David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the UW-Madison Applied Population Laboratory, said the state’s population growth of 3.5 percent over the last decade is the smallest leap Wisconsin has had since the 1980s.
One of the major factors that has contributed to this polarized political climate — where false claims can gain momentum — is enhancements in technology and communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael Wagner said.
Noted: David Egan-Robertson, a demographer in the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one of the key points he would be looking at is changes in the state’s race and ethnicity data.
Much of the state’s growth in recent decades has been attributable to an increase in the Hispanic population, he said.
Quoted: “With Kind out of the picture, Republicans have a really good shot at winning that seat and having a bigger majority in (Wisconsin’s) congressional delegation,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the population is at risk of dropping below 350 wolves. A recent study by Treves and other researchers concluded that hunters and poachers might have killed a third of the wolf’s population since the animal’s delisting.
In a statement following the vote, conservation group Wisconsin’s Green Fire said the quota is likely to cut the state’s wolf population in half.
“Removing 300 wolves in another hunt would likely have a destabilizing effect on almost every wolf pack in the state,” said Adrian Wydeven, a former DNR wolf biologist. “There is no other wildlife species where that level of reduction would be acceptable. And it’s highly likely it would trigger a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review of state management.”
Quoted: “I think that there was some concern that inflation would continue to accelerate,” said Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Producers haven’t been able to respond with supply as enthusiastically as consumers have responded with demand as the economy has sort of opened back up.”
Conroy said the new numbers indicate the current accelerated inflation is a temporary trend brought on by supply shortages.
“I think that’s hopeful for a lot of consumers in particular, that as some of the short-term problems resolve themselves, prices will stabilize,” said Conroy.
Vaccinating children as young as 6 months of age against COVID-19 may become the new front in the global pandemic fight, if the vaccines prove to be safe and effective.
One such trial by the American pharmaceutical company Moderna will begin enrolling children 6 months through 11 years old on Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. UW will be one of 75 to 100 sites in the U.S. and Canada for the trial, which has been named the KidCOVE study.
Quoted: “Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin’s teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real,” said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor.
“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history.”
“We know very little if (trainings) are effective at all. We don’t even know how long they last if they are effective, but we don’t even know if they’re effective,” said Markus Brauer, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a social psychologist, Brauer studies the social aspects of human behavior with a focus on diversity-related issues. Brauer’s research has centered on developing and testing interventions aimed at changing people’s behaviors in a variety of domains, including diversity, and his work has led him to a simple conclusion: many pro-diversity initiatives don’t work. Poorly done diversity training can do more harm than good.
Quoted: According to Noah Williams, director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, the state’s labor force participation has been declining for decades as the state’s demographics shift over time.
“The way I think about it is there’s long term trends and then on top of that there’s been the shorter term issues,” Williams said, “The population is aging; it’s aging more rapidly in Wisconsin than in the rest of the country.”
Quoted: The overall job numbers showed “a strong contribution from education hiring, as more schools than normal retained teachers through the summer and ramped up hiring for a planned return to instruction in the fall,” said Noah Williams, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
The upward trend, however, is threatened by the virus spread, Williams added.
Noted: The team, led by Sebastian Heinz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, took a look at several telescopes’ data from the 2015 outburst to probe the dust clouds, finding that most of the grains are likely graphite and silica. More importantly, the observations found that the dust cloud is not the same density in all directions, contradicting the theory suggested in previous studies.
Quoted: Epidemiologist Ajay Sethi teaches a class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison called conspiracies in public health. He says misinformation can have serious consequences and if people see or hear something that’s wrong, they should try and counter it, similar to rejecting racist remarks or actions.
“I don’t tell my students to do this, but I tell them maybe we should draw on the principles of calling out racism,” said Sethi. “If you see something, say something, recognizing you may be talking to a Russian bot online. So, we have to decide when our efforts are worth it.”
