Quoted: “We know that voter registration numbers have been lower this spring and summer than they would normally be in a presidential election year,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
Noted: Black came to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first job at Summerfest was as administrative assistant to then-Summerfest director Henry Jordan in 1974-75. At the time she was named executive director of Summerfest in October 1983, she was a member of Mayor Henry Maier’s staff.
Quoted: Trump’s rhetoric and actions, however, continue a century-long history of the federal government working with private real estate interests to develop and maintain segregated communities, especially in the suburbs, said Paige Glotzer, a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of the book “How the Suburbs Were Segregated.”
Songbirds seem to enjoy singing. And while a great deal of research has investigated the development and production of birdsong, little is known about the motivation to sing.
New work out of Lauren Riters’ lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teases out the relationship between singing, reward, and endogenous opioids in songbirds. The results suggest that studying songbirds can teach us about the shared neurobiological mechanisms underlying social reward in all vertebrates, humans included.
Noted: One approach focuses on improving teachers’ own mental health. Matthew Hirschberg and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that randomly assigning a group of aspiring teachers to a preservice course on mindfulness reduced those teachers’ implicit bias and fostered their provision of emotional, instructional, and organizational support to students. The 22-hour course emphasized kindness, compassion, and managing one’s emotions. Another mindfulness program, CARE for Teachers, saw similar results.
Quoted: “We don’t want Wisconsin to become a poster child of how not to do an election,” said David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: That lines up with experts that say a diverse police force is only part of the answer when the discussion centers on racism, representation, and bias in communities. Police forces are often a reflection of the communities where they serve, UW-Madison Professor Emerita of Sociology Pamela Oliver noted in an email exchange with 7 Investigates. “It isn’t clear that changing the composition of the police force when the community hasn’t changed would make much of a difference.”
A 2003 study found that higher diversity in law enforcement did not necessarily mean a lower number of deaths caused by police, and Prof. Oliver said that the overall body of research “is mixed at best” in relation to the idea that diversity alone in law enforcement will result in less implicit bias.
Noted: While getting rid of non-native plants is a pesky and time-consuming job for most humans, it’s no tough task for goats, according to UW-Madison grazing specialist Jacob Grace.
The CJC also received a report from Professor John Eason on an analysis he completed to determine the impact of jail population reduction on the incidence of COVID-19 in the jail as well as the projection of COVID-19 infection if the reduction had not occurred.
Professor Eason is currently an associate professor of sociology at UW-Madison. Eason previously served as assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, as well as assistant to associate professor of ociology at Texas A&M University. His primary research interests link race, health, punishment, and inequality to community processes.
His early research has shown that the jail infection rate would have been substantially higher had decreases in the jail population not occurred. Professor Eason will continue his research through May 2021.
“Working with the CJC to look at data and policy can bring the power of academia to the practical application of justice in Dane County” said Eason. “I am excited to work with CJC members bridging the gap between government and the UW.”
Noted: Legally, people can use slurs in a university setting. In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of free speech specifically with regard to anti-Black slurs or actions. In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court unanimously struck down the city of St. Paul’s Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance and reversed the conviction of a teenager for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family, arguing that the First Amendment protects cross burning as freedom of speech. Such legal protection was widely discussed in 2016 when a football fan at the University of Wisconsin at Madison wore a costume of President Barack Obama with a noose around his neck. University police officers asked the fan to remove the noose, and the University of Wisconsin issued the following statement: “The costume, while repugnant and counter to the values of the university and athletic department, was an exercise of the individual’s right to free speech.”
Noted: Madison365 spoke with three local experts: Public Health Madison Dane County data analyst Brittany Grogan, University of Wisconsin infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi, and Dr. Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.
Noted: Taft’s interest in weather began in the U.S. Air Force, which he joined as a 19-year-old radar technician. He eventually became a combat pilot, spent a year in Vietnam, taught aviation and flight planning, and earned a degree in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.
Quoted: “It takes a brave actor to stand up and run against the boss,” Lanny Glinberg, director of the University of Wisconsin Prosecution Project, says.
Glinberg also points to the decline of local news as an impediment to contested races. If the community isn’t aware of the daily goings on in the courthouse, how will they know if there have been any problems?
“Another factor — how well informed is the public of the role of district attorney?” he says. “The most powerful actor in the criminal justice system in terms of discretion. The public needs quality investigative journalism to know that. That’s in shorter and shorter supply.”
Many businesses are open. Mask orders have been implemented as cases are trending up. We are tracking the numbers, but many of you have questions about how we can protect ourselves and others. What can we do to slow the transmission of COVID-19?
