We hear from a graduate student working to learn, and tell, stories of indigenous people who attended and worked at UW-Madison — stories that have so far been missing from the university archives.
Noted: Jeff Sindelar, associate professor in the meat and science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees 100% with the European influence when it comes to Wisconsin’s sausage skills.
It started with people with strong meat-processing skill sets putting down roots here, but having people who wanted to purchase those foods provided a sustainable market throughout the generations.
Wisconsin was also well-positioned geographically to help carry on those traditions, Sindelar said. Being located between the large population centers of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the latter with its famous stockyards, brought railways to Wisconsin.
Noted: Abrams said his organization also is working with the University of Wisconsin System to provide a $500 tuition credit to UW students who work in a health care facility over winter break, which is typically a month in length.
University of Wisconsin System officials have dramatically increased salary ranges for top leaders, giving them more leverage as they search for the next system president and UW-Madison chancellor.
The state Legislative Audit Bureau released its annual financial audit of the University of Wisconsin System Tuesday.
This holiday weekend, AAA expects over 100 million Americans to travel. But state health leaders urge unvaccinated people to reconsider.
“If they’re not [vaccinated], really, it’s important that folks do not try to gather,” Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
According to the UW Health Chief Quality Officer, only a group of people who are fully vaccinated with a booster shot should get together during Christmas time.
Quoted: “If you’re vaccinated and boosted, holiday celebrations for the most part pose really low risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
For unvaccinated people, that’s not the case. If someone gets vaccinated or boosted now, they won’t be fully protected by Christmas Day, but Pothof said some protection is better than none.
“The best day to get your booster shot, if you haven’t gotten it, is today, as soon as possible,” Pothof said.
Quoted: “We’ve entered a convergence of timing here of cases are rising,” said. Dr. Dan Shirley, an infectious disease physician with UW Health. “There’s this kind of variant question, and obviously the holiday season is an important time to get together.”
A study released by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams says eliminating the personal income tax and raising the sales tax would jump start Wisconsin’s economy.
Noted: Zuckerman dedicates nine pages to Jon Wolff, an mRNA pioneer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Medicine. In 1990, Wolff and several colleagues published an article about “the first successful use of mrna” that could be used as a vaccine, as it ultimately was for Pfizer and Moderna.
Noted: A recent count by Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that “books about white children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three-quarters of children’s and young adult books published in 2019.” In other words, vegetables, animals, monsters, and aliens had more visibility in books than brown or black characters.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents has approved increasing salary ranges for top university positions in order to match ranges at peer institutions. The vote Monday came after UW System interim President Tommy Thompson said he favors smaller, successive increases for top executive pay ranges.
Noted: Written by Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and faculty co-director of the Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Noted: “Just Be Claus” is Joosse’s 55th book published for kids. Originally from Grafton, she started telling stories in grade school and later studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After having her own children, she was inspired by them to write children’s books.
The Wisconsin Badgers are NCAA volleyball champions. Finally.
In five neck-and-neck sets, No. 4 Wisconsin defeated No. 10 Nebraska, securing the national title in women’s volleyball.
Noted: Marisa Moseley is in her first season as the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin. She came to Madison from Boston University, where she was head coach for two seasons. She led the Terriers to their first winning season in five years and was named Patriot League Coach of the Year. Moseley was an assistant coach for nine years under Coach Gino Auriemma at the University of Connecticut, a national women’s basketball powerhouse, following assistant coaching stints at Denver and Minnesota. She played for Boston University from 2000-2004.
Quoted: The U.S. last experienced rampant inflation four decades ago. “We have very short memories,” says Steven Deller, an economist in the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. “We don’t remember what it was like during the 1970s and early 80s, so this is unusual.”
In a recent analysis, Menzie Chinn, an economist at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, writes that inflation averaged just 1.7% in the last decade, at times “raising concerns that inflation was too low.”
But while the current inflation might have first looked like the economy playing catch-up after prices tumbled early in the pandemic, it has since “overshot the trend,” Chinn adds. Big-ticket purchases — cars, appliances and other so-called durable goods — are showing the sharpest increases, Chinn writes on his blog Econbrowser. High real estate prices and rental costs have also been a factor.
Antibody-like proteins found in a shark’s immune system could be a natural COVID killer that not only prevents the virus that causes it, but also different variants – such as Omicron that is currently spreading across the globe.
The proteins, known as VNARs, are one-tenth the size of human antibodies, making them small enough to ‘get into nooks and crannies that human antibodies cannot access,’ Aaron LeBeau, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pathology who helped lead the study, said in a statement.
Antibody-like proteins developed from the immune systems of nurse sharks can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 from infecting human cells, a University of Wisconsin researcher reports.
The first time professor Elizabeth Bearden asked the University of Wisconsin-Madison for permission to teach remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she heard back in three days.
