Essay by Professor Beth Nguyen
Lunar New Year might bring to mind festivals and fireworks, but I’ve always associated it with a kind of isolation. Long before the pandemic, long before the rest of America learned about sriracha and pho, I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee family in a mostly white town in Michigan.
Quoted: Those data show that “it’s mask fit that really matters, and there are bunch of different ways to improve mask fit,” says David Rothamer, a mechanical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering.
Noted: A 2012 study led by Leslie Seltzer at the University of Wisconsin, for instance, found that phone calls can approximate in-person interactions in reducing cortisol (the stress hormone) and stimulating oxytocin (a neuropeptide associated with bonding and affection).
There’s a lot you could do with $88 million.
You could, say, pay for full scholarships for 3,200 students to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for one year.
Noted: The Badger Seal is a DIY mask fitter designed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It takes a few minutes’ time and work to assemble, but materials only run $1 per mask. You can download the instructions here.
Amy Wallner is one of the farmers who enjoy digging up data for the University of Wisconsin’s Seed to Kitchen Collaborative. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in horticulture and soil science, she learned through the Department of Horticulture website about the collaboration, which aims to come up with delicious vegetable varieties that grow well in the Upper Midwest
Quoted: Solo parents aren’t the only travelers noticing increased scrutiny. “All border crossings have become more difficult over the past few years,” says Erin Barbato, a clinical professor and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. From political unrest to the global pandemic, different forces have added complexity to international travel. In this environment, we need to expect that agents may ask more questions, Barbato says.
Ryan McDonagh isn’t just lacing up his skates this season. He’s also hitting the books.
The Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman is working on getting his bachelor’s degree in personal finance at the University of Wisconsin via online learning. He left Wisconsin in 2010 after his junior season, just 18 credits short of the finish line, and signed a contract with the New York Rangers.
Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh has found a way to make the most out of the new normal brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. He’s finishing his college degree.
McDonagh, who is 18 credits short of getting his personal finance degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now taking online classes to put himself on a path to graduate.
Quoted: “While the majority of people have debt loads we wouldn’t consider to be outrageous, there are a lot of people exiting higher education and carrying pretty significant burdens into the workforce,” said Cliff Robb, a consumer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
New figures show the University of Wisconsin System saw $317.7 million in lost revenue and additional expenses between March and December as universities continue to weather the widespread budgetary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a novel initiative to address a series of challenges on Wisconsin campuses — projections of declining enrollment, recruiting and supporting students of color and the damage of COVID-19 — five universities are putting counselors in targeted high schools to help guide students to higher education.
Bjorn Eraker, a finance professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said those high numbers point to a bubble, not long-term stability of the stock.
“It’s a speculative bubble more than it is a safe investment,” Eraker said. “There’s no way of knowing what they might do because the stock is trading way, way above its fundamentals. It is a game more than it is an investment.”
A new and always fatal disease that has been killing chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Sierra Leone for years has been reported for the first time by an international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Committee co-chairman Jonathan Temte of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said the committee will break because it will take months to distribute vaccine shots to everyone eligible in phases underway.
Jim Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute who is a member of the panel, said during the meeting he was concerned about the effect of the break on the subcommittee members’ ability to provide information to the health care community and others about the status of the rollout.
“Now that we’re on this committee (many of us) are sort of viewed as sources of information for a lot of the people around the state and a lot of organizations and it’s been incredibly beneficial to be part of these conversations to be able to help shed some light on these things,” Conway said. “I’m a little concerned if we’re going to take a long pause that we won’t continue to be able to be those resources for others, so I do wonder where things are, what we know about how the distribution is going and if there is anything that we can offer.”
Temte agreed, saying, “At the end of the day we serve at the pleasure of the Secretary or Acting Secretary so if our efforts, skills, knowledge and opinions are of value, I think we stand ready to come back.”
Quoted: “Think about it — our hospitals and clinics are near capacity because we have a heavy caseload of COVID right now,” said Mary Hayney, a pharmacy professor at UW-Madison.
“We need to find other people to … administer vaccines to the public. So students are a resource that can be tapped to do that because they have the skills and are ready to go,” she said.
Quoted: “For over six decades, the UW Law School has been privileged to publish and provide a home for the Wisconsin Jury Instructions. This has been a labor of love, grounded in our deep commitment to the Wisconsin Idea,” wrote UW Law School Dean Dan Tokaji.
