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.
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.
In Madison, increasing COVID-19 hospitalizations could lead hospitals to again postpone some elective procedures like knee and hip surgeries if the situation continues to get worse, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health. “The next few weeks are going to be tough,” Safdar said. “If the hospitalizations continue to rise, I think that will put the health systems under enormous stress.”
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.”
University of Wisconsin AIDS researcher David O’Connor noted: “We don’t have the sorts of interstate travel restrictions that would make it possible to contain the virus in any one place.”
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.
The hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping season is here, or is it? “The production rate is down and even when they do get finished, you encounter the shipping problem,” says Nancy Wong, professor of consumer science at UW-Madison.
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.
Noted: “College campuses are just ideal habitat,” said David Drake, a professor and extension wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin, where a sizable flock likes to hang out near apartments for graduate students. “You’ve got that intermixing of forested patches with open grassy areas and things like that. Nobody’s hunting.”
Coexisting with collegiate poultry is not always easy. At California Polytechnic State University, the campus Police Department is occasionally called about turkeys chasing people. At the University of Michigan, a state wildlife officer killed a well-known turkey two years ago that was said to be harassing bikers and joggers. And at Wisconsin, Dr. Drake said at least a couple of aggressive toms were culled after repeatedly frightening students.
Even for fans of the turkeys, getting chased can be fearsome.
“There’s an element of humor, because, oh, it’s a turkey,” said Audrey Evans, a doctoral student at Wisconsin who runs @turkeys_of_uw_madison on Instagram. “But your fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.”
Quoted: If the child may not be aware of the incident, adults can start with a general question, like, “Were kids at school talking about anything in the news today?” suggested Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If the answer is no, Wright said an adult may end the conversation with an open invitation, like: “Great. Lots of times there are things we hear about in the news that can be scary. If you ever hear anything that makes you feel upset, please know you can always talk to me.”
In some cases, especially if it’s expected that a child will find out about the incident, adults may want to introduce the subject. Wright suggested sharing something like: “There was a parade and someone injured some people at the parade. If you hear about it, I want you to know you can talk to me about it.”
Column by John, Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at the Wisconsin Law School at UW–Madison.
Quoted: “Wolves are moving south, and they have been for a while,” says Tim Van Deelen, a professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison with a focus on large mammals in the Great Lakes region. “We’ve seen wolves go through Chicago. We know one wolf was killed in a cornfield in Indiana. And if you think about the most direct route, they would walk right through Milwaukee. That is part of how wolves disperse. Is it common? No. But is it out of the realm of possibility? No.”
Quoted: What do you know about the Native peoples who have called Wisconsin lands their home for thousands of years?
November is Native American Heritage Month and is a good opportunity to learn about the history, culture and sovereignty of the 11 federally recognized tribes in Wisconsin and the Brothertown Indian Nation, which hopes to regain its federal status.
Most people know little to nothing about Native Americans, said Aaron Bird Bear, director of tribal relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Keeping ourselves ignorant about Indigenous nations, about our shared history and our treaty-based relationships with Indigenous nations is a form of collective amnesia,” Bird Bear said.
“One thing we would hope is that people really think deeply during Native American Heritage Month of how they can interrupt or arrest settler colonialism itself, which is a process by which the vast majority of U.S. society knows little to nothing about the people who’ve lived here for 20,000 years and counting.”
Quoted: “The idea is is that they will discuss the evidence, share their opinions with one another, spend time discussing whether they think the prosecution has met their burden of proof, but they don’t really get a blueprint for how to go about doing that other than to just discuss the evidence and listen to one another and keep an open mind,” said John Gross.
Gross is a UW-Madison Law School professor who has more than twenty years of experience serving as a criminal defense attorney. Gross expects jurors will spend a great deal of time sifting through video evidence.
“The jury is going to be able to look at that video as much as they would like in their jury room and figure out what they think you can see and hear and then conclude from all of that video evidence,” he said.
Quoted: Keith Findley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, called the lack of decision “odd.”
“The only reason I can think of for waiting is perhaps he wants to give the jury a chance to acquit so he doesn’t have to, but that’s speculation on my part,” Findley, co-founder of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said in an interview.
After more than 40 years of extensive research, UW-Madison’s History of Cartography Project is nearly complete. We talk with the director of the plan about the contents of the six-volume set, what he hopes people gain from the project, and his love for maps.
Written by Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new book “Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy and Everything Else,” Penguin Random House, May 2021.”
