Category: UW Experts in the News

Trump is exaggerating how many people illegally cross the border. Moreover, most independent research contradicts the idea that illegal immigrants bring more crime. A 2018 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Criminology, led by Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, examined whether places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants have higher rates of violent crime such as murder or rape. The answer: States with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through 2014.

“The value of crypto assets varies so much, day to day,” says University of Wisconsin law professor Megan McDermott. “How you value them—and at what point in time—will really affect what customers and creditors can recover.”

Alexia Kulwiec, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaches labor and employment law and is an expert in national labor policy and workers’ compensation. She said of the on-site health clinics at Tyson, “Their whole goal is not to find serious health problems and to keep costs down. . . .  It is really circumventing the whole purpose of worker’s compensation to start with.”

Barry Burden, an American politics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed. “It is not ’cheating and stealing’ but rather a request to reverse the Supreme Court decision on the grounds that it violates federal civil rights law,” Burden said in an email to USA TODAY.

The good news? Not every item on holiday shopping lists is significantly more expensive. Cranberries had a good harvest and prices were up less than 5% between the end of September and the beginning of November, said Paul Mitchell, an agricultural economist and professor at the University of Wisconsin. Green beans cost just 2 cents more per pound in the second week of November, according to the USDA.

“The report draws attention to a form of international trade and movement that most people don’t know about,” says Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the research. “It’s becoming increasingly apparent that globalization is not only a problem for human diseases but also animal diseases.”

“It’s an exemplar,” said Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, an Alzheimer’s researcher and associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved with the study. “These are populations we need to be studying.”

“I think there’s a fair bit of lack of knowledge around required minimum distributions and retirement account rollovers, both of which contribute to our measured abandonment,” Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business and co-author of the paper, wrote in an email.

Andrea Dutton, a professor of geoscience and MacArthur Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that’s not possible.“Burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that are causing temperatures to rise rapidly, and this is the major contributor to the global warming we are experiencing,” she said in an email. “This is not a matter of belief but rather a matter of scientific evidence.”

“The season is not yet over, which means 2 things: 1) there might yet be additional damaging storms (see Hurricane Nicole right now!) and 2) it takes time for the full economic and noneconomic losses for big storms to become apparent,” Daniel B. Wright, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Hydroclimate Extremes Research Group, told Newsweek in written comments.

The Wisconsin legislature has been controlled by Republicans for several election cycles, after they were able to redraw legislative maps that put them firmly in control of legislative districts, even though Democrats tend to hold their own in statewide races, said Michael W. Wagner, a professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

To determine the distance of the Moon, scientists studied rhythmic patterns in Earth’s orbit and axis called Milankovitch cycles, explained Margriet Lantink, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

“It reached its height in the mid to late ’80s, especially at the federal level, [with] people voting [differently] for president and Congress,” Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Vox. But as political polarization, the decline of local news, and the nationalization of local politics have increased in the past two decades, split-ticket voting has been dying a slow death.

“Very few states [have] senators of different parties, and they’re even elected in different years,” Burden, who co-wrote a book on this history, said. “Even the number of split Senate delegations, where senators are from different parties, is now at a relative low.”

Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project, agreed that the video showed standard procedures for poll workers in Madison.

Seeing all this, Democrats, including President Biden, have made desperate appeals to voters to take to the electoral ramparts and protect the nation’s democracy. But these entreaties may prove insufficient, suggested Mark Copelovitch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at a time when Republican messaging about gas prices and economic pressures have consumed the conversation. “There’s an ‘in your face’ aspect to this that is much more tangible than ‘democracy is about to collapse’ or ‘Wisconsin’s electoral and legislative institutions no longer meet basic criteria of democracy,’” he wrote to me in an email.

If you ask a kid where a particular game or rhyme came from, they’ll likely tell you they invented it, Rebekah Willett, a professor at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied childlore, told me: “They cannot trace it, and they have no investment in tracing it.”

“We discovered neutrinos reaching us from the cosmos in 2013,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and part of the IceCube collaboration who authored the paper, “which raised the question of where they originate.”

“A pattern emerged but we weren’t sure whether we were seeing fluctuations in the data or if this was real,” says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

These ghosts, as Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IceCube team member put it, are fit to solve two major mysteries in astronomy. First off, a wealth of galaxies in our universe boast gravitationally monstrous voids at their centers, black holes reaching masses millions to billions of times greater than our sun’s. And these black holes, when active, blast jets of light from their guts — emitting enough illumination to outshine every single star in the galaxy itself. “We don’t understand how that happens,” Vandenbrouke simply summarizes.

“Mostly what regulators have is moral appeal and they’ll wag their finger,” said Manny Teodoro, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on public policy and water.

“Considering there are more than 100 types of A and B rhinoviruses,” notes Yury Bochkov, a respiratory virus specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, “you would have to put all 100 types in one vial of vaccine in order to enable protection” against just A and B rhinoviruses. Add in all the C rhinovirus types (more than 50), then cram in RSV’s virus types (more than 40), and that same vaccine would have to be packed with more than 200 strains. Even then, it would only offer protection against about two-thirds of all common colds. “That was considered the major obstacle in development of those vaccines,” Bochkov says.

The trick is to develop a bird vaccine that works for a long time even as the virus mutates. Adel Talaat, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is developing a so-called “nanovaccine” that blends tiny particles of several different bird flu strains.

However, Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while “this would clearly be a conflict of interest for a business or financial reporter, I doubt Kudlow’s audience views him as that and I don’t recall his laying claim to being a journalist.” She added that Kudlow is clearly a “commentator and is being transparent with his audience about an entanglement that could be seen as a conflict.”