“When COVID started, among parents and teachers there was a lot of speculation about what mask wearing was going to mean for everyday social interactions and people started being concerned, reasonably, about how all of this was going to impact children,” says Dr. Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral fellow at UW-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab.
Quoted: The idea of removing names — let alone an entire article — from a newspaper’s digital archive is traditionally anathema for many journalists. “For a long time the instinct was, ‘Nope, we’re not even going to think about this. We are about seeking the truth and reporting it and we don’t go back and unreport it,’ ” said Kathleen Culver, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: “Now is not the time to loosen restrictions but rather double-down on our mitigation efforts and ramp up vaccine rollout,” Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Other new variants will inevitably emerge if we allow the coronavirus to spread uncontrollably.”
Quoted: As customers make their way through shelves, they may move or pick up items in ways that can make the location and quantity of inventory difficult to to gauge, said Hart Posen, professor at the University of Wisconsin school of business.
“It leads to lots of mistakes and errors because what the computer system says is on the shelf might not be there, because a customer has it in their cart, or…picked it up and moved it someplace else,” he said. “So mostly using store shelves for e-commerce fulfillment is not a scalable and efficient way to do it.”
Noted: One way to appeal to youth on Covid-19 is by placing the wellbeing of their social group on their shoulders, said Dominique Brossard, a professor specializing in science communication at University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She pointed to the decades-old “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive” slogan in the U.S. as one successful campaign that helped lower incidence of youth drunk-driving. Simply relaying information about the virus may have limited effectiveness with the younger generation, who are accustomed to being bombarded with a constant stream of content.
Noted: Lewis, an assistant professor of mathematics at George Washington University, decided to hire Rai before he had any idea that the pandemic would push the course online. He had gotten the idea from Harry Brighouse, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has written about having a student worker critique his teaching. The move online meant Lewis’s discussions with Rai covered different ground than the professor had initially imagined — he thought they’d talk more about issues like how much class time he should spend on particular topics. But it ended up being an especially good semester in which to have a thoughtful observer.
When public servants face a challenge, AAAS Member and newly elected 2020 AAAS Fellow Dr. Laura Albert finds solutions. Whether helping police tackle the opioid crisis, or assisting election officials in protecting voters during a deadly pandemic — which was one of her most recent feats — the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor uses mathematical models and analytics to recommend safe, economical and often innovative remedies.
Quoted: Melissa Kono is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works in community development and is raising a family on a farm. “Work-life balance,” she said, is not a farming staple.
Noah Williams, an economist at UW-Madison, said he is against an increase in the minimum wage. Williams points to 2019 projections from the Congressional Budget Office. With $15/hr officials estimate 1.3 million people would be pulled out of poverty. Another 1.3 million people, however, would lose jobs.
“I don’t think that any of us really anticipated the extent to which asymptomatic transmission would play a role,” Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Hospital, said Wednesday during an online panel discussion reflecting on the pandemic a year after it began.
Coming after such a severe sentence, it is hard to judge the significance of Bundit’s acquittal. Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Thai protest movements, said it was unusual for a lese-majeste case to be acquitted. “They are rarely, but sometimes, dismissed,” she noted on Twitter of Bundit’s case. “What makes it particularly significant is the 43.5 year sentence (down from 87 years) handed down to Anchan, a 65-year-old former civil servant last week, and the over 50 Article 112 cases filed against democracy activists recently.”
“It told mapmakers you can do whatever you want,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All of the guardrails are off.”
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers, like many people, faced a lot of stress in 2020. He said the pandemic brought both emotional stress, as COVID-19 spread in rural areas, and stress for their profession, due to disruptions to supply chains and consumer eating habits.
Food packaging films that contain several layers of different plastic are particularly tricky to take apart. Every year, 100 million tons of these multilayer films are produced worldwide. When thrown away, those plastics go to landfills, says chemical engineer George Huber of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“The drug performs quite well in mice and the authors hint at it having potential against other viruses too,” said David H. O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It is premature to say if it will have clinical benefit, but it definitely merits clinical trials.”