Quoted: Climate change is driving the extreme heat and record-breaking drought that have set the stage for wildfires to burn more than 3 million acres so far this year, according to Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Patz has served as a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned in its 2018 report that drastic shifts are needed to reduce global warming to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“These extreme events of drought and heat waves are definitely linked to climate change,” said Patz. “They don’t only affect those states that are burning in the West, but the wildfire smoke travels across the country. We’ve seen very high levels in northern Wisconsin and across the state.”
Written by Kathleen Bartzen Culver, James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communications and director for the Center for Journalism Ethics.
The first sequenced genome of a daddy-long-legs has revealed the genetic tricks that these creatures use to make their lengthy, grasping legs.
Most of these leggy invertebrates are not spiders but belong instead to a group called harvestmen (order Opiliones). Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vanessa González at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and their colleagues sequenced the genome of the long-legged harvestman Phalangium opilio and found that the creature has a single cluster of Hox genes, a type of master gene that influences the body plan of all animals.
“No one wants to work anymore.” This is a common refrain from business owners around the country as the economy opens back up. Conservative commentators claim that unemployment insurance is keeping people from going back to work and fueling widescale laziness—but is that really what’s going on?
Today on the show, labor economist Laura Dresser joins Thursday host Allen Ruff to challenge these myths of the “labor shortage” narrative. They talk about the working class in Wisconsin, the pandemic economy, the importance of worker power, and the real reason employers are struggling to hire.
Laura Dresser is associate director of the Center On Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) and assistant clinical professor in the School Of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is co-editor of The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market(Cornell University Press, 2008) and co-author of the annual State of Working Wisconsin report from COWS.
Quoted: Thomas Friedrich is a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and another study author. He said vaccination, while extremely effective, is not necessarily a magic shield.
“This does not indicate that the vaccine is not effective,” said Friedrich. “What it does mean is that in some people who are vaccinated — at least for a certain amount of time after infection — there’s enough virus around in their systems that they could pass the virus on to others.”
Dave O’Connor, also a UW-Madison professor of virology and the third co-author of the study, said it’s important to continue to recalibrate expectations as circumstances change.
“The vaccines are imperfect, but they’re still going to help keep me out of the hospital right now, and we should be really thankful for that,” said O’Connor. “But we also need to be on guard, because just because we might be done with the virus doesn’t mean the virus is done with us.”
Noted: Some scientists have wondered whether such duplications might help explain some of the wild variety of the animal kingdom, said Prashant Sharma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and also an author of the study. Complex genomes and more varied organisms might seem to go together.
But despite harvestmen’s variety — there are more than 6,000 species in the group — there is no sign of duplication in the harvestman genome, the researchers report. And horseshoe crabs, arachnids that had at least one genome duplication in their evolution, have only a handful of species.
“Arachnids really challenge this idea,” Dr. Sharma said. Having more genes might help organisms diversify, but only if environmental conditions and other factors line up correctly as well, he speculates.
Much of southern and western Wisconsin has continued to experience abnormally dry conditions this year, with far southeastern Wisconsin seeing severe drought earlier this summer.
But agronomist Chris Kucharik from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said lower precipitation hasn’t had as much of an impact on the state’s crops as he was anticipating.
“I’m a bit surprised at how well the crops have been doing,” Kucharik said. “Honestly, once the crop is in the ground, (farmers) are kind of at the mercy of what happens during the growing season with the weather.”
After Rhinelander Mayor Chris Frederickson found out in 2019 that at least one of his city’s municipal water wells was contaminated with a dangerous compound, he got in touch with Jim Tinjum.
Tinjum is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also heads the geological engineering program, which is how Frederickson found him.
“I was contacted to help them figure out where the PFAS was coming from and what to do about it,” Tinjum said.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers warned in a new study that Wisconsin’s plans for another hunt “raise questions about sustainability.”
The state’s stated goal is maintaining a stable population of wolves, a top predator that helps sustain ecosystem health, study co-author and Madison environmental studies professor Adrian Treves told The National Geographic.
