During the H5N1 research, Ron Fouchier, from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the University of Tokyo, both virologists, wanted to understand how pandemic flu viruses might evolve.
The researchers, working independently at the University of Wisconsin and Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, ignited a storm when they sought to publish their work in science journals. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which makes recommendations to the government on potentially risky research, asked journals to hold off while panel members debated the risks of publishing the scientists’ methods, including the risk of providing bad actors with the means to create a bioweapon.
“Thanks to the students and all the university employees at UW Oshkosh and UW-Whitewater for helping us reach this goal,” said UW System President Tommy Thompson. “Like me, they want to make our universities healthy and safe, and I know they have worked tirelessly to make today’s announcement possible.”
With UW-Oshkosh and UW-Whitewater reaching a 70% vaccination mark Friday, five System schools now at or above the benchmark.
The University of Wisconsin System’s drive to ensure that vaccination rates at each of its universities surpass the 70 percent mark leaped forward Friday with officials announcing that two more of its schools have crossed the magic threshold.
Over 90% of undergraduate classes are held in person this fall.
UW-Oshkosh and UW-Whitewater joined UW-Eau Claire, UW-La Crosse and UW-Milwaukee in meeting the 70% goal set by interim System President Tommy Thompson. UW-Madison, which is not participating in the scholarship incentive program and has a student vaccination rate above 90%, announced on Friday an extension of the university’s indoor mask mandate that will last at least until late November.
The American Indian Science and Engineering Society held its kickoff meeting in the American Indian Student and Cultural Center on Wednesday evening. The meeting occurred concurrently with the national AISES conference in Phoenix and a Wunk Sheek student organization meeting, illustrating a tenacious presence of Native American student groups in the Madison community.
The panelists will discuss the impact of these treaties on modern day Madison.
As Madison seeks to finalize boundaries of City Council districts for the next decade — complicated by uneven growth throughout the city — the two maps under consideration would split UW-Madison dorms over two districts, raising concerns from some about a weakened student voice on the city’s legislative body.
Video: Barry Burden, director of the UW-Madison Elections Research Center, responds to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s statement about investigating the 2020 vote in the state.
Quoted: Purples and reds, however, are caused by anthocyanin, pigments that are more dependent on ideal fall weather. They serve a greater purpose than just looking pretty.
“Researchers here at UW-Madison back in 2003 discovered that these anthocyanins actually act as natural sunscreen for leaves,” said David Stevens, curator of the University of Wisconsin-Madison arboretum. “What they’re doing is protecting sugars that are still in the leaf from harmful effects of the sun once that chlorophyll is gone.”
Quoted: Jordan Ellenberg is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When it comes to what constitutes a fair map, Ellenberg said many Wisconsinites might be asking the wrong questions.
“The very word ‘fair,’ there’s some question of philosophy and some question of ethics and some question of law,” Ellenberg said. “There is not really a good answer to what is fair, so then you may say, ‘Well, what are we even doing?’ Like, why am I here talking about it? Because there is a good answer to what is unfair. That’s a different question.”
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the opposite is true.
“This has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, worsened by people taking risks, such as gathering together indoors, without masks,” Remington said. “The vaccine has been very effective in preventing serious illness, and death. The fact that the delta variant is so much more contagious, means that we cannot rely on the vaccine alone, but need to reduce the risks of getting infected and infecting others.”
“Only a fairly small number of students who experience an assault request a formal investigation,” said UW’s Title IX Coordinator Laurn Hasselbacher, JD. “In the vast majority of cases, the Title IX office does not press for students to file formal complaints in order to respect personal choice and autonomy.”
Noted: If you have a variable income, it’s best to base your budget on the lower end of how much you expect to be making so you can still over all your expenses in case your hours get cut or you get fewer tips than you were expecting, said MaryBeth Wohlrabe, a positive youth development educator who runs the Outagamie County Rent Smart program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension in the county.
Distance from family and cultural traditions is a common stressor for Latina mothers in the Madison area, said Dr. Patricia Téllez-Girón, a UW Health family medicine provider who treats many Latinas at Wingra Family Medical Center in Madison.
Group Health has six of its own clinics in the greater Madison area and already lets patients go to 13 other clinics, including seven at UW Health and three at Access Community Health Centers. Under a new partnership with UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter, members will be able to go to 12 more UW clinics and seven at Meriter.
The University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team announced Friday that it will hang Michael Finley’s No. 24 in the rafters of Kohl Center this season. UW will officially retire the number during a halftime ceremony this season, a date has not been announced. No. 24 will remain in circulation at UW, however.
The biology of Sars-CoV-2 immunity, however, is the same whether you’re in Tel Aviv, Tokyo or Toronto. The pioneering Israeli work of making third doses the standard provides an instructive template for other countries to follow as quickly as possible, while also ensuring that this becomes the global standard of vaccination for everyone, no matter where they live.
-David O’Connor is professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin
“In concrete terms, you could see the price or the valuation of U.S. Treasury debt going down, which is the same as saying interest rates are going to rise for U.S. government borrowing. What that’s going to do is it’s going to tend to blow up our deficit faster than it otherwise would,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
In fact, Burden, founding director of the Elections Research Center and a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not uncommon for people with the same name to share not just birth years but actual birthdays. The Arizona report found thousands of people with the same first, middle and last names and birth years.
A report released in June and co-written by former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson, a Republican, and University of Wisconsin professor Barry C. Burden concluded that the Arizona procedures “deviate significantly from standard practices for election reviews and audits” and that any findings are “suspect and should not be trusted.”
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison noted that the draft report makes several errors by seizing on statistical aberrations that have simple explanations.
They’re not for establishing the residence of a voter in Maricopa County to vote,” Barry C. Burden, Director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on the press call. “We don’t know how they get their data or what they do exactly, ” he added.
“For validating a person’s residence, and whether they are eligible to vote and where they lived in the weeks just before Election Day 2020, I think it’s probably not a trustworthy source,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ahead of the presentation, election experts criticized some of the methodology used by Cyber Ninjas that was detailed in the draft report. The report said the firm used a commercial public database to try to match information about voters. Such databases typically rely on the National Change of Address database, which can be out of date and incomplete and isn’t designed for that purpose, said Barry Burden, the Director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He spent 35 years in practice at the University of Wisconsin, focused on treatment and research of HIV/AIDS and immunology. His passion for HIV/AIDS education took him to many parts of the world, with Uganda, Africa, being the most important to him.
Ron began his scientific career at the University of Wisconsin in 1973. He established the first Neuroscience Training Program in 1975 and directed the program for 25 years. In 1988, he founded the Center for Neuroscience, becoming director for the next 12 years. Several years later he founded and directed the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Biological Imaging and chaired a campus-wide planning committee which led to the establishment of a University Department of Neuroscience.
Milly worked as a bookkeeper for the University of Wisconsin for many years and retired from the UW-Madison Waisman Center.
Noted: Levi Massey, Lakeland’s assistant principal, said the district recognizes the disparity and is working to reverse it with “a school culture that creates a greater acceptance for all our students.”
Lakeland, he explained, is collaborating with a top University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher on “culturally responsive interventions” to reduce the school’s disciplinary issues, especially among Native students.