Dr. Ajay Sethi, an infectious diseases expert at UW, joined the Wake Up Wisconsin team to talk about the discussion.
But do these vast differences play a role in forming the politics of future citizens? That’s something political scientists and education experts have debated for decades. “High quality civic education is essential to ensure that this generation of young people is fully prepared to participate wisely and well in the political and civic realms,” said Diana Hess, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of education and an expert in civic and political education. “That said, the crisis of epic proportions facing our democracy was caused by a confluence of factors and certainly should not be blamed solely or even primarily on what did or did not happen in our schools.”
Unfortunately, other social media outlets—where 55 percent of Americans often or sometimes get their news, according to a Pew Research study—were bereft of such information. So Ritter, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, a former Penn epidemiologist now at University of Wisconsin-Madison, started a Facebook page called Dear Pandemic, a source for easy-to-understand, science-backed Covid information written by a volunteer team of 12 women scientists from around the country and England, including five in Philly. (The team is supported by a project coordinator and a team of experts, translators, student employees, and interns.)
“Essentially, the huge number of cumulative infections worldwide provides a large number of opportunities for viruses to acquire beneficial mutations and then spread preferentially,” said Thomas Friedrich, a vaccine expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This is kind of like playing an evolutionary slot machine. One individual slot may be unlikely to hit the jackpot — but if you are able to play millions of slots in parallel, hitting the jackpot on a few becomes much more likely.”
Biden’s administration could also oversee unemployment return to the low levels that it had been at under the past two administrations, though the pandemic is still wreaking havoc on major sectors of the economy, UW-Madison economist Steven Deller said. “Once COVID is under control, there is no reason why we can’t go back to a pre-COVID economy,” Deller said.
A research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, Cortland Dahl, says stress events, like the previous election and lead-up to the inauguration, can exacerbate a mantel health issues. Dahl noted that cases of anxiety and depression tripled in 2020, and turbulent events like a contentious election can just make things worse.
“Fathers say it means a lot to them to see their baby on the screen and have an unmediated experience with the baby,” explains Tova Walsh, PhD, MSW, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies the transition to fatherhood.
Even though the public largely maintains a generic confidence in science, “people are quite capable of viewing scientists as lousy experts when it comes to specific issues that don’t fit their notions of what’s true,” says Sharon Dunwoody, professor emerita of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dr. Patrick Remington, a professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, previously worked as an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says a career spent studying public health policy has taught him that laws are typically only effective for the people already inclined to follow a given health recommendation, like wearing seat belts in cars or not smoking indoors.
“It’s really complicated to go from zero to 100 mph and be writing the rules as you go,” said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program.
Quoted: Dietram Scheufele, the Taylor-Bascom chair in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that scientists already must counter misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines. Manipulated data only makes that job harder, he said.
“It’s probably the worst possible time to deal with something like this,” he said.
Quoted: Committee co-chairman Dr. Jonathan Temte of the University of Wisconsin-Madison agreed.
“Our recommendation should be based on the scientific evidence, the ethical pinnings, and the feasibility,” Temte said. “And on all three accounts, one would say, absolutely. If we are saying we’re going to punish these people yet again — because they are being punished for their crimes at this point in time — this constitutes kind of a double punishment and treating them very, very differently and I’m very uncomfortable with that.”
Not all of Biden’s economic agenda hinges on Congress. He has asked the requisite agencies to extend the federal moratorium on evictions and foreclosures through March 31, and the pause on federal student loan payments through Sept. 30. But there’s ultimately a limit to what the Executive Branch can do on its own. “There’s no set of buttons and levers the President can push and pull to generate the optimum mix of economic growth, unemployment and inflation,” says Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor who studies Executive Orders.
Jonathan Senchyne, an associate professor of book history and print culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he thinks a price might have been listed because this type of book would have been put on display at a holiday fair.
Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at that hiring pace, it’ll be a long time before Wisconsin makes up the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in April.
Biden was able to make so many changes so quickly because of the precedent set by his predecessor, Donald Trump, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer, author of the book “With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power.”
“Every president looks for ways to use the powers of the office to