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Author: gbump

Declaring 2020’s Winner Could Well Hinge on How Quickly States Count Mail Ballots

Wall Street Journal

“There’s a lot of suspicion among hard-core Trump supporters, and hard-core Trump opponents, about people trying to manipulate the voting system,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s just very tempting for people to believe that something nefarious has happened when the results don’t seem to be going in the way they expected.”

Big Ten Football May Be Back. The Atmosphere Isn’t.

The New York Times

There are a few things you can count on on the Madison campus during a fall weekend. The farmers’ market on the square of the state Capitol; music blasting from apartments, fraternity houses and bars in the hours before a football game, and the mass migration of tens of thousands of fans wearing red T-shirts toward Camp Randall Stadium.

Giant ‘survivor’ planet found orbiting dead star

Earth Sky

Andrew Vanderburg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, said in a statement: WD 1856 b somehow got very close to its white dwarf and managed to stay in one piece. The white dwarf creation process destroys nearby planets, and anything that later gets too close is usually torn apart by the star’s immense gravity. We still have many questions about how WD 1856 b arrived at its current location without meeting one of those fates.

After a tantalizing discovery at Venus, what could an astrobiology mission look like? | Space

Space.com

“This is something more that we can’t explain about Venus,” Sanjay Limaye, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Space.com. “Venus has got more questions [about it] than Mars, which is why we are suggesting that Venus should be considered an astrobiology target.”

How to Save the Pandemic Generation

The New Republic

Black young adults hold 10.4 percent less wealth, on average, than their white counterparts due to student debt, according to research by Fenaba Addo at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Black and Latinx borrowers also have higher rates of default than white borrowers, and two in five Native American or Alaska Native borrowers have defaulted on a federal student loan.

Op-Ed: Clerking for Justice Ginsburg, we learned about the law — but also about love

LA Times

With marriage, as with everything else, the justice set a high bar. She tirelessly championed righteous causes and lofty ideals, and also devoted herself to the family she adored. She inspired millions of people she never met and also enriched the lives of those of us who were lucky enough to know her. It is difficult to lose her, especially now. But we know the best way to honor her is to try to live as fully as she did, embracing the values she held dear.

Miriam Seifter and Robert Yablon are associate professors of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. They clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2008-2009.

Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400,000 Bonuses. What Are They Buying?

New York Times

Ryan J. Owens, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the other author of the study, said its basic conclusion was that “knowing your former boss gives you a leg up.”

“When you clerk for a justice for a year, you come to know how that justice thinks very intimately,” he said. “You know the ins and outs of the justice’s thought processes.”

Sleep scientists urge consistent schedule during unusual school year

WKOW-TV 27

“People think a lot about how sleep is important for consolidating memory, but what they don’t think about is that sleep resets your brain for learning, meaning in order to take in information during the day, you need to have a rested brain,” said Dr. Stephanie Jones, the assistant director at the Institute for Sleep and Consciousness at UW-Madison.

How RBG’s vacancy could affect decisions at the polls

NBC-15

Howard Schweber, a political science professor who also teaches law at UW-Madison, described how he saw the late justice interpreting the law. “Not only on issues involving women’s rights, [but] her dissenting opinions in the voting rights decision that stripped protections from minority voters in numerous jurisdictions. Her dissenting opinions in particular, rang with passion.”

Gibson, Chère Campbell

Wisconsin State Journal

In 1982 Chère worked as an academic planner in University of Wisconsin System Administration. In 1984 she left administration and joined the faculty of the Department of Continuing and Vocational Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Family Living Program Area in University of Wisconsin -Extension.

With Football Returning, Big Ten Cities Brace for More Covid Outbreaks

New York Times

In Madison, Wis., where the denizens of the state capital ordinarily coexist happily with the University of Wisconsin, local politicians and public health officials were unsparing in their assessments of the season’s potential consequences. They worried less about matters like testing access and more over how football could lead to new outbreaks; local health officials said Wednesday that 42 people directly tied to Wisconsin’s football program had tested positive for the virus in recent months.

Weekly White House task force reports reflect mixed messages on masks

CNN

Wisconsin is in the red zone for cases, the ninth highest rate in the country, and the yellow zone for test positivity, both of which have increased over the last week, per the task force.

The task force expresses particular concern with cases in Dane County, home to the University of Wisconsin, which, it says, “reported more than 1,400 cases last week, a greater than 200% increase.

“The task force repeated its recommendations to institutions of higher learning.

University of Wisconsin Graduate Student Lied About Being Black

Jezebel

Mere weeks after former George Washington University professor Jessica Krug was pressured into coming forward and admitting that she had been pretending to be Black for the entirety of her professional career, another white academic has been outed for lying about their racial identity. CV Vitolo-Haddad, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has resigned from a teaching position at the college after an anonymous Medium post led them to admit that they had lied about being a person of color.

White UW-Madison Student Apologizes for Lying About Being Black

The Root

University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad—who uses non-binary they/them pronouns—issued an apology Monday after they spent years “posturing as a person of color while working as a teaching assistant and acting as co-president of UW-Madison’s chapter of the Teaching Assistants’ Association graduate student worker’s union,” the Daily Cardinal reports.

Felicia Campbell, Professor Who Studied Gambling and Pop Culture, Dies at 89

The New York Times

Ms. Campbell was born on April 18, 1931, in Cuba City, Wis. Her parents, Frank Churchill Florine, a pharmacist, and Irene (Bower) Florine ran Florine and Son’s Drugstore and Pharmacy, where their daughter worked as a soda jerk. After earning undergraduate and masters degrees in English at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the Marines because, she said later, she wanted to see if she could handle it.

Barry Alvarez discusses return of Big Ten football

Wisconsin State Journal

Video: University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez, who was the football scheduling chair of the Big Ten’s return-to-competition task force, discusses the conference’s plan to resume football during a Zoom call Wednesday morning.

Trump Again Scorns Science on Masks and Vaccines

The New York Times

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is also part of the Big Ten and had a sharp uptick in cases last week, local health officials ordered all Greek organizations with one or more cases among their live-in members to quarantine. Several states, including Kansas, Colorado and Michigan, have tracked coronavirus clusters to fraternities and sororities.

Kaleem Caire: It’s long past time for UW-Madison to hire a Black athletic director

The Capital Times

Barry Alvarez turned UW-Madison into a consistent winner and contender in Division I sports as a coach and athletic director. He put fans in seats, recruited successfully and dramatically raised the revenues of the athletic department, and the visibility of the university in general. He will go down in history as one of the greatest athletic directors of all time. This is not about him.