DON’T PANIC: As the Microsoft antitrust case was unfolding in front of the nation, Glenn Pascall, a senior fellow at the UW’s Institute for Public Policy, told The New York Times that Seattle wasn’t in a panic about the judge’s ruling. “I’m just not sure you’re going to see a lot of gnashing of teeth in response to this,” he said.

CONFOUNDING CONNECTION: USA Today asked Peter Cummings, a physician at the UW, to respond to a study that found gun-lockup laws actually contribute to the crime rate. Cummings had earlier published his own study, which found that unintentional shooting deaths among children 15 and under fell by 23 percent from 1990 to 1994 in 12 states with safe-storage laws. “It seems like a very implausible connection,” Cummings said in reference to the latest study. “But I guess anything’s conceivable.”

FISHY: That dam controversy caught the attention of The New York Times recently. In a story on dams and their effect on salmon, The Times spoke with the UW’s Jim Anderson, a fisheries professor. Anderson said the current policy - maintaining dams and the salmon population - was like trying “to find a way to have our cake and eat it, too.”

BELIEVE IT: If someone on the Internet claims to be a woman, she probably is according to Malcolm Parks, an associate professor of speech communication at the UW. Parks’ findings caught the attention of The New York Times. “What we found was that gender switching wasn’t nearly as common a phenomenon as people had thought,” Parks told the Times. ¶

Newsmakers is a periodic column reporting on coverage of the University of Washington by the national press and broadcasting services.