Treves called plans for a November hunt unwise, particularly since officials have no clear understanding of the impact of the February killings. Hunters often seek out the largest animals, for example, which are frequently pack leaders whose loss could leave entire groups to starve to death. The killing of fertile females would further reduce the population.
Quoted: Even though the situation in the industry remains tough, Mark Stephenson, head of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “2020 was not as bad a year for dairy farmers.”
Milk prices had been low since 2015 — “for a longer period of time than we’ve seen in quite a while,” according to Stephenson. Farmers did their best to cut costs, and waited for demand to increase and boost prices with it.
Quoted: “It’s [the delta variant] able to bind to the cells in our nasal passages and our lungs more tightly and as a result someone who gets infected is more capable of pumping out a lot more virus,” said Dr. Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
Researchers led by Guilherme Gainett from the University of Wisconsin-Madison first sequenced the genome of Phalangium opilio (technically not a spider but a close relative), thought to be among the most widespread of more than 6,000 different species of daddy long legs — also known as harvestmen — documented worldwide.
Noted: Utilizing RNA interference, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison were able to sequence the genome of Phalangium opilio and modify six of the arachnids’ eight legs and turn them into half their normal size.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” the study’s lead author, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview with New Scientist.
Quoted: “If they have issues with their immune system or are immunocompromised, I would say now is probably not a great time to travel, because there are so many things that are outside of your control,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.
Researchers studying how poverty and adversity affect children’s development often track how negative experiences — be they poverty itself or factors such as having an incarcerated parent — affect decision-making, stress levels or aspects of brain function. But Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that most of these efforts miss a crucial but long-overlooked component: children’s perceptions of their experiences.
Pollak spoke with Knowable Magazine about the importance of studying individual differences in experience.
Quoted: “We know that masking allows children to be in school safely, reduces transmission of COVID, and, really importantly, if children are masked, then it provides much less disruption to kids, because they don’t need to be quarantined if they’re exposed to a case of COVID,” said Greg DeMuri, a pediatric epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The study started in Dane County and contains a disproportionate level of samples from that area, cautioned David O’Connor, one of the authors of the new study and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists stressed that despite having comparable levels of virus, vaccinated patients remain far less likely than the unvaccinated to become severely ill, hospitalized or die from COVID-19.
Also, O’Connor said the 83 Dane County cases showed that unvaccinated people are more than twice as likely to get the virus as those who’ve been vaccinated.
“What we’re seeing here is that the vaccines are doing a superb job of keeping people out of the hospital,” O’Connor said.
Quoted: Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”
Noted: Some species’ hindmost legs can grow so long that competing suitors will line up to compare them. “Whichever male has the longest leg wins, and it’s the one that is going to mate,” Guilherme Gainett, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me.
Some answers might be hidden in the harvestmen genome. Gainett and Sharma, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recently teamed up with the genomics expert Vanessa González, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, to cobble together the first-ever draft of the genome of Phalangium opilio, the world’s most widespread harvestman species.
Quoted: “For this idea of boosters, it’s going to be hard to control. You just have to rely on local public health departments and local providers to prevent that from happening,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “It’s conceivable that the two races in Wisconsin could unfold somewhat differently, said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The governor’s race will largely be about Evers’ handling of the pandemic, the budget he recently signed, and the state’s economic situation,” Burden said via email. “The Senate contest is more likely to focus on the Biden administration and whether the president’s efforts to address the pandemic and the economy are necessary remedies or harmful government overreach.”
Noted: Fascinated by the way these appendages develop differently, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues teamed up with genome specialists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to draft a sequence of the genome of a lab-raised harvestman.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” says Gainett.
Quoted: Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she has some sympathy for Chris Cuomo and his desire to help his brother.
“As hard as it is to see your brother mired in controversy, your obligation as a journalist is to the public you serve,” she said. “If it’s true that Chris Cuomo drafted the statement later put out by the governor’s office or he encouraged an approach that emphasized contrition, his involvement was deeper than what he disclosed to viewers in May. That moves far beyond being ‘looped in to phone calls’ with staff members. It’s playing an active role in shaping the narrative of the controversy.”
