Noted: Swap meets and flea markets are an old practice in the United States, and until the 1960s, they were mostly populated by white vendors who sold mostly secondhand goods outdoors, said Edna Ledesma, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched swap meets.
Quoted: Michele LaVigne, a recently retired University of Wisconsin-Madison clinical law professor and director of the Public Defender Project, said implementing the new rules — which require prosecutors to include crime victims in more steps of a prosecution — could slow an already sluggish process.
“All court systems have shut down basically and there is a backlog from hell building up,” LaVigne said, referring to the four months courts have been largely closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Quoted:
The call for hardening our internet infrastructure is especially salient to Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2018, Barford and two colleagues published a study highlighting the vulnerability of America’s fiber cables to sea level rise, and he’s currently investigating how wildfires threaten mobile networks. In both cases, he says, it’s clear that the telecommunications infrastructure deployed today was designed with historical extreme conditions in mind — and that has to change.
“We’re living in a world of climate change,” he said. “And if the intention is to make this new infrastructure that will serve the population for many years to come, then it is simply not feasible to deploy it without considering the potential effects of climate change, which include, of course, rising seas, severe weather, floods, and wildfires.”
Sarah Anne Carter is the visiting executive director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and a visiting assistant professor of design studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19 have fared well so far in two clinical trials underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to preliminary results.
The university also launched three new COVID-19 clinical trials and began considering offers to host another nine. Since the coronavirus clinical trials began, 80% of all UW Health patients with COVID-19 have been enrolled in one.
Noted: If one is trying to dominate your picnic as well, Dr. Jandt suggests playing along. “Let it land, let it do its thing,” she said. When she collected data for her master’s thesis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she shared a P.B. and J. with her research subjects every day, an experience she said helped her learn to appreciate the insects’ personalities, and “really forced me to be calm all the time.”
The University of Wisconsin System has asked the governor for $110 million to fund COVID-19 testing and personal protective equipment, as campuses look to open this fall and the number of coronavirus cases in Wisconsin continues to rise.
After the Big Ten announced that it would play a conference-only schedule this fall in football and other sports, University of Wisconsin director of athletics Barry Alvarez warned fans that more uncertainty is on the way.
Noted: Then: Sept. 26, 1986, The Milwaukee Journal. I wrote a story that focused on the sharply differing levels of educational success of kids in the suburbs and kids in the city. I quoted John Witte, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor: “To the extent that education achievement is equated with life chances, these two groups face very unequal opportunities.”
The lecturer says her comments were misinterpreted.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection prevention and control for UW Health, said masks cannot single-handedly prevent coronavirus spread but are an effective intervention.
“If someone was wearing a mask, it would likely reduce the number of people they would infect,” she said.
Noted: The surge in cases in the county has put in jeopardy the ability of the state’s flagship university to hold in-person classes this fall, the University of Wisconsin Health chief quality and safety officer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week.
The uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic has cost the University of Wisconsin football team a chance to play at one of the country’s storied stadiums.
The Badgers game with Northwestern scheduled for Nov. 7 will not be played at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, the Cubs and Northwestern announced Wednesday. The game will be played on Northwestern’s campus at Ryan Field in Evanston, Illinois. The start time has not been announced.
As colleges and universities announce plans to invite students back to campus this fall, American higher education is, according to the New York Times, “about to embark on a highly uncertain experiment.”
Pictures of Vanessa Guillen hung by a table with candles and flowers.
Dozens yelled chants that echoed against the walls of Spaights Plaza at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus Wednesday night.
Protesters demanded the termination of Betsy Schoeller, a senior lecturer and former colonel in the Wisconsin Air National Guard, after she made a controversial comment on Facebook in response to an article about the killing of Guillen, the Mexican-American soldier whose remains were found near the Fort Hood, Texas, base last week.
Noted: James graduated in May from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in finance and economics. Chris graduates in December with a degree in statistics. The Kardatzkes grew up in Spring Green. James scored a perfect 36 on the ACT. Chris scored a 35.
For Hannah Arbuckle, a summer internship focused on helping people cultivate wild foods at the Bad River Reservation was an opportunity to help the tribe she belongs to.
It was also the University of Wisconsin-Madison senior’s chance to complete her last requirement for graduation.
But when she called her supervisor at the reservation to ask if her internship was still happening, Arbuckle learned the program had been canceled.
After spending years studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Linh Nguyen, an international student from Vietnam, watched in recent days as his life fell into limbo.
