Quoted: David Canon is a political scientist at UW-Madison, and he echoes many of Gardner’s concerns.
“In my view, it’s clearly voter suppression…Our elections are very secure. The number of cases of voter fraud are so infinitesimally small that it’s just not something that changes the outcome of elections,” Canon says.
Noted: According to the announcement, the clinics will collaborate with AMI Expeditionary Healthcare, the University of Wisconsin System, local public health departments and other local partners.
Former Wisconsin wide receiver Quintez Cephus said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the university that he was used as a scapegoat during a sexual assault investigation that resulted in his temporary expulsion.
Gov. Tony Evers wants to spend $2.4 billion on building upgrades across Wisconsin — nearly half of which would be spent on University of Wisconsin System campuses.
Noted: The daughter, 18-year-old Rebecca Wright, is among the new Eagle Scouts, having earned 102 merit badges. She now attends the University of Wisconsin-Madison and wants to be a genetics researcher.
Noted: Anderson eventually came to work with Vern Suomi at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1966. Suomi was known for his growing research in satellite meteorology.
Quoted: Benjamin Baird, a sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who wasn’t involved in this study, told Scientific American the findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is.” SciAm has more: Sleep has classically been defined as unresponsiveness to external environmental stimuli—and that feature is still typically part of the definition today, Baird explains. “This work pushes us to think carefully—rethink, maybe—about some of those fundamental definitions about the nature of sleep itself, and what’s possible in sleep.”
Noted: Engebrecht has been urging officials to prioritize people with significant health problems, or at least create wait lists so they could be contacted when extra doses are available. The family also has been taking precautions while awaiting doses of vaccine, to protect Nate, who recently moved back home from the University of Wisconsin-Madison because of the risk of COVID-19 on and around campus.
Noted: Brenda Gayle Plummer is a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in African American history, the history of U.S. foreign relations, race in international affairs and Caribbean history. She is the author of several books, most recently of In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974.
As we approach a full year of this pandemic and attempt to survive sub-zero Wisconsin winter, many of us are tired; physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I teach at UW-Madison and the beginning of the semester is always an intense energetic marathon for me so I find myself having to be extra mindful about resting. So this month’s piece isn’t about food, but about rest as a political practice of resistance.
Quoted: “That high-resolution temporal record is, I think, pretty impressive,” says Brad Singer, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the history of the Earth’s magnetic field but was not part of the research team. “This is only a small number of specimens that they measured, but the results look fairly reproducible in the different trees, and I think that’s a pretty impressive set of data.”
Noted: The connections between climate impacts, wood supply, and poverty have drawn researchers at the University Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Wisconsin to study wood banks on a national scale. Growing out of dozens of interviews of wood bank volunteers done by Clarisse Hart, director of outreach and education at the Harvard Forest, the team has identified 82 wood banks across the country.
Quoted: These findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is,” says Benjamin Baird, a postdoctoral researcher who studies dreams at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was not involved in this study. Sleep has classically been defined as unresponsiveness to external environmental stimuli—and that feature is still typically part of the definition today, Baird explains. “This work pushes us to think carefully—rethink, maybe—about some of those fundamental definitions about the nature of sleep itself, and what’s possible in sleep.”
Quoted: “This work challenges the foundational definitions of sleep,” says cognitive neuroscientist Benjamin Baird of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies sleep and dreams but was not part of the study. Traditionally, he says, sleep has been defined as a state in which the brain is disconnected and unaware of the outside world.
At least three-fourths of all University of Wisconsin System classes will be in-person this fall according to system interim President Tommy Thompson.
Noted: Demand for electricity goes up when temperatures drop, said Dr. Line Roald, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The surprising part of what happened in Texas was that so many generators — from nuclear and natural gas plants to wind turbines — stopped producing energy due to the freezing temperatures, she said.
Quoted: “That would be a really interesting future direction of this methodology,” Benjamin Baird tells Inverse. Baird is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who studies lucid dreams, but was not involved in this study. He also has lucid dreams himself.
After being forced to host football games without fans in the stands in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, University of Wisconsin officials are taking a decidedly optimistic stance in preparing for the ’21 season:
Their goal is to see Camp Randall Stadium at full capacity.
University of Wisconsin System interim President Tommy Thompson told campus chancellors to aim to have at least 75% of their courses in person next fall, with the hope that COVID-19 vaccines will allow a return to some normalcy.
The legacy of Vel Phillips is one filled with firsts.
In 1951, she was the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. In 1956, she was the first woman and first Black member of Milwaukee’s City Council. In 1971, she was the first woman and first Black judge in Milwaukee County.
Like so many great scientific discoveries, Tom Brock started the research that would go on to revolutionize the field of biology — and pave the road to the development of the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight a pandemic — with a question.