“We are delighted that the jury instructions will be digitized and made free to the public from this point forward, thanks to the diligent efforts of the state courts and many people working with them.”
Quoted: “There is always a chance that in the future another new variant might emerge, and we would have to check again whether the vaccine can be effective against that new variant,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two Madison 7-Elevens have been deemed safe by Madison police after reported bomb threats. About 3 p.m., police tweeted that nothing was located and both locations were safe.
Quoted: The idea of removing names — let alone an entire article — from a newspaper’s digital archive is traditionally anathema for many journalists. “For a long time the instinct was, ‘Nope, we’re not even going to think about this. We are about seeking the truth and reporting it and we don’t go back and unreport it,’ ” said Kathleen Culver, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: “Now is not the time to loosen restrictions but rather double-down on our mitigation efforts and ramp up vaccine rollout,” Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Other new variants will inevitably emerge if we allow the coronavirus to spread uncontrollably.”
Quoted: As customers make their way through shelves, they may move or pick up items in ways that can make the location and quantity of inventory difficult to to gauge, said Hart Posen, professor at the University of Wisconsin school of business.
“It leads to lots of mistakes and errors because what the computer system says is on the shelf might not be there, because a customer has it in their cart, or…picked it up and moved it someplace else,” he said. “So mostly using store shelves for e-commerce fulfillment is not a scalable and efficient way to do it.”
Noted: One way to appeal to youth on Covid-19 is by placing the wellbeing of their social group on their shoulders, said Dominique Brossard, a professor specializing in science communication at University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She pointed to the decades-old “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive” slogan in the U.S. as one successful campaign that helped lower incidence of youth drunk-driving. Simply relaying information about the virus may have limited effectiveness with the younger generation, who are accustomed to being bombarded with a constant stream of content.
Noted: Lewis, an assistant professor of mathematics at George Washington University, decided to hire Rai before he had any idea that the pandemic would push the course online. He had gotten the idea from Harry Brighouse, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has written about having a student worker critique his teaching. The move online meant Lewis’s discussions with Rai covered different ground than the professor had initially imagined — he thought they’d talk more about issues like how much class time he should spend on particular topics. But it ended up being an especially good semester in which to have a thoughtful observer.
When public servants face a challenge, AAAS Member and newly elected 2020 AAAS Fellow Dr. Laura Albert finds solutions. Whether helping police tackle the opioid crisis, or assisting election officials in protecting voters during a deadly pandemic — which was one of her most recent feats — the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor uses mathematical models and analytics to recommend safe, economical and often innovative remedies.
Noted: Annika Kersten Wellman, a senior studying nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says she believes that the administration should at least go for a middle ground of $30,000 in federal loan forgiveness per borrower. That amount would be closer to the national average of student debt and “will help correct the inequity that is student loan debt,” she said.
Wellman, who said she was lucky that she didn’t have to take out loans for her education, supports student loan forgiveness as a way to address the disproportionate burden of education debt on people of color, something that Warren and Schumer have emphasized in their support of student loan forgiveness.
To have a statue of the late civil rights legend and political trailblazer Vel Phillips, Wisconsin’s first Black secretary of state, outside of the state Capitol building in downtown Madison would mean so much to so many people, including State Rep. Shelia Stubbs (D-Madison) who would see it every day at her work.
Noted: The house was in use for more than 200 years before an earthquake destroyed it during the early seventh century. Excavation by the Sardis Expedition of Harvard University is being conducted with the permission of the Turkish government, and is directed by Professor Nicholas Cahill of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: Melissa Kono is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works in community development and is raising a family on a farm. “Work-life balance,” she said, is not a farming staple.
Noted: Arriving in my inbox at 7:50 a.m. on Jan. 21 was an email that I anxiously had been anticipating. It was from the University of Wisconsin Madison doctor who is running UW’s clinical trial of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine. I, along with 460 volunteers, had been making monthly appearances at UW Hospital to provide blood samples and to get two shots spaced a month apart.
Quoted: Dietram Scheufele, the Taylor-Bascom chair in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that scientists already must counter misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines. Manipulated data only makes that job harder, he said.
“It’s probably the worst possible time to deal with something like this,” he said.
Officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have launched their new saliva-based COVID-19 testing program which, once in full swing next week, will take the campus from conducting around 12,000 tests per week to 82,000.