It was fall 2020. Bearden’s fears about contracting the virus were as high as ever.
Quoted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said stormy days aren’t that rare of an occurrence at this time of the year for the state.
“Even in a normal year, under perfectly normal circumstances, we’d have a nice progression of pretty stormy days, followed by a couple of clear days, followed by stormy,” he said. “But there are a couple of things that might be fueling a little bit of an extra punch for these things.”
Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, said the amount of time where tornadoes are a risk for the state is only going to grow.
“On the whole, we’re not sure how (tornadoes) are going to change in the future, whether they’re going to become more intense, less intense, more common, less common,” he said. “But in a warmer climate, we’ll start to see conditions more favorable for tornadoes earlier in the year, in April or May, and then becoming more common in the fall through November.”
Quoted: People are quitting their jobs at nearly twice the rate they did before the pandemic. And they’re not in a rush to come back, Michael Childers, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor, said.
“Workers are more selective and have that opportunity right now based on the job market. And that almost becomes self-fulfilling. It’s sort of this sustaining cycle that we’re in,” Childers said at Tuesday’s event.
Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said most of the price increases have been in fresh meat products, with more processed items like hot dogs or lunch meat seeing small price growth or none at all.
But Sindelar said the meat industry is “too dynamic” to clearly point to the factor that is driving up prices.
He said farmers are facing increased costs to raise animals. But price changes are more likely to come from the processing companies, which have a greater influence on what consumers pay for products. Sindelar travels the state to work with all sizes of meat processors, and he said they’re seeing higher production costs, too.
“Regardless of where I go, I get the same response: they can’t hire enough people, they have open positions. When they’re trying to produce products, it’s taking them seven days to produce five days worth of product,” Sindelar said. “So 20 to 25 percent more resources to produce the same amount of product as they once did.”
Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison’s director of dairy policy analysis, said mixed market signals for dairy farmers could be keeping prices from increasing as rapidly as other food groups.
“Our future markets are showing that we would expect higher (commodity) prices over the next several months. But we’ve also had a few reports that are kind of pulling back on those reigns a little bit. One of them are the stocks reports,” Stephenson said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has reached the Final Four of the women’s NCAA volleyball tournament for the third straight season.
No. 4 Wisconsin will face the No. 1 Louisville on Thursday evening. The other semifinal match features No. 3 Pittsburgh and No. 10 Nebraska. The winners will play for the championship Saturday.
It’s not every year a college athlete earns a fifth first-team All-American nod in a team sport. But these aren’t ordinary times, and Dana Rettke is no ordinary athlete.
The University of Wisconsin middle blocker received her fifth first-team nod from the American Volleyball Coaches Association, becoming the first athlete in NCAA volleyball history to be honored as such. Rettke reeled in her fourth plaudit as a senior earlier this year, then came back for a fifth season available to athletes during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.
Quoted: The Journal Sentinel’s findings that tax dollars are going to landlords who fail to fix potentially dangerous electrical violations are “shocking and terrible,” said Mitch, a housing law expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who legally goes by just his first name.
“It would be as if a health inspector found rats at a restaurant and said, ‘Here’s a whole bunch of government coupons that you can use to give out and make your food less expensive — never mind the rats,’” he said.
Mitch, who oversees the UW-Madison Neighborhood Law Clinic, which primarily serves low-income renters, said it’s possible to hold landlords accountable while still protecting tenants.
“We can have safe cars, and people still buy cars,” he said. “We can have regulations on restaurants, and we still have restaurants. We have regulations on banking, and we still have banks. Every industry has regulations, and it still survives.”
Nurse sharks gliding around a tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may hold the secret to an unusual, previously unexamined treatment for COVID-19, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.
Quoted: “We’re learning that it’s pretty easy to turn the economy off. But it’s really hard just to flip the switch and turn it back on,” said Steve Deller, a professor in agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“What COVID has done is, among other things, it’s changed the risk-benefit calculation that workers do,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison.
State Superintendent of Schools Jill Underly said Monday she is “mixed” on the University of Wisconsin System’s recent move to remain ACT/SAT test-optional for another two years.
Noted: University of Wisconsin Administration: Up to $5.7 million to create a “workforce-ready curriculum” for students who are incarcerated “to teach employable skills to students while incarcerated and continue supporting them post-release through program completion and career placement.” The program will pilot at UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside, UW-Green Bay, and UW-Madison.
As the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents works to fill two top leadership positions, market data suggest current salary ranges for UW executives are well below those at peer institutions.
Quoted: Greg DeMuri is a pediatric epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has also been advising the Madison Metropolitan School District on its testing program. He said it took some time to get the program up and running, but it’s starting to work well.
