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Author: knutson4

U.S. eviction bans are ending. That could worsen the spread of coronavirus

Reuters

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.”

Families Of Children With Special Needs Are Suing In Several States. Here’s Why.

National Public Radio

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.

Tony Evers seeks another $250 million in state budget cuts to offset pandemic revenue losses

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Expert guides how to bring inclusion and diversity to work

NBC-15

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 economist doesn’t blame government regulations for economic slowdown

WisBusiness

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.”

Low In The Sky: Catch Neowise Comet Before It Dims

Wisconsin Public Radio

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.

Who gets the final say? School reopening confusion arises in Milwaukee

Fox 6 Now

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.

What’s Going on Inside the Fearsome Thunderstorms of Córdoba Province?

New York Times

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.

Working Wisconsin faces new challenges in the COVID-19 pandemic

Wisconsin Examiner

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.

Race and the newsroom: What seven research studies say

Nieman Lab

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.

Wrist-mounted wearable tracks your hand in 3D using thermal sensors

engadget

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.

The ‘Half-Campus’ Model: Some colleges invite a fraction of their students to live on campus this fall. But is that approach truly safer? And who gets to be on campus?

Inside Higher Ed

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.”

Using Thermal Cameras to Track Hand Motions Could Be the Key to Interacting with Smart Glasses

Gizmodo

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.

Women’s suffrage exhibition at DeForest Area Historical Society

DeForest Times-Tribune

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.

Amid pandemic, graduate student workers are winning long-sought contracts

The Washington Post

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.

The new language of vote suppression

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder

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.”

Wisconsin’s controversial new crime victim bill of rights could fall short without more funding from state

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

To fight climate change, Democrats want to close the ‘digital divide’

Grist

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.”

COVID-19 plasma trial at UW-Madison shows treatment helped 94% of severely ill patients avoid ICU or ventilation

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

There Are Wasps in the Yard. You’d Better Get to Know Them.

New York Times

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.”

Borsuk: That feeling when the news archives read like today’s front page

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.”

UW Milwaukee Calls Lecturer’s Comments on Vanessa Guillen ‘Repugnant’

Inside Higher Education
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said comments made by a senior lecturer about Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen’s killing were “repugnant and terribly at odds with UWM’s values,” but the university resisted calls to terminate the lecturer, saying that under the First Amendment the university “cannot regulate the private speech of its employees.”

The lecturer says her comments were misinterpreted.

Masks now required for Wisconsin prison staff and all state workers as Capitol stays closed to the public

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Coronavirus concerns move Wisconsin-Northwestern football game out of Wrigley Field

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Dozens gather at UWM demanding termination of senior lecturer

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

‘I did all the right things:’ College students pivot in job market thrown off by coronavirus

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Facing a world clamoring for help with COVID-19, scientists are changing how they work

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.”

Farmers’ milk prices rising, easing dairy farm losses, but for how long?

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Which mask is best? UW engineering professor studies how droplets escape from face coverings

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

How can I get my child to wear a mask? If I’m sick with COVID, how long do I need to quarantine? Experts answer your questions

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Bice: ‘(Expletive) your statues’: Senate candidate faces backlash after defending destruction of Madison statues

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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 reports sharp increase in coronavirus cases, with half affecting people in their 20s. Many linked to businesses near UW

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

‘I feel very isolated’: What life is really like for people of color in Shorewood

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.”

‘Until I’m free you are not free either’: Civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer has Madison connection

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

For Milwaukee Dads, Help Figuring Out Fatherhood

U.S. News and World Report

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.

People probably caught coronavirus from minks. That’s a wake-up call to study infections in animals, researchers say.

Washington Post

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.

Dinosaur diaries: Fossilised stomach contents reveal a dinosaur’s last meal

Natural History Museum

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.

‘This is shocking to me’: A voter ID case that could rattle Wisconsin’s fall election has been on hold for more than 3 years

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.”

Study of 20,000 COVID-19 patients shows treatment with survivor plasma is safe

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.