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has assembled a panel of experts from the University of Wisconsin’s Madison and Milwaukee campuses. They will periodically answer questions from readers.
Quoted: “Even though states are putting the 14-day quarantines up, there are big questions about how it’d be enforced on a campus and for students who live off campus,” said Nicholas Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The impact seems really uncertain unless it’s strictly a residential campus.”
While a minority hiring program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison values skin color, there is less value placed on political minorities of color on the right.
Quoted: “I don’t think (the finding) was surprising, but it was good to see data that actually described it,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health in Madison.
Noted: Other staples of everyday life, especially the resumption of school, may differ widely in cities and towns across the country. Without data to measure the effect of different educational methods on the spread of the virus, the U.S. will soon embark on what amounts to “uncontrolled experiments,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW virologist and influenza expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka said that although he is confident COVID-19 will become endemic, he believes the lifestyle changes people have made should not become permanent.
“Once everyone gets vaccinated we should be able to go back to normal life,” he said, predicting that day might come “in three years, maybe four years.”
Noted: To understand what’s really going on, we spoke to a dozen experts and dove deep into the data. Working with data provided by William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Diversity Explosion, we looked at twenty years of migration by state, and compared that to changes in presidential voting patterns using data from the website 270toWin. And finally, we studied migration patterns by age from a database at the University of Wisconsin.
Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellow to the Hebrew University. His research focuses on Jewish resistance at the extermination camp Treblinka.
Quoted: It’s also critical for avoiding what Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls “prevention fatigue.” For example, if teachers at a school, who otherwise feel perfectly healthy, come to dread their twice-weekly swab, surveillance testing will quickly become unreliable. “They’ll say, ‘I feel fine’ and find a way to skip it,” O’Connor says. “We’re a nation of wusses, myself included.”
Noted: Research by Scott Sanders, a professor in the mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has shown that in situations where people can social distance, three-layered masks are best, with cotton for the internal layer, a non-woven synthetic for the middle and an outer layer of polyester.
But even if there is leaking from the mask, some kind of barrier is better than nothing, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
And, the masks should really be combined with social distancing, added Sethi, who is part of a team developing a model to forecast potential surges in hospitalizations in southern Wisconsin.
Quoted: Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Department who specializes in regional economic development, said it’s encouraging to see unemployment improving across the state. However, she said the numbers show that the economy has not gotten back to normal for a lot of people in Wisconsin.
“Even though things are better, we’re still quite a ways from where we were before the pandemic hit,” Conroy said. “So if we were to compare to say a year ago, we have a ways to go in terms of improving things again.”
The best explanation of how Donald Trump took the Midwest, and so the White House, came in a book published eight months before he did it. Kathy Cramer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison spent years interviewing small-town voters, such as retired farmers in rural petrol stations chatting over bad coffee. She asked how Wisconsin, a once-placid sort of place, had become bitterly confrontational. Her book, “The Politics of Resentment”, tracked how Scott Walker, the two-term Republican governor who left office in 2019, inspired fury from half the population and adoration from the other half. In every election of the past decade, voters were herded into rival camps.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease physician and the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said it’s impossible at this point to establish a scientific correlation between evictions and COVID-19 spread and deaths; diagnosed coronavirus cases are up 150% in Milwaukee, for example, since the eviction moratorium ended.
What is not in doubt among public health experts, she said, is that evictions are dangerous during a pandemic. “A key tenet of prevention in a pandemic is to have the infrastructure that will minimize transmission from person to person,” Safdar said. “Any activity that breaks down that structure … makes containment of a pandemic exceedingly difficult.”
Written by Todd Newman, Assistant Professor of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quoted: But Julie Mead, who researches legal issues related to special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there’s a potential problem with these lawsuits.
“Students with disabilities require programming that is special. That’s the whole point — ‘special’ education,” she says. In other words, for the very reason that each of these students is different, and needs different services, it may be harder to get courts to recognize them as a class, Mead says. She notes that, ever since a 2011 Supreme Court decision, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, certifying a class for a class action suit has gotten more complicated.
Noted: William R. Hartman, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology, is principal investigator for the UW COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
Noted: Minutes after Evers announced the plan, University of Wisconsin interim president and former Gov. Tommy Thompson pointed out that the system’s campuses had already absorbed more than half of the first round of cutting and signaled the system would have trouble with further reductions.
“Our universities are doing everything we can to provide in-person classes safely this fall and reductions in state support for the UW System are an obstacle to that work,” Thompson said in a statement.
Quoted: “I’m acknowledged for who I am, and I’m supported to do my best and to contribute at my best. That is the culture that we want to strive for,” Binnu Palta Hill, the associate dean for diversity and inclusion at the Wisconsin School of Business, said.