Quoted: Committee co-chairman Dr. Jonathan Temte of the University of Wisconsin-Madison agreed.
“Our recommendation should be based on the scientific evidence, the ethical pinnings, and the feasibility,” Temte said. “And on all three accounts, one would say, absolutely. If we are saying we’re going to punish these people yet again — because they are being punished for their crimes at this point in time — this constitutes kind of a double punishment and treating them very, very differently and I’m very uncomfortable with that.”
Noted: The council also unanimously approved a resolution supporting the placement of a statue honoring Vel Phillips at the state Capitol building. “Trailblazer and former Milwaukee Ald. Vel Phillips achieved many ‘firsts’ in her career, including being the first African American woman to graduate from UW-Madison law school, first on the Milwaukee Common Council, first on the bench, and first in statewide office,” the resolution states. It also says the statue would be the first at the Capitol honoring a person of color.
Noted: After high school, he pursued a degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he began working with the college Democrats chapter and working with political campaigns.
Quoted: Dr. David O’Connor is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UW-Madison’s school of Medicine and Public Health, where he runs a lab studying viral infections. Speaking with WORT, O’Connor said it’s common for viruses to mutate as they find new hosts.
“The genetic material for the coronavirus is called RNA, and when RNA makes copies of itself, sometimes those copies are sloppy, and a mistake gets made,” O’Connor said.
The Associated Press and other news outlets have focused on the fact the B.1.1.7 strain appears to transmit between people more quickly than other strains. Dr. Thomas Friedrich, who studies diseases and immune systems at UW-Madison, shares this same suspicion.
“This variant does appear to be more contagious, more transmissible between people, about one and half times as transmissible as previous strains. So, that’s concerning to us because it means that virus might spread a bit easier, and might be a little harder to control,” Friedrich said.
Quoted: Stanley Payne, a University of Wisconsin historian of Spain and author of A History of Fascism 1914-1945, agrees that Trump’s lack of coherent revolutionary fervor makes him fall short of fascism. “Never founded a new fascist party, never embraced a coherent new revolutionary ideology, never announced a radical new doctrine but introduced a noninterventionist foreign military policy,” Payne wrote to me in an email. “Not even a poor man’s fascist. Ever an incoherent nationalist-populist with sometimes destructive tendencies.”
Noted:
It’s too soon for scholars to have studied how those in poverty have used their $600 stimulus checks. But in a study of the way Americans spent their first round of pandemic-related stimulus checks in April — many of those around $1,200 each — scholars from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Virginia showed that people spent a great deal of their allotment on food, helping to stave off hunger.
Professor emeritus of dairy science and former dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Neal Jorgensen, passed away at 85 on Dec. 22.
With the conclusion of the fall 2020 semester, the University of Wisconsin Madison closes out one of the more tense semesters in campus history, and conflicts between administration and black students activists currently remain unresolved.
Noted: Their study was published in “Functional Ecology,” a journal of the British Ecological Society, and involved a collaborative team of researchers from the U of I, Washington State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Geological Survey. It looked at how the risk of heat stress from a warming climate might affect milk production in grizzly bears. It also investigated how bears respond, including their use of soaking pools.
Noted: If the county can’t increase revenues, board members would be faced with cutting funds for outside services provided by the Ashland County Aging Unit, Bay Area Rural Transit and the Division of Extension at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ashland County board member Laura Nagro said they need to keep looking for ways to draw in revenue, hinting that it may be a tough sell during the COVID-19 crisis.
Quoted: “In meat systems, permeate can be used to reduce the amount of sodium, enhance browning, protect color, mask bitter flavors and improve structure formation,” said Susan Larson, associate researcher, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for the US Dairy Export Council, Arlington, Va. “The lactose in permeate also provides a carbohydrate that could replace a portion of the sugar in a fermented sausage.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, professor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Johnson’s strong allegiance to President Donald Trump, as well as his position within the Senate majority and chairmanship of a powerful committee, positioned him squarely in the national spotlight.
“That combination has been really effective for him for the last several years and has given him a national platform,” Burden said. “And now he’s essentially losing all of that.”
Noted: Meek knows a thing or two about the symbols and rhetoric associated with the African American race dialogue. She earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which she calls “the Whitest place in the world.” In the 1960s, the university was a hotbed of civil rights activism. By 1971, when Meek arrived on campus, the administration had purged the campus of “most of the so-called radical element,” she says. “And I had gone to that school because of the radical element.”