Noted: “Karl Polanyi for President,” a 2016 article in Dissent that Konczal coauthored with Patrick Iber, is a useful companion piece to Freedom from the Market, and helps illuminate the intellectual genealogy of its arguments.
As Konczal and Iber explain, Polanyi’s most famous work, The Great Transformation (1944), is devoted in large part to a critique of the idea that the so-called “free market” is a precondition for, and guarantor of, freedom more generally. “Polanyi’s work dismantles this argument in two important ways,” they write, first by showing that “markets are planned everywhere they exist.”
Translated from Spanish
Quoted: In fact, for the historian and writer Patrick Iber, author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, “it is very possible that a student activist in Nicaragua, fighting against the Ortega dictatorship, could move to the United States. and endorse Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as president. Not everyone would, of course, but it would not be inconsistent, “he said in an interview with El Tiempo Latino.
Americans born in the 1990s have experienced various economic traumas in their lives, says the professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think that when people express their support for socialism, what they are saying is that the capitalist system is not working well enough. They are saying: “My society says this is capitalism, and I am suffering, so I am against capitalism,” he explains. “These failures, even if someone from Venezuela or Nicaragua would prefer them to the failures of their systems, they are real and it is fair that politics is a scenario in which people demand that their countries do better.”
Quoted: The CDC study “raises the very worrisome possibility that high viral loads can occur in people who have delta, and this is a fundamental as we have to approach the fall and winter,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Noted: The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.
Noted: In July, University of Wisconsin scientist Adrian Treves and two colleagues concluded in their new study that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin is significantly lower than estimated by the DNR. While the DNR made claims about how the February trophy killing season would not cause much of a change in the overall wolf population numbers, mass slaughter during the middle of the breeding season would indeed have a significant impact on the population. This study shows that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin in April likely falls between 695-751 rather than the far fluffier projections presented by the Wisconsin DNR.
Noted: Dr. Tiffany Green, who was not among the authors of the new research, told Medical News Today that the study aligns with separate research regarding patients who had undergone a cesarean birth.
Dr. Green, of the departments of population health sciences and obstetrics & gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is senior author of a study that was presented at the 2020 Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine Conference.
Dr. Green and her team found that, “Black patients reported higher average levels of pain compared to white patients, but still received similar amounts of pain medication.” Controlling for reported pain scores, explained Dr. Green, they received less pain medication than their white counterparts. This was also true of Asian patients.
Quoted: In response to a second statute cited by Flaherty, related to failure to pay fines, fees, surcharges or court costs, Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor, said “a judge can decide to impose a jail sentence until the money is paid.” She also noted that, “implicit in that power is some ability to monitor whether the money is paid or the work is done, though the statute does not spell out what such monitoring might look like.”
“In short it’s slow, and it takes time. And that’s a good thing for the most part because that means we are trying to get the facts right because the stakes are really high,” says UW law professor Cecelia Klingele. Klingele says it’s common for charges to be added in a fast moving investigation like the Halderson case.
Written by Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Shape and How Not to Be Wrong.
This might be the year for ticks. Or cicadas. But not so much for mosquitoes.
With a long and cold spring earlier this year, mosquitoes didn’t have as much of a chance to ramp up in numbers, said Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wiscconsin-Madison.
“I don’t have complete evidence of that, but that’s what I suspect,” she said.
Mosquitoes are pesky, no doubt, but Bartholomay said they’re also integral to the health of local habitats, specifically to birds, bats, ducks and other species that feed on them.
In fact, Bartholomay said that in places where mosquito larvae are well controlled, birds get less protein, which then impairs their own reproduction.
“It’s very likely that (mosquitoes are) really important in a way we under-appreciate,” she said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY the image was misleading.