Palta Hill is also a consultant, workshopping with companies around the nation on different aspects of inclusion. She turns to research suggesting employees perform better when they feel like they belong and says the topic matters at every industry.
UW-Madison economist Noah Williams said it would be inaccurate to blame government regulation for the economic slowdown that’s accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Economic activity started falling early in March, before there were any restrictions in place,” Williams said. “What the lockdowns essentially did was keep that activity at a very low level. Things deteriorated much more quickly than people expected.”
The night sky is giving us many good reasons to look up this summer.
From Neowise, the recently-discovered comet that’s only viewable every few thousand years, to the annual Perseid meteor showers, there’s a lot to watch for in the evening and early morning skies, said Jim Lattis, director of the University of Wisconsin Space Place.
Lattis walks through the summer sky’s brightest objects, and gives tips for where and how to see them.
Quoted: “His stupid, careless talk is not really fascist but conceivably subfascist,” said Stanley Payne, a well-known historian of European fascism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Both Hitler and Mussolini spoke more toward theoretically coherent goals.”
Confusion this week over whether Milwaukee’s private schools could start in-person education in the fall led several parents to ask FOX6: Who has the power to veto school plans during a pandemic?
“If you had asked that question a couple months ago, it would have been pretty clear,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus Dennis Dresang said.
Dresang’s research focuses on state, local, and federal government.
Noted: Around 6 p.m., Angela Rowe, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was running the day’s operations, radioed from the ops center that several storms were tracking on a northeast bearing toward the triangle. Soon those of us who were in the field watched as the skies before us transformed. Clouds along the leading edge of the northernmost storm flattened, sending down graying tendrils of haze that brushed along the ground. Far above, the blackening core of the storm started bubbling, roiling skyward like an overflowing pot of pasta.
The COVID-19 pandemic imposed significant new hardships on American workers — and it’s exposed just how much hardship many of them have been enduring for years.
That’s a central conclusion of a report published today, the 2020 edition of the State of Working Wisconsin. The report is published by COWS — formerly the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — a policy research and analysis organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Sue Robinson and Kathleen Bartzen Culver, journalism professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, use coverage of the proposed charter school as a case study to explore ethical obligations white reporters have when covering race. They conducted three focus groups and 39 in-depth interviews with 24 white reporters and 15 community leaders of color. They also analyzed more than 1,000 news stories and social media posts about racial disparities in educational achievement in Madison from 2011 to 2015.
Quoted: “If we look at crises throughout history, they can be a kickstart for progressive social and urban change,” says Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at UW-Madison. “But they can also be an opportunity for backlash and anti-progressive forces.”
Modern wearables like the Apple Watch use sensors like gyros and accelerometers to detect hand movements. Those components allow them to turn on their displays when you lift your wrist, as well as to ensure you’ve properly washed your hand. But thanks to the work of a joint team of researchers at Cornell Unversity and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, future wearables could offer more nuanced hand detection.
Quoted: The effort to de-densify campus could have a public health benefit if the extra space is used to spread people out across classrooms and residence halls, said Craig Roberts, an epidemiologist emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a member of the American College Health Association’s COVID-19 task force.
“If the reduction is being done solely for budget reasons, however,” he said, such as to “keep class sizes the same but have fewer classes with fewer instructors, then I don’t think it’s going to make much difference.”
If this whole smart glasses thing is going to effectively free us from having our heads constantly down and staring at our phones, we’re going to need a reliable way to interact with a virtual screen. Thanks to new research from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, we could still rely on our hands and fingers without actually having to touch a screen.
Noted: Before that, on Thursday, Aug. 6, there will be a virtual program entitled “Black Male Suffrage in Early Wisconsin,” presented by Dr. Christy Clark Pujara, assistant professor of history, Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It will tell the story of Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black Milwaukee resident, who asked that his name be added to the list of eligible voters on Oct. 31, 1865.
Noted: Montgomery went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she soon met Floyd, who would become her husband of nearly 47 years.
Belzer lived in La Crosse until attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to the governor’s office. He worked as Evers’ personal assistant since February of 2019.
Noted: The first collective bargaining agreement for teaching assistants was reached at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the spring of 1970; in the 50 years since, there have been only about 40 more, covering just one in five graduate student workers, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College.
Quoted: Such practices have been justified by the third key component of the vote suppression narrative: the claim of widespread voter fraud. This claim, too, is fallacious, as many voting experts will attest. As Kenneth R. Mayer, a voting expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison declared, “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”
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.