Noted: Scientists at the University of Wisconsin Madison are blasting bacteria with high doses of ionizing radiation to watch them evolve radiation resistance in real time and study which genes are involved.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, an economist with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said prior economic declines were led by male-dominated fields, such as construction and manufacturing. The pandemic-driven decline, she said, has strongly affected areas – such as the restaurant and education industries – with a high number of women workers.
“And those jobs are low-wage jobs,” Dresser said. “They’re held disproportionately by women. They’re held disproportionately by people of color.”
Noted: According to a Jan. 6 preprint of a study conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, if you develop a fever while you have COVID, you may be immune to COVID for a longer period of time.
“Such an inflammatory response may be key for developing a strong anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody response,” according to the study’s authors. And if you want to stay safe, These 3 Things Could Prevent Almost All COVID Cases, Study Finds.
Noted: Schmitt was born on a Wisconsin farm and moved to Merrill with his family at age 11. He worked in a barbershop and played semi-professional baseball with the Madison Blues while attending school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Three years after graduating from law school in 1928, he became Lincoln County district attorney.
Quoted: The motivation for the crackdown is “a combination of corporate pressure through fear of losing advertisers, and some sense of responsibility that this (insurrection) was a bridge too far,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The question is how sustained the corporate response will be,” Culver said. Currently, companies including AT&T, JPMorgan and Coca-Cola have paused their political contributions to the 147 Republicans who objected to certifying the election results, for instance. “Is it performative in the moment or will it last? It feels unlike any moment I’ve seen before.”
The national cyberattack that targeted the SolarWinds computer network monitoring software could have impacted some University of Wisconsin System campuses that use it.
Quoted: But fellow co-chairman Dr. Jonathan Temte, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said politics shouldn’t play a role in public health decision-making.
“It is our purview to make whatever we think is the best recommendation,” he said. “I don’t think it’s ethically acceptable to say we’re going to do congregate living but exclude the incarcerated, because by definition, that’s congregate living.”
Quoted: In Florida, for example, a nursing home offered vaccines to members of its board and major donors, the Washington Post reported.
But that doesn’t seem to be the norm, said Ajay Sethi, an infectious disease expert with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said the top concern should be that no doses go to waste.
“It’s far better to get a shot in somebody’s arm than throw it out. Throwing it out is a complete tragedy,” Sethi said.
“If it’s happening to the point where the original plans are being abandoned, then I think that would be an issue,” Sethi added. “But I don’t think we’re at that stage right now.”
Quoted: “What we’ve heard more and more is that there are organizations that end up with unfilled slots in their immunization schedules who would like to reach out to members that would technically be in that next (rollout) group,” said Dr. Jim Conway, a professor of pediatrics at UW-Madison.
Noted: The Public Interest Justice Initiative, a joint project between Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s office and the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, was launched in 2019 after the Remington Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School found that more than half the 128 inmates serving life sentences for juvenile offenses were from Milwaukee County.
Noted: From there, Spangler became an art professor for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, then, aspiring to make more money for his family, started doing work for some commercial firms in Milwaukee.
Noted: Jasinski, the eldest of eight children, was raised in a Milwaukee family that canned fresh produce by the bushel. Now she flies solo in Madison and is catering manager at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Union.
A new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study has found that the quick test used by UW campuses to regularly test students missed about 1 in 5 positive cases for people who have symptoms.
Quoted: “The rollout has not gone real smoothly, and for as many doses out there, we’re not vaccinating very quickly,” vaccine committee co-chairman Jonathan Temte, the Associate Dean for Public Health and Community Engagement for UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said Tuesday about deciding who is included in the next phase.
“And the larger we make any particular group, the much longer it’s going to take,” he said. “One of the questions is how long do we put off some of those high-risk individuals.”
In possibly the most Wisconsin contest you’ll ever see, Tommy Thompson challenged comedian Charlie Berens, creator of the “Manitowoc Minute,” to a “smash off” in his latest video to encourage Wisconsinites to get tested for COVID-19.
Children can still read the emotional expressions of people wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers say.
“We now have this situation where adults and kids have to interact all the time with people whose faces are partly covered, and a lot of adults are wondering if that’s going to be a problem for children’s emotional development,” said study co-author Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