Quoted: Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She notes, for example, that in an emergency where people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
“But it doesn’t work scientifically,” Ossorio said. “It doesn’t produce good enough data that you can actually have any confidence that the test intervention is safe or effective.”
“We have this real brick and mortar view of how clinical research had to happen, and I think COVID has really challenged that,” said Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical trials development for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health.
Song Gao, an assistant professor of geographic information science at UW-Madison, was among the first to study and map how people’s mobility changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, an epidemiologist at UW-Madison, launched “Dear Pandemic,” a social media group that communicates the latest COVID-19 research.
“The world is just going to be different,” Jones said, “Getting to the point where there’s hopefully a vaccine that’s effective is going to take enough time that I think science will change.”
Quoted: “The sharp drop in May was the result of the COVID-19 virus shutting down schools, universities, restaurants and food-service which caused a big drop in the sales of milk, cheese and butter,” Bob Cropp, a University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension professor emeritus, wrote in a recent column.
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer Scott Sanders usually spends his time figuring out how gases and particles behave in combustion engines.
But Sanders has turned his expertise to determining how a different type of particle, one that has sickened millions around the world, moves from human mouths covered with masks.
Quoted: “A mask that is not covering the nose will not stop a person infected with SARS-CoV-2 from contaminating the air in front of them when they exhale. Similarly, a mask covering only the mouth will fail to prevent an uninfected person from inhaling contaminated air. Since it does not take a lot of virus particles to cause infection, a partially worn mask may not be effective enough. This reminds me of when I see people wearing a bicycle helmet without buckling the strap or wearing it so loosely that it doesn’t cover the front of their head. The intention might be there, but there is a higher risk of head injury following an accident if the helmet is unable to do what it is designed to do.”
— Ajay Sethi, PhD, MHS, associate professor, Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Widespread criticism has rained down on those who led a night of destructive protestsin Madison on Tuesday night after the arrest of a Black protester.
Many on the left and right were left baffled and upset that rioters toppled two iconic Capitol statues — one of an abolitionist who died during the Civil War and the other a female figure representing the state motto “Forward.”
But one state Senate candidate, Nada Elmikashfi, defended the destruction in no uncertain terms.
Finally, Elmikashfi, a 24-year-old recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and a Muslim immigrant from Sudan, said, “I’m glad my future colleagues in the legislature are getting a good introduction of how nice I’ll be in the Capitol when it comes to their anti-blackness.”
Dane County is reporting a sharp increase in coronavirus cases, with 279 people testing positive for COVID-19 in the last five days.
Half of those new cases involve people in their 20s, and multiple cases have been linked to businesses near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, local health officials said Thursday.
Noted: Before becoming an attorney and moving to the Harlem neighborhood in New York City, Adkins, 30, completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It was weird having a best friend who was white and still feeling so isolated and uncomfortable by the whiteness on the campus,” he said. “I still enjoyed my time there very much, but I’m just talking about having to grapple with my double consciousness in a very real way.”
When Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to a predominantly white audience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971, the civil rights icon spoke of the time when she was 13 and asked her mother a seemingly innocent question.
“How come we wasn’t born white?”
It was the question of a young teenager growing up in the heart of the South, when ruthless racism was the norm.
The majority of people who die from COVID-19 are killed by a dangerous immune system overreaction called a cytokine storm, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and dozens of other sites around the world are now testing a potential weapon against it.
Quoted: It’s not unusual for men to struggle after the birth of a child, says Tova Walsh, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied fathers and parent-child relationships. There are financial pressures, expectations to try to meet and lifestyle adjustments to make.
In the history of family services, fathers have been overlooked and neglected, Walsh says, with sometimes clinical consequences. “Paternal depression is underrecognized,” she says.
Wednesday brought news about UW-Madison and its plans for the 2020 fall semester. In a press release, the university unveiled its “Smart Start” initiative.
Quoted: For the time being, researchers say cats should be a focus, because studies have found they are highly susceptible to the coronavirus and because they are common pets and roam freely in many places. In a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists infected cats with the virus and found that those cats could infect other cats. No felines showed symptoms, but the amount of virus they shed in nasal swabs was similar to that shed by some humans, said co-author Peter Halfmann, a University of Wisconsin virologist.
“If a human can transmit to a human with this amount of virus being shed, it’s definitely possible for a cat to transmit to a human,” Halfmann said.
Noted: A new study published in PLoS ONE by David Lovelace and team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used a series of climate models and predictions of body temperature to investigate the biology of some Late Triassic dinosaurs. They investigated the small theropod Coelophysis bauri and large prosauropod Plateosaurus engelhardti during the hot, dry global greenhouse conditions that prevailed at that time.