“Because elections are decided by the votes of actual people rather than the land represented by county borders, it is incorrect to conclude that a state is ‘red’ or ‘blue’ because most of the counties in that state are of the same color,” he wrote in an email. “Many counties in the U.S. have extremely small populations that do not contribute much to the statewide result.”
Quoted: Keith Findley, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Yamahiro can essentially pick any licensed attorney in the state for the task.
That person will then review all the evidence in the case. They could ask the police for more reports or issue subpoenas as well.
“She or he will then evaluate all of the evidence and determine whether it’s appropriate to proceed with a prosecution,” Findley said.
Noted: Citizen-initiated John Does are rarely used in Wisconsin. Marcus Berghahn, a criminal defense attorney and adjunct law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said they happen perhaps once or twice a decade in the state.
While Madison’s students are preparing for the fall semester, the Delta coronavirus variant is complicating plans for the upcoming school year. According to local public health officials, Delta is now the dominant coronavirus strain in Dane County.
For more on what the Delta surge means for local students, our Producer Jonah Chester spoke with Dr. Gregory DeMuri, a professor of pediatrics at UW-Madison.
Quoted: “Breakthrough infections started out at a very low rate. But now with the delta variant and the higher ease of transmissibility, those breakthrough infections are growing,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection control at UW Hospital and Clinics and faculty at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “So, the mask then will be this extra layer of protection in addition to the vaccine. Of course, it’s crucial for unvaccinated people (to mask up) because they don’t have that layer of protection from the vaccine.”
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, it’s going to be bad,” said Kurt Paulsen, University of Wisconsin-Madison urban planning professor. He explained that the eviction moratorium barred landlords from evicting tenants who were unable to pay their rent during the pandemic, but that renters are still ultimately on the hook for all the rent they missed when the moratorium expires.
“Thousands and thousands of renters have been unable to pay the rent because of unemployment or COVID-related financial hardships, and eventually the rent comes due,” Paulsen said.
Quoted: The CDC based their recommendation on new evidence about the delta variant. Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said he would classify the latest science as “a bit of a game-changer.”
“We didn’t know this was going to be the case until we discovered that people who are vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection can potentially spread that to other people and that wasn’t the case before delta,” Sethi said.
Quoted: Public health officials do not know how long the immune system protects itself after an infection with COVID-19 and encourage all eligible people to get the vaccine.
“The duration of that protection is unknown,” said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “The science is already showing that people who have had the vaccine have better responses to the (delta) variant than people who had past infection.”
Written by Susan Yackee, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Collins-Bascom Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at UW-Madison.
Noted: Trump’s agencies wrote fewer rules than past administrations, including other Republican ones, says Susan Yackee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on rule-making. Although many controversial regulations wind up in court, agencies typically win those cases, she told me. Here, too, the Trump administration was an outlier: It lost a lot.
While the debate over enhanced federal unemployment aid in Wisconsin has been settled for now, the broader, national discussion on the issue continues.
At least 26 states have cut their ties with the program. Business owners and interest groups argue that ending the additional aid is the best way to address difficulties in hiring new workers.
For more on the debate, WORT producer Jonah Chester spoke with Laura Dresser, a labor economist at UW-Madison.
Industry experts Mark Stephenson and Bob Cropp say they see optimism in price and supply for the coming months, according to the latest episode of the Dairy Markets and Policy podcast.
Cropp, professor emeritus of UW-Madison’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, said cold storage reports bring both bad and good news to dairy farmers: American cheese stocks are slowly decreasing at 2% this month, but butter stocks have gone up 14% in the same timeframe. Stephenson, director of the Center for Dairy Profitability, said cheese stocks will continue to see rising price support.
Quoted: Lead author Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, argues that without a more precise number the hunt quota should be set as low as is possible.
“A quota of one would comply with the statute [mandating a hunt] and acknowledge that we have no clue how successfully the wolves reproduced this year,” Treves said. “Because the hunt happened during the mating season, we would need good data on how many packs produced pups, and that is data we do not have.”