When burned for fuel, natural gas releases roughly half as much carbon dioxide as coal and a tiny fraction of pollutants like sulfur and mercury. But the production and transportation results in release of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, negating most of the environmental advantages. “It’s a little better, but not much,” said Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor of public affairs at UW-Madison who studies the impacts of energy use.
How did major Chinese and U.S. outlets differ in their initial coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic? That’s the central question behind a new study published last week in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly journal.
The overall finding: Chinese outlets’ focus on Covid-19 was much more domestic, perhaps because they were focused on trying to contain the outbreak, while the U.S. view was much more focused on politics and the conflict between various levels of government when it came to combatting the crisis.
“Some are more party-focused in China and some more investigative and we tried our best to cover a variety of mainstream outlets,” said Kaiping Chen, an assistant professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the senior author of the new paper.
Manuel P. Teodoro is an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. He works with water sector leaders across the United States on management, policy, and finance.
Quoted: “Much of that is because they themselves don’t necessarily feel like they are experts in money management,” said Melody Harvey, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how public policies affect financial capability.
“I imagine that most parents wouldn’t want to intentionally mislead their children or give wrong information,” she said.
A decade ago, Urban and J. Michael Collins, a professor and financial security researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were part of the team that examined outcomes in Texas and Georgia after those states implemented a financial education requirement.
They looked at students’ credit reports through age 22 and found students were less likely to have a negative item on their credit report. They also borrowed more — showing they could better fill out applications for things like credit cards or a car loan — and had a lower delinquency rate on those loans than their peers in states without the graduation requirement.
“We saw that those kids who had the financial education had basically fewer mistakes in their early 20s,” Collins said.
Though U.S. public opinion never turned against the war in Afghanistan as it had in Iraq in the mid-2000s, the conflict has helped entrench anti-interventionist views, said Jon Pevehouse, a political science professor at UW-Madison. “It certainly has made (the public) completely unfavorable toward interventions to create democracy or even unseat governments,” Pevehouse said. “I think history will look back and say, ‘Yes, we could have given it a bigger try,’ but the checks would have had to been even larger, the deployments even larger. It would have been hard to imagine the political support for that.”
Quoted: “Raising general tax revenue through a water and sewer bill is one of the most regressive ways a government can raise revenue,” said Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Municipalities across the country issue taxes on water to fund other services, Teodoro said.
“If you look at the full range of ways that the city can raise revenue, a water and sewer tax is extremely regressive because everybody has to use water,” he said.
Quoted: “I think we are in a very good position because of the number of dollars that are flowing in this direction. The federal government is now turning on the hose,” said one of Tuesday’s panelists, Barry Orton, professor emeritus, telecommunications, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I would say that for municipalities and other public entities that are looking to provide broadband to their citizens, this is going to be their window of opportunity,” Orton said.
Quoted: “Prices have clearly gone up, and we’re seeing that trend continue,” said Peter Lukszys, University of Wisconsin School of Business expert on logistics and supply chain management. “Consumption during last year was down because fewer Thanksgivings were being celebrated. This year there is more demand, and when there is more demand, it is more likely to have shortages.”
Quoted: Madison’s freezing temperatures are arriving about a month behind normal, said David Stevens, curator of the Longenecker Horticultural Gardens at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Wisconsin’s unseasonably warm fall has had an impact on animal and plant life, including the arboretum’s lilacs, which usually bloom in the spring.
“While it’s not uncommon to see a few flowers pop on these common lilacs in late summer, early fall, this year was pretty extreme,” Stevens said. “We’re seeing quite a few flowers throughout our collection that we normally would not see.”
Quoted: Dramatic shifts in water levels on Lakes Michigan and Huron, as a result, will likely become increasingly common — even if average levels stay roughly the same, said Michael Notaro, associate director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research.
Beyond speeding up coastal erosion, more frequent, intense storms bring heavier rains that increase the runoff of fertilizer into lakes, feeding algal blooms on nutrient-rich lakes that harm fish and other wildlife.
“It’s not really (a question of) when it’s going to happen. It’s already happening,” said Notaro.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while Trump and other Republicans complained about the practice there isn’t a single definition of what “ballot harvesting” refers to.
“To most observers, harvesting is done by a private, partisan group or individual when they gather ballots from individuals and then deliver them to an election office,” Burden said in an email. “Kleefisch claims that Democrats do this sort of thing ‘non-stop,’ but I am not aware of widespread ballot collection by Democratic volunteers or operatives in Wisconsin.”