The Memorial Union Terrace on UW-Madison’s lakefront will begin a phased reopening on Monday.
Quoted: Robert Yablon, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election law, called the case “a true outlier.”
“Seventh Circuit cases rarely sit for even one year after oral argument, much less three,” he said by email.
“The judges’ internal deliberations are confidential, so it’s impossible to know for sure what’s happening behind the scenes. The judges may have disagreements that they’re truly struggling to resolve. It’s also conceivable that they’re waiting to see if Wisconsin law changes in ways that moot the appeal or hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually decides another voting-related case that offers further guidance on the relevant legal standards.”
Although the presence of COVID-19 means no one can guarantee college football games will be played in 2020, University of Wisconsin officials continue to plan for the season-opener on Sept. 4 against visiting Indiana.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents appointed former Gov. Tommy Thompson as the interim system president during a closed session meeting Thursday.
Noted: The study shows a decent representation of minorities,” said William Hartman, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at UW Health. “That’s an important point given that the minority communities have been hit so, so hard by COVID-19.”
Hartman is leading survivor plasma trials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was not involved with this study.
Author Jordan Nutting is a AAAS Mass Media Fellow writing about science at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this summer. She’s working on a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Wisconsin has the most roundabouts of any state on its state highway system,” said Andrea Bill, a traffic safety engineer and researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory.
Quoted: “This is just a sliver of the nearly 6 million people in Wisconsin,” said Patrick Remington, an epidemiologist and a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “These were highly visible and they could be high risk, but in reality, these were isolated events.”
“It is really hard to isolate one thing when so many things are going,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We cannot deny such an impact because of people on the street in public, standing close and shouting out and not wearing masks. That is ideal to spread the virus,” said Song Gao, assistant professor at the UW-Madison Geospatial Data Science Lab.
Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor of industrial engineering and infectious disease modeling expert at the UW-Madison, said his work shows social distancing adherence plays a major factor in the spread of coronavirus.
“Me and my family are also tired of being careful,” Alagoz said. “But unfortunately we cannot get super comfortable. … People should still be careful. Wearing masks, I think, is important, especially indoors.”
Quoted: UW-Health Doctor Tiffany Green studies the causes and consequences of racial disparities in health.
“We see across the country that Black Americans are dying disproportionately relative to our share of our population, and that is especially true here in Wisconsin unfortunately,” Green said.
“Currently we’re talking about what can we do about the police, but the police are not the only issue, every other social system was built on the same inequities,” Alvin Thomas, UW-Madison Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Human Development and Family Studies, said.
Somewhere in America, a 14-year-old Black boy is playing video games in his room, and his parents are satisfied that they are keeping him safe from COVID-19. But then, in Minneapolis, George Floyd is killed by a police officer, and his parents are reminded that their son’s life could just as easily be snuffed out.
Author Alvin Thomas is an assistant professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: According to data presented to the Board of Regents at the beginning of the month, the system anticipates a total loss of more than $100 million through the end of the summer, even taking into account the emergency federal funding they’ve received.
The UW System will receive $20 million of the funding, coming just as UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee announced their plans to reopen for the fall Wednesday.
The money will help offset the cost of technology infrastructure, personal protective equipment and other expenses, UW System President Ray Cross said, but said more help will be needed.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Milwaukee announced Wednesday that they would bring students and employees back for the fall 2020 semester.
The University of Wisconsin will welcome a limited number of athletes back to campus this week, with voluntary strength and conditioning activities to begin June 15.
Noted: Ashley is a graduate of Divine Savior Holy Angels High School, DePaul University and the University of Wisconsin Law School. She joined the state bar in 2012, and worked in criminal defense at Alex Flynn & Associates for three years before joining Legal Action.
Noted: A three-day short course in ice cream making has been taught for decades at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Dairy Science in Madison. Students travel from as far away as Asia, often with a goal to make ice cream with indigenous ingredients and flavors.
“Certain ingredients behave differently when added to ice cream,” explains Scott Rankin, who heads the UW program. “Alcoholic beverages are one example. You can’t just add them” without consequences.
Noted: The court sought input from law deans at Marquette and the University of Wisconsin, the state bar, the board of bar examiners, who all opposed the idea.
Noted: I read this past week an article in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change by McKenna Kohlenberg, a Milwaukee area native who is in the home stretch of getting both her law degree and a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It uses Madison as a case study in what Kohlenberg calls the “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline.” She cites research that 70% of adults who are incarcerated and 85% of juveniles who have been involved with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate.
