Category: UW Experts in the News

A study being released this month reveals some surprising statistics about public smoking bans. University of Wisconsin Economist Scott Adams says that his team looked into the number of drunk driving deaths where there is a ban on smoking in bars, and found that the fatal crashes are about twelve percent higher in such places. He thinks there are several possible explanations. (Audio.)

A UW-Madison expert says it now appears inevitable that Barack Obama will be the Democrats’ choice for President.

Political scientist Charles Franklin says it would probably take a major scandal of some sort to keep the Democratic presidential nomination from Barack Obama. Franklin says the Senator continues to pick up super delegates across the nation and maintains a lead over Hillary Clinton for pledged delegates. He’s predicting a flood of super delegates for Obama to pick up over the coming weeks.

Quoted: Virginia Terry Boyd, the curator of the traveling exhibit who is a professor and chair of the Textiles and Design program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Quoted: Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication and journalism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says public awareness of nanotech hasnâ??t changed at all since 2004, when he began his surveys. Scientists are more apt to be concerned about health and safety issues than the public is, he says.

Quoted: For Majid Sarmadi, a UW-Madison textile chemist and professor of design studies, it’s his concern for the future health of the earth and its inhabitants that serve to drive his research.

Quoted: Marvin L. Birnbaum, a critical-care physician at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and president of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine.

Quoted: Ken Goldstein, a university of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist who studies the Jewish vote.

Quoted: Chiara Cirelli, a sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says the study is a “wonderful” proof that it’s possible to get high-quality EEG data from sleeping wild animals. The method might also be used to gauge sleep intensity, she says, another important measure for understanding the function of sleep. “We just need many, many more” studies like this, says Cirelli. Rattenborg and his team are up to the challenge: Ostriches are next.

Quoted: Ken Goldstein, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Quoted: Morris Davis, a real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton scored a big win in Tuesday’s primary in West Virginia, beating Barack Obama by almost two to one in votes. However, UW-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin says the win provides only a “psychological boost” for Clinton, who still trails Obama in delegates.

Franklin says Clinton is running out of options, because she’s low on campaign cash and would have to capture 70 percent of the remaining delegates to catch up to Obama.

Franklin says Clinton’s only hope is to convince enough super delegates to bring their support to her campaign.

Quoted: Paul Mitchell, assistant professor of agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Michael Fendrich, a psychologist who directs the Center for Addiction and Behavioral Health Research at the University of Wisconsin, said the White House report “overreaches” in some of its conclusions.

Quoted: Robert M. Hauser, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched retention rates and policy in the public-school system.

Quoted: David Drake, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of forest and wildlife ecology, has been spending considerable time with the birds in recent weeks during their mating season, and says the effort seems to be succeeding.

Quoted: M. Jake Vander Zanden, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, in a recent study. The same study shows that the number of invasive species in the Great Lakes rose from zero in 1810 to 160 in 1999.

Quoted: A recent analysis co-authored by by Morris Davis, professor of real estate and urban land economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Michael Scott, a former police chief and a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said people who seek drugs or money in a robbery often are more desperate than someone who commits an ordinary crime, and might be more brazen.

Quoted: Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Noted: Unit-record tracking has been all the rage at The Education Optimists, a new-ish blog by Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Liam Goldrick, the director of policy at the New Teacher Center.

Quoted: A second witness, biomedical engineer John Webster, said he agreed and that his theoretical research based on experiments on pigs confirmed that.

He said that even in the worst-case scenario — in which Taser darts hit a thin person between the ribs within 11 millimetres or less of the heart — the probability of ventricular fibrillation (interruption of the normal heart rhythm) would be in the order of six in a million.

“For people with a small body mass there is a tiny risk,” Webster said by video-teleconference from the University of Wisconsin.

JANESVILLE â?? Flooded by workers displaced from General Motors, its suppliers and other non-automotive manufacturers, the local economy is expected to sputter in the short term.

How it fares in the long term, however, will likely be a matter of community attitude and hard work.

â??There will be short-term economic struggles, and weâ??re already in a recession,â? said Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison.

Quoted: David Spooner, a research botanist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With complementary foods like milk, the Irish subsisted on potatoes and milk.”

Quoted: Dietram A. Scheufele, a media and public opinion expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Morris Davis, a professor of real estate and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says curtailed credit will “cause the price of starter homes to fall, thus reducing the wealth of current owners of starter homes, which will itself trigger a chain-reaction decline in the price of a trade-up home.”

The increasingly bitter battle for the Democratic presidential nomination could benefit Republicans, but not in the catastrophic way some might expect.

So says Kenneth Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who has consulted for ABC, CBS and CNN.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden, regarding the February blowout.

Quoted: Sean Carroll, who teaches molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, said the movie’s references to intelligent design are a “smokescreen” to promote religious views. Intelligent design is a theory that certain features of the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause, not random mutations or natural selection as proposed by evolution.

Quoted: UW professor Beth Graue advocates for sending children to school on time.

Graue believes programs like McFarland’s Just-5 aren’t needed.

“They tend to have nicely developed curriculum, but if you look at the evidence for whether they work or not, it hasn’t been borne out in the literature,” said Graue.

The effects of war on soldiers and their families at home is the focus of a new, million-dollar teaching project. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum is teaming up with the Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin on â??Life During Wartime,â? which will use veteransâ?? testimonies, photographs, and artifacts in creating a unique curriculum. Coordinators plan to connect state veterans and historians with 150 history teachers during the three-year program.

A million-dollar federal grant helps to get public school students excited about the study of American History.

The experimental program, “Life During Wartime,” is designed specifically to raise student achievement first by improving his teacher’s knowledge and understanding of American history.

Quoted: Drinking is ingrained in Wisconsin culture and heritage, said Nina Emerson, the director of the Resource Center on Impaired Driving at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “If you have a losing hand, you’re going to use every amount of rhetoric you can to distract people from the fact that you don’t have any facts,” Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his lab last week. “And that’s what ‘Expelled’ is all about.”

Quoted: Shawn Peters, a University of Wisconsin-Madison instructor who studied faith healing cases for his book “When Prayer Fails,” called the legal hurdles faced by Falstad “significant.”

Quoted: Stanley Schultz, UW-Madison History Professor, hopes to “light a fire” under the 150 teachers in the test project.

http://www.channel3000.com/news/16069040/detail.html
MC FARLAND, Wis. — Redshirting is a common term in sports. It’s the practice of having the youngest players on a team sit out their first year in order to gain another year of eligibility when they’re older and most likely stronger.

The Badgers count basketball star Mike Wilkinson and football standouts Tyler Donovan and PJ Hill among their recent redshirts.

Now the term is being applied to children whose parents hold them out and enter them into kindergarten at age 6, rather than age 5.

Studies have found the practice, called redshirting, happens more often for boys with birthdays in June, July and August.

The practice means the youngest children in a class will then become the oldest in the class the following year.

“They’ll look at the kindergarten entrance age and say, ‘My child is not ready yet. I’ll wait a year and then have them go to kindergarten the following year,'” said UW professor Beth Graue.

Quoted: Shawn F. Peters, a University of Wisconsin-Madison teacher and author of “When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law.”

Quoted: Edward Friedman, an expert on Chinese nationalism at the University of Wisconsin, says when Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1977, “anti-Japan nationalism became a great legitimating glue to hold the society together, eventually ending up in the really ugly April 2005 anti-Japan racist riots in China.”

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental educators Tom Eggert and Dan Anderson said that there’s too much boasting about being green — from food to packaging to products.