Quoted: “When you’re talking about winter, (humans) are really wimps,” said David Drake, professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It helps our appreciation of wildlife, I think, to understand how the animals are able to make it through the season.”
On Feb. 10, I had the pleasure of talking with Jennifer Cheatham from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and John Diamond from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on our Education Week show A Seat at the Table. When participants register to view the live or on-demand show, they are able to input one question they would like me to ask our guests, and the questions they offered focused on many different facets of racial equity.
It’s a challenging time for colleges and universities, and for the students who want to attend those institutions to prepare for life in a rapidly changing world.
“Especially now, with COVID, we are seeing that (high school) seniors especially are having a difficult time getting prepared for college,” UW-System President Tommy Thompson said at a Feb. 3 press conference announcing plans for a new precollege pipeline initiative.
A new college program at the University of Wisconsin is challenging curiosity and preparing students for the future; aimed at giving young students exposure and pushing them to their potential during the coronavirus pandemic.
Quoted: Two researchers at UW-Madison began sequencing SARS-CoV-2 samples in February 2020. Virology professor Tom Friedrich and pathology professor Madison Dave O’Connor have a background in HIV research, and began sequencing SARS-CoV-2 samples from around Dane County as soon as local spread began.
“The sort of architecture of how the virus looks at the genetic level is a little different,” O’Connor said. “But the basic principles are the same as for HIV, and flu and other viruses.”
Quoted: When studying the impact of mask mandates, it’s important to consider whether people follow them and if they’re enforced, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said it can be difficult to assess mandates individually when they’re issued with other public health guidelines, but he believes the Kansas study offered compelling data on the matter.
“You could argue that with or without a mandate, people might wear a mask because that’s what they do and the mandate is just confirming what they do,” he said. “At the end of the day, an entire county had fewer cases.”
Quoted: The rate has stayed consistent in the state with the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Workers earning minimum wage who work 2,000 hours a year — 40 hours for 50 weeks — make about $14,500 before taxes and work expenses.
“That’s just about enough to keep one single person out of poverty,” said economist Tim Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Also last week, Tommy Thompson, the interim president of the University of Wisconsin (UW) system, floated the idea that the University’s 13 branch campuses be consolidated with the 16 technical schools in the Wisconsin Technical College System.
In 2018, the UW System went through a restructuring proposal that aligned 13 two-year UW Colleges campuses with its comprehensive universities. These schools are now called branch campuses. They offer two-year degrees aimed largely at students who may eventually want to transfer to a four-year university to earn a degree.
Quoted: Erica Turner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor who specializes in equity issues, said the incoming superintendent will face steeper-than-usual challenges. Education funding in Wisconsin, as in many states, hadn’t fully recovered from the recession more than a decade ago by the time the pandemic began. With some state revenue sources having taken a hit, and the unexpected costs of managing a pandemic, Turner said the new superintendent will likely have to contend with more limited funding.
“This is an equity issue because it has been the case, and it’s likely to continue to be, that a lot of the cuts will come from equalization aid — efforts to make school funding more equitable,” she said. “For educational equity, you need someone who can be an effective advocate around the budget, and then also will have to prioritize that what cuts happen, and how they happen, happen in an equitable way.”
Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s business school jumped 27 spots this year to No. 19 in the Economist’s ranking, which could put the program on the radar of prospective students, said Assistant Dean Blair Sanford.
“To be top 20 in a respected ranking, that has some extra clout for us,” she said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of UW-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said the fall spending levels appears to be a case of politics in Wisconsin “moving in line with some surprising national trends.”
He said both the presidential campaigns and congressional campaigns around the country more than doubled their spending from 2016, and the jump may be the biggest step increase ever between two consecutive presidential election cycles.
Noted: He graduated from Wauwatosa High School in 1947 and went on to receive an undergraduate degree in 1951 and MBA in 1959 from the University of Wisconsin. While attending the university, he met Carolyn Royer and they married in 1952
Quoted: “Overall, when I read the study, I think I’m looking at clear documentation of racial disparities in sentencing in the in/out decision,” said Pamela Oliver, an emerita sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Oliver said disparities in sentencing usually show up with a judge’s ruling on whether to lock someone up — which she called the “in/out decision” — not in the length of the sentence. She said that was the finding of the 2007 Wisconsin Sentencing Commission report, which was removed from the state website several years ago.
Quoted: “Sometimes incorrect information is a simple data entry error, and other times, it could be a sign of fraud,” says Peggy Olive, University of Wisconsin-Madison financial capability specialist. “It is up to each individual to look over his or her own credit report for old information that should be removed, common mistakes or signs of identity theft. Better to discover an error yourself than to have a creditor find it first.”
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.