“Literacy strongly correlates with myriad social and economic outcomes, and children who are not proficient by the fourth grade are much more likely than their proficient peers to face a series of accumulating negative consequences,” Kohlenberg writes.
Noted: Mensah worked for less than two years at both the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department before he was hired by Wauwatosa police in January 2015.
Mensah was the subject of one citizen complaint while on the UW-Madison police force, but his supervisors determined he had acted appropriately. A student said Mensah unnecessarily drew his Taser when officers responded to break up fights at a fraternity’s dance party, records show. Mensah did not fire the Taser.
The complaint was not upheld after other officers and witnesses described the chaotic scene and the student who filed the complaint did not return voice messages. The phone number eventually was disconnected.
Quoted: “We found substantial variation across communities in the proportion of people who had these risk factors for severe complications,” said Maureen Smith, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “That finding suggests that matching community with the right resources needs to take into account that communities are different.”
The information compiled by UW researchers can help identify potential hot spots, said Jessica Bonham-Werling, director of the Neighborhood Health Partnership Program, which prepared the reports, at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. That in turn can help public health and other officials make decisions on where to allocate resources, from testing and contact tracing to community services, such as delivering groceries.
Noted: “He was first and foremost a journalist with a strong sense of social justice and a pen that could be withering at times,” said Patricia Loew, professor at the Medill School of Journalism and co-director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University, who worked with Rolo as a colleague and a student. “He was fiercely loyal, as he was in sheltering and playing dad to his teenage nephew. I advised him as a graduate student, an experience that was both exhilarating and exasperating. He could be acerbic and suffered no fools, as his cohorts sometimes complained, and as his own students learned when he became a UW-Madison lecturer.”
Quoted: ARDS is the most common cause for COVID-19 patients being transferred into the intensive care unit, said Lynn Schnapp, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Noted: Last spring, Milwaukee teenagers Dana Sharqawi and Sumaya Abdi organized protests after mass shootings at mosques in New Zealand.
On Wednesday, they brought people together again at the Islamic Society of Milwaukee — this time to remember George Floyd and to protest police violence. They said they were guided by their Muslim faith.
“Our religion tells us that if one part of your body’s in pain, then the whole body’s in pain,” said Abdi, now 19 and a student at UW-Madison. “So if our black brothers and sisters are in pain, we’re in pain, too.”
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross is asking Gov. Tony Evers and state lawmakers for a line of credit, fewer regulations and the ability to begin classes early in the fall.
Quoted: Jim Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, said the good news is that being outdoors decreases the risk of transmission.
“However, since the primary transmission is from human to human, individuals in close quarters with little movement do have increased opportunity for higher ‘quality’ contact and subsequent infection,” he said in an email. “Obviously it depends on how many infected people there are in the group, and how careful individuals are about their own hygiene.”
“It’s really disappointing to hear that the police in Madison took actions that exacerbated the risk of transmission at the protest, like pushing people together into crowded spaces, forming riot lines, and using chemicals that make people cough and spread more droplets,” said Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist and assistant scientist in health geography at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health, said she noticed that the gatherings violated distancing recommendations. But she said she had to weigh which was the greater threat to society: COVID-19, or accepting what Safdar called “murder in broad daylight” by police.
Protests are another way of engaging in the political process — which is “essential,” said UW-Madison epidemiologist Patrick Remington.
“We have to get back to being engaged in society, we just have to do that understanding that there’s an infectious disease that could make you pay a high (price) for that involvement,” he said.
Entering the next phase of a presidential search process marred by criticism and hindered by a global pandemic, the committee tasked with hiring a replacement for retiring-University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross named a single finalist Tuesday.
Gov. Tony Evers announced three new appointees to the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents Monday, including a Madison lawyer who represented the women who accused former UW-Madison Badgers football player Quintez Cephus of sexual assault.
The University of Wisconsin men’s hockey program has lost one of its more beloved alums.
Rob Andringa, a Madison native who helped UW win the 1990 NCAA title under Jeff Sauer but was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in December 2017, died Friday night.
With the sports world on hold, we gave you the 50 greatest moments in Wisconsin sports history over the past 50 years. What about the next 10 that just missed the list? This is No. 59.
There were plenty of eye-popping numbers that suggested the University of Wisconsin football team had no chance against No. 1 Michigan to kick off the 1981 season, but one stood above them all: 176-0.
Noted: The problems were concentrated along State Street, the normally thriving pedestrian avenue that connects the state Capitol to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus Protesters broke out the windows of Urban Outfitters, an art museum’s gift shop, Ragstock, AT&T and other stores.