“It is very, very useful,” he said. “They are seeing cases there, and detecting cases, and they’re able to keep (sick) kids out of school because of it, so it’s a big asset to the schools and to the community.”
The University of Minnesota football team may have laid claim to Paul Bunyan’s Axe two weeks ago, but the University of Wisconsin women’s volleyball team came to the rematch wielding a broom.
For the third straight year, the Badgers are headed to the NCAA Final Four in volleyball after sweeping past the Golden Gophers, 25-18, 26-24, 25-22, Saturday night before an electric crowd at the UW Field House. Wisconsin will meet No. 1-ranked and undefeated Louisville in Columbus, Ohio, on Thursday.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said no one is discouraging the use of the remedies Johnson is proposing but the public should know they are not proven to be effective in protecting against COVID-19 infection.
“Things like home remedies, vitamins and supplements, new diets have been advertised to and used by people in our society for decades, centuries even, for all sorts of ailments. No one is discouraging their use, but they do not provide tangible benefit against Covid, and they are not a substitute for vaccination,” Sethi said.
Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the NIH relies on proven treatments.
“Simply put, the NIH and other researchers set a high bar for proving that a treatment is effective. Studies done in the lab or in animals, or clinical anecdotes play an important part in the research process, and lead to hypotheses that are then tested in rigorous, controlled trials,” Remington said.
High school students applying to University of Wisconsin System colleges won’t have to take ACT or SAT college preparatory tests through the 2024-25 school year. A UW Board of Regents committee unanimously approved extending the “test optional” policy, which has been in place since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The full board is expected to approve the measure during its Friday meeting.
Noted: The union represents trade workers at University of Wisconsin campuses, prisons and other state facilities. In many cases, they make about $41 an hour, according to state records.
As with trade workers around the country, they are paid a lower wage as apprentices. They all make the same wage once they complete their apprenticeships and become journeymen.
Kathy Thompson worked for 20 years as a steamfitter for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She recently started working for the private sector because the pay was much better, she said.
Noted: Berens, who grew up in Elm Grove and New Berlin with 11 siblings, studied journalism and environmental geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to a previous Journal Sentinel report.
After graduating in 2009, he spent time working as a production assistant, news reporter, host and producer. In 2013, he won an Emmy while reporting in Dallas.
Quoted: Jeff Buhrandt, UW System vice president for the Office of University Relations, pointed out to the committee that state universities have always strived to promote free speech and diversity of thought on campus.
“Our current policy recognizes that each institution has a solemn responsibility not only to promote lively and fearless exploration, deliberation and debate of ideas, but also to protect those freedoms when others attempt to restrict them,” said Buhrandt.
Quoted: The Republican resolution passed the Senate and Assembly on party-line votes, and when Republicans released their maps in October, they were pretty true to its principles.
Because of that, the 2021 map looked a lot like the 2011 map. In the world of redistricting shorthand, this is often referred to as “core retention.” But Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor, has a different name for it: “gerrylaundering.”
“‘Gerrylaundering’ is an attempt to perpetuate an existing biased map by carrying forward the existing lines with as little change as you can get away with,” Yablon said.
On Wednesday, the Wisconsin men’s basketball team overcame a 22-point deficit to defeat Indiana, 64-59, matching the biggest comeback in program history.
It equaled a game all the way back on Jan. 5, 1976, when Wisconsin toppled Ohio State in overtime, 82-81, an all-the-more impressive win without a 3-point line.
Noted: A 2019 report from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute that examined gaps in the state’s behavioral health system found that 55 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had a significant shortage of psychiatrists, particularly of those who could provide support for both mental health and substance use issues.
Written by Meredith Whye, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former early childhood teacher.
Quoted: Staffen said it’s unclear how many Connecticut warblers have historically been found in Wisconsin. There are around 1.5 to 2 million birds worldwide, said Stan Temple, professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Temple noted Connecticut warblers and other species like spruce grouse and boreal chickadees are occupying the southern edge of their range in northern Wisconsin. Those forest-dwelling species are contending with habitat loss as climate change is causing those forests to shift further north. In the next several decades, the southern limits of the songbirds’ range likely will no longer include Wisconsin.
“So in the long term, assuming that climate change continues unabated, the bird is destined to disappear from the Wisconsin landscape, regardless pretty much of what we do,” said Temple.
Quoted: “It feels a lot like the criticism we heard five or six years ago of the GAB,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center director Barry Burden said in a recent interview.
The Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is pleased to announce the winners of the “East Asia in Wisconsin Library Program” competition. Grants have been awarded to public libraries throughout Wisconsin, enriching their collections with new titles that will enable patrons to deepen their understanding of East Asia (which includes China, Japan, and Korea). Over $24,000 in funding will be distributed to 29 libraries, representing 12 of the state’s 14 library systems.
Noted: According to the University of Wisconsin System Education Reports and Statistics website, there were 3,548 education related degrees conferred during the 2019-2020 school year. That’s up slightly from a record low of 2,766 education degrees conferred during the 2015-2016 school year.
After defending their national title last season, the women’s hockey team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has continued its run of dominance — outscoring opponents by a total of 66 goals so far this year.
Wisconsin’s players and coaches will learn their bowl destination and opponent sometime Sunday.
The College Football Playoff matchups and other bowl games are set to be revealed on ESPN from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Quoted: Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental health from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said those effects are to be expected when wildfires blow your way.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said
What is the fairest and most efficient way for citizens to pay for police and fire protection, safe streets, libraries, parks and other public services cities provide?
This is the real question University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Manuel Teodoro indirectly raised in his recent commentary urging elimination of the long-standing practice of municipal water utilities making payments in lieu of taxes — what are known as PILOTs — to municipalities. But Teodoro is mistaken in calling for an end to PILOTs in the absence of making any other changes to how municipalities are funded.
With all the focus on a new COVID-19 variant, it’s easy to forget about the flu. But University of Wisconsin-Madison officials warn cases are picking up on campus and around the state.
Quoted: Michele LaVigne, a former director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the preventive detention statute “is oddly not used in this state” but said Brooks’ earlier cases would not have met the threshold for using it.
“None of this guy’s cases would have qualified for preventive detention so bail had to be set,” she said.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, the director of infection control at UW Hospitals and Clinics, said she and other health care experts are wondering whether the omicron variant will be more contagious, how serious infections will be and how effective current vaccines will be in combating it. Safdar said it’s important to remember that even if existing vaccines are less effective on this new strain, they are still likely to offer some protection.
“Every decision that we make in this pandemic is going to be a trade-off between the risk and the benefit, and it’s what can one do to mitigate that risk,” said Safdar. “And of course, we don’t know how this is going to unfold fully yet. But it is a reminder that let’s do everything that we can on our end to mitigate things.”
Jake Wood was a few months out of the Marine Corps in 2010 when a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti. On the spur of the moment, he and a few other veterans headed to Port-au-Prince and started looking for ways to help. With no organization and no supply chain, it was a haphazard response. “The only thing we got right is that none of us died,” he said.
Noted: Jake Wood is a Wisconsin School of Business alumnus and played football for the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
In just over a half-hour, a class of West High School students made a big dent in the warming climate.
“We all today found a menu of options that when we add them together we can reach our climate goals,” Wisconsin Energy Institute outreach and events coordinator Allison Bender told them.
Bender, through a partnership with the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs, had presented the students with the En-Roads Climate Change Solutions Simulator. About 100 Advanced Placement Environmental Science students at the high school saw the presentation and got to consider their own climate solutions throughout the day Tuesday in an event funded through the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviewed historical weather data at the UW Research Station in Arlington to see how dry 2021 was. The statistics date back to 1963.
He found this summer was similar to some of the driest years the station had on record, including 1988 when the station saw some of its worst corn yields.
“In the southern two tiers of counties in Wisconsin, we had some pretty dramatic drought conditions that farmers were experiencing. And it really didn’t let up until probably the end of September,” Lauer said. “We were dry most of that time. But having said that, we seemed to get a little bit of rain … that allowed the crop to keep going.”
The NFL announced a partnership last week with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and three other research universities to study head impacts during football games and practices using mouthguards fitted with sensors.
To assess how missed screenings might affect cancer mortality rates, the National Cancer Institute turned to Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research involves modeling both cancer epidemiology and infectious diseases.
“The question is really interesting because it’s a combination of the two areas I work in,” Alagoz says. His first estimates, unveiled in a widely read editorial published in Science in June by NCI director Normal E. Sharpless, showed that missed screenings might result in 5,000 additional deaths in breast cancer alone over the next decade. A separate group, looking at missed colon cancer screenings, predicted another 5,000 deaths.
When Alagoz produced his breast cancer estimates early in the pandemic, he thought the numbers might not be truly representative. So he worked to refine them, using better data with three powerful cancer models that incorporated numerous factors related to breast cancer—such as delayed screening, treatment effectiveness and long-term survival rates—and the nuanced ways they intersect to affect mortality over time. “Everyone can tell you what will happen immediately, but it’s hard to say what’s going to happen in five or 10 years,” Alagoz says. “If there’s a huge increase in smoking, you’re not going to see more lung cancer right away. You’re going to see that 10 or 15 years down the road.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the people Gableman is meeting with “are all election skeptics who have bought into the big lie.”
Gableman, who last year without evidence claimed the election was stolen, has insisted he has no preconceived ideas about his review and hopes to find that the election was run properly.
“It’s hard to see how he could ever reach such a conclusion given this set of oddballs who he’s working with,” Burden said.
