Category: Experts Guide

Quoted: Dr. James Conway, a UW Health pediatrician and vaccine expert, and Ajay Sethi, a UW-Madison infectious disease epidemiologist.

Quoted: “They didn’t give these news outlets a chance to engage this ethical reasoning, and I think that’s a problem,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “But I can see how this person thought it was not a problem” because such journalistic standards are not widely understood by the public.

Quoted: “We’re going to miss the excitement with this batch,” University of Wisconsin entomologist PJ Liesch said. “If Wisconsinites really wanted to see these, you could drive a couple hours and get to parts of Indiana or Illinois and be able to see them, but it’s going to miss us here.”

Quoted: Gerrymandered districts are “the most important driver of election outcomes,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Although there are improvements to be made in the campaign finance system and in other election rules and practices,” he said, “the configuration of districts has proved to be the most powerful determinant of state legislative election results.”

Quoted: For University of Wisconsin, Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden, the final bill text for Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” could be bipartisan, especially given the return of earmarks. Earmarks permit lawmakers to sneak funding for nonprofit projects in their states or districts into certain measures.

“Many Republican legislators will want a piece of the package to claim credit for in their districts,” Burden said. “At least for some Republican legislators, the spending is an essential part of both national security at ports and borders and economic competitiveness with China.”

Quoted: “It’s like looking at the sky at night, and seeing one star,” Francis L. Halzen, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the director of IceCube, said in a telephone interview, describing the current state of the hunt for the ghostly particles.

Quoted: Implementing a two-way tracking system would increase transparency, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It likely would attract support from both parties.

“I think Democrats liked them, because their main worries are about ballots not being received or returned, and a voter being disenfranchised,” he said. “For Republicans, I think it provides some security about the integrity of the election. … If the election official ever thought that someone was fraudulently stealing ballots out of mailboxes and sending them, they could simply check the online tracking system, and the voter could do that as well.”

Quoted: Trump complained about mail-in voting early in 2020 and never stopped. Despite all the suspicions, the 2020 election still had a record turnout.

That’s why Barry Burden, political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, isn’t convinced voting reform bills in battleground states is about restoring voter confidence.

“They were confident. They participated at extremely high rates,” he said.

Quoted: “It has been infuriating to see how this racist and sexist killing spree has been handled by U.S. media outlets,” communications professor Lori Kido Lopez, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Asian American Studies Program, told The Daily Beast. “It is also infuriating to see the news media taking seriously the idea that ‘sexual addiction’ is relevant here. There is a long history of sexual predators using this kind of faux medical diagnosis as a way of escaping responsibility.

“It was particularly insulting and offensive to see headlines repeating the suspect’s description that he was having ‘a bad day.’ That is such a callous statement that minimizes the massive loss of life, but also the way that this kind of terrorism radiates fear and pain throughout the entire community.”

Quoted: “We think the true biodiversity of fungi is somewhere between one million and six million species,” says Anne Pringle, a University of Wisconsin-Madison mycologist—as fungus experts are called—and a National Geographic explorer. Yet despite their global prevalence, fungi have historically been left out of conservation initiatives.

At its meeting tomorrow night, the Dane County Board of Supervisors will consider a resolution condemning hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The vote comes as lawmakers across the country are speaking out against hate crimes against Asian Americans after a series of shootings yesterday in Georgia left eight people — six of whom were Asian — dead.

But do those resolutions and condemnations go far enough?

For more, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Doctor Cindy Cheng, a Professor of History and Asian American studies at UW-Madison.

For that reason, requiring a vaccine passport to travel internationally could soon become a reality, according to a UW-Madison professor emerita of law and bioethics, Alta Charro.

Quoted: Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, praised the Plain Dealer’s transparency. She said journalists should be thoughtful about when to cover disinformation and when doing so would simply give the falsehood a platform. They should also consider how a politician might say or do something to distract from an inconvenient news story, she said.

“They have a responsibility to serve the public interest,” Culver said. “And giving a platform to things that are not true does not serve that public interest.”

Quoted: Pamela Oliver, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied racial disparities in the justice system. She said communities of color are surveilled by police more frequently than white communities, and as a result, officers arrest a disproportionate number of people of color.

Many crimes are committed at the same rates between young white people and people of color, but people of color have been arrested for them at higher rates.

“White kids screw up just as much,” she said. “They do bad stuff, but nobody sees it because they’re not being watched.”

“Transitions are challenging for kids even under the most normal of circumstances,” Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a Human Development & Family Studies professor at UW-Madison, said Monday. “This is not the most normal circumstances.”

Quoted: “Turnout (overall) was very high because both Biden supporters and Trump supporters turned out at very high rates,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden, who studies turnout and election administration.

Dr. Heather Kirkorian, an associate professor at UW-Madison specializing in the relationship between childhood development and technology, says some kids struggled with remote learning while others thrived. This is why she says individualized transition plans are so important.

Menzie Chinn, professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison, said he expects the federal stimulus signed into law Thursday will help boost unemployment some, as Wisconsinites start to spend that money in the economy. But Chinn also notes that many residents in the state took large hits to their finances last year, and may not be able to spend that money as freely, potentially limiting some positive economic effects the stimulus money could have had.