Category: UW Experts in the News

“Virtually everything the government’s done to fight the disease, since the beginning, has placed the burden on individuals to both assess and mitigate their own risk,” Dr. Richard Keller, a professor in the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told ABC News. “The implications there, for the people who are dying from the disease, are that they’re dying as a result of their own individual failings.”

According to Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, inflation can be a sign that the job market is strong and people feel comfortable spending money.

“Some of the reasons you might be able to extend the statute of limitations is that there was active concealment of any kind of fraud by the defendant,” Ion Meyn, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Newsweek. “Here, it’d be very hard to argue act of concealment when you’re pleading that you knew about it.”

“Right now, at times, Russian propaganda even equates Nazis and Western civilization,” said Anton Shirikov, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in propaganda and misinformation.

“It is conspiracist thinking,” Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Politifact.”They are interpreting data that confirms their pre-existing conclusions. It’s a zombie claim; no matter how many times you kill it, it keeps coming back.”

And not much beyond mass culling can be done to slow the spread once it starts. Adel Talaat, a professor of microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says we should improve disease surveillance and farm biosecurity to help prevent new outbreaks and slow the spread, but a vaccine that could reliably reduce transmission would go a long way.

Absentee ballots are also verified by signature and tracked closely, often with an option for voters themselves to see where their ballot is at any given time. That process safeguards against anyone who tries to illegally cast extra ballots, according to Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project.“It seems impossible in that system for a nefarious actor to dump lots of ballots that were never requested by voters and were never issued by election officials,” Burden said.

This would help accrue “a kind of common law,” says Lucas Graves, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now, we have the equivalent of secret courts; their decisions are unseen and judgements forgotten. Transparency “pushes back against the arbitrariness” of executives, Graves says.

That is the conclusion of 12 studies by researcher Chia-Jung Tsay, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She gave investors different types of records of pitch competitions—such as video only or audio only—and asked them to guess which entrepreneur had won each round. The investors who made the best guesses saw only visual images of people making pitches, with no sound or information about the pitch itself.

Russia’s decision to cut off gas exports to Poland and Bulgaria — the latter of which had remained undecided in its stance regarding Russia up until the recent ban — is a risky move meant to act as a warning to other European countries.

But some experts have written off the move as a miscalculation.According to Yoshiko Herrera, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in Eurasian politics, it may have the opposite intended effect.

What’s more, people can mistakenly think affirmations are about “seeking perfection or seeking greatness,” said Chris Cascio, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the practice. Instead, Cascio said, the key concept of affirmations is: “As you are, you are good enough and you’re valued being you.”

Some anthropologists, including Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, are skeptical about whether the trees were, indeed, infested. An editorial published in response by The New York Times also said: “We have been importing ornamental plants from Japan for years, and by the shipload, and it is remarkable that this particular invoice should have contained any new infections.”

“They occur under specific atmospheric conditions,” Orf, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “They require lots of moisture, atmospheric instability, and wind shear. Supercells produce the most violent tornadoes compared to all other thunderstorm types. A recent example of a violent supercell is the storm that hit Mayfield, Kentucky, in December of 2021.”

Gregory Nemet is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs whose research focuses on the process of technological change in energy and its interactions with public policy.

To get the world economy to zero emissions by midcentury, we need to move light and fast. That means aggressively expanding what we know works and is affordable—wind, solar and electric vehicles—on the order of how quickly we built ships and airplanes in World War II. Falling prices, digitization of the economy and more flexible electric grids can enable us to do that.

“What if I told you…that the inflation was a cross-national, pandemic- and war-induced phenomenon & not primarily due to Jerome Powell or Joe Biden and their policies?” said University of Wisconsin political economy professor Mark Copelevitch, posting a series of global inflation charts on Twitter.

“It feels like we’re being asked to partake in a trust fall,” says Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the team-building exercise that involves falling backward and counting on others to catch you before you hit the floor. “When is the last time you did a trust fall and enjoyed it?”