Interview with Peter Lukszys, senior lecturer with the Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management.
Interview with Heather Kirkorian, a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at UW-Madison.
Quoted: “When the list was first brought up in 2019 going into the 2020 election, there was a lot of concern,” Barry Burden, Director of Elections Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, said. “You heard outcry and eventually lawsuits to try to move things along. But that’s completely different from the regular list maintenance that the state has done for a number of years.”
Interview with Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law Franciska Coleman.
Noted: Joe Lauer is an agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Madison Agronomy and UWEX state corn specialist
Quoted: “We know there are these big tipping points in the climate system, and once we get past them, it’s too late to go back,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison who co-authored a study finding that a 3 degree trajectory could lead to an abrupt jump in the rate of Antarctic melt as early as 2060.
Quoted: “About 31% of preventable transportation-related manure spills are due to operator error,” said Kevin Erb, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension conservation professional training program director. “An accidental spill is not illegal, but failing to properly report and clean it up is.”
Noted: The program, which costs $15 for adults and $10 for ages 2 to 12 (museum admission is included), will also offer a scavenger hunt through the exhibition “Jennifer Angus: Magicicada.” Angus, an artist (and design professor in the School of Human Ecology), has devised decorative scenes and Victorian-like dioramas involving hundreds of preserved insects. Enhanced by historical taxidermy specimens, the show promises some haunting pleasure.
Quoted: “There isn’t a lot of evidence in the data that people are staying home,” said Laura Dresser, an economist and associate director of COWS, a University of Wisconsin-Madison policy research center, noting the state’s continued above-average labor force participation.
Other factors, such as the continued difficulty in finding child care, are likely keeping people from working who would otherwise want to do so, she said. One reason for Wisconsin’s higher labor force participation rate is that more women are in the state’s workforce, and are likely to be disproportionately affected by the disruption in child care.
Dissatisfaction over pay and frustration with customers who angrily object to masking have given restaurant and hospitality workers reason to pursue other jobs instead, said Steven Deller, of the UW Extension’s agricultural and applied economics department. “There’s lots of little things going on here,” Deller said. “I think a lot of folks are simply saying, ‘No — do I really want to do that any more?’”
Noted: Julie Underwood, a retired faculty member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education and Law School, said the argument in the lawsuits are based on a claim of negligence: The school districts have a responsibility to provide reasonable care of the child, and failed to do so.
If it’s determined that immunity doesn’t apply here, the next question would be whether it was reasonable for the school boards not to require masks, Underwood said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not uncommon for political party leaders to change their views on recall elections.
“For conservatives in Wisconsin, (they) made two keys argument against the 2012 recalls. First was that Governor Walker had only been in office for a year and deserved to have more time to prove himself before facing another election. Second was that the motivation for the recalls was merely a policy debate about labor unions and not over malfeasance in office, which is what recalls should be used for,” Burden said.
Noted: Sugar does reduce water activity, and water is what lets microorganisms do their thing, said Barbara Ingham, professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a food safety specialist for UW’s Division of Extension. (“Just don’t eat raw dough,” she noted, since flour can be the subject of recalls for E. coli.)
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, time for the Wisconsin Book Festival, 28 events this week alone, both in-person and online, and Stu Levitan welcomes one of the featured presenters, and one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is the University of Wisconsin faculty, Professor Jordan Ellenberg, to discuss his NYTimes best-seller, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else.
For today’s show, Monday host Patty Peltekos speaks with Jo Handelsman about her new book, A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet.
The Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Science Festival are co-presenting a book event with Jo Handelsman this Thursday, October 21 at 6 p.m. in the Discovery Building at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. More information available at the Wisconsin Book Festival website.
Jo Handelsman is the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Vilas Research Professor, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. She previously served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama as the Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from 2014 to 2017. She is the author of A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet (Yale University Press, 2021).
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not uncommon for political party leaders to change their views on recall elections.
In 2012, Burden said, conservatives in Wisconsin fought the recall drive by arguing that Walker and Kleefisch had not been in office long enough to be removed and that recall elections were “merely a policy debate about labor unions and not over malfeasance in office.”
Now, he said, conservatives and Republicans can claim they are being consistent by arguing that school board members are violating state law with their public health mandates, such as masks, vaccines and online learning.
“So it is about wrongdoing in office and not just a dispute about local education policy,” Burden said.
Performer, educator and author Erica Halverson has a lot to say about how the arts can be used in schools to transform education in a meaningful way in her book “How The Arts Can Save Education.” Halverson, who also is a professor of curriculum and instruction at UW-Madison, will discuss her book during an in-person event at the Wisconsin Book Festival later this month.
Noted: Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at 11:45 a.m. the last Monday of each month.
Quoted: Erin Barbato, the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, said that the immigration status of evacuees isn’t tied to remaining at the base, but once they leave, a clock starts on their resettlement benefits, which are only available for eight months after leaving the base.
“Many people are confusing the resettlement process with the immigration process. So, when people are applying for humanitarian parole or for their Special Immigrant Visa or even for asylum, that does not need to be completed on the base,” she said. “The issue is people have now been waiting for a long time at these bases and they don’t want to remain there any longer, but many of them need a resettlement plan in order to get their life started in the United States.”
Noted: This year in Wisconsin, a fall armyworm population is present unlike anything most entomologists have ever seen. The pests are doing damage to alfalfa, winter wheat and other cover crops around the state. Bryan Jensen, UW-Extension Pest Management Specialist, shares that this warmer fall weather has helped to create a perfect storm for fall armyworms to thrive. Fall armyworms are different from the normal armyworms seen during late spring. The good news, according to Jensen, is they will most definitely not over-winter here in Wisconsin: they are a warm weather species, and will not survive the winter
Quoted: Kurt Paulsen, a professor of housing, land use and municipal finance with University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the bill’s provisions contrast with research indicating the expansion of permanent supportive housing is a solution to homelessness.
“Creating a criminal trespass for unsheltered homeless persons is moving in a different direction than expanding availability of permanently supportive housing,” said Paulsen.
Now nineteen months into pandemic life, many Americans are struggling to recalibrate their COVID risk. How do we balance needed COVID precautions with considerations of mental health and meaningful social interactions? What will it take to reach the “new normal”—and will we even know when we get there?
To help us break this down, Dominique Brossard, professor of life sciences communication, and population health scientist Ajay Sethi join us for a discussion of risk assessment in the post-vaccination stage, how to negotiate a wide range of feelings about the pandemic, and why it’s still okay to not feel okay.
Dominique Brossard is professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her teaching and research focus on science and risk communication.
Ajay Sethi is an epidemiologist and associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he specializes in the study of infectious diseases.
Quoted: Adjusting disease rates for age is a common practice in epidemiology. The practice is crucial for understanding the impacts that a disease like COVID-19 has on a large and varied population.
“We adjust for factors like age because we identify factors like age as being confounders,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: COVID-19 vaccination rates tend to be lower in rural communities, and the same goes for rural areas in Wisconsin. The difference between the most and least vaccinated counties in Wisconsin is as much as 40 percent said Dr. Jonathan Temte, an associate dean with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who studies vaccine and immunization policy.
Quoted: Mike Wagner, professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the conflict between Vos, Gableman and Brandtjen is typical of recent dynamics within the Republican Party and shows a “crash to be as close to President Trump as possible.”
Former President Donald Trump has continued to push false claims of election fraud across the country in the year following the election.
“It’s really striking to see elected officials and appointed officials engaged in a back-and-forth about who can be more skeptical about an election that was clearly shown repeatedly to be extraordinarily fair and very well conducted,” Wagner said.
The first session included Pat Setji, general manager of screening at Exact Sciences; Betsy Nugent, chief clinical research officer at UW Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health; and Ayesha Ahmed, general counsel and vice president of human resources at Nexus Pharmaceuticals.
Quoted: Every decade, states have to draw new maps after the census to rebalance the population in each district. For more than 50 years, the courts had the final say in Wisconsin because Democrats and Republicans split control of state government.
Not in 2011, when the GOP controlled both the legislative and executive branches.
“That’s when we got these really gerrymandered districts,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon.
Canon believes federal courts may revisit the issue after the science becomes more established.
“If the state courts can get some consensus on a measure or a couple of measures that show a partisan gerrymander, then maybe 10 years from now, this comes up again, and federal courts will say, ‘The states did this pretty well, and we do have accepted measures,’” Canon said.
Deaths caused by COVID-19 in Wisconsin surpassed 8,000 a year-and-a-half after the pandemic reached the state. As vaccination levels remain plateued, new medical developments to combat the virus and its deadly disease progress. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Nasia Safdar with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health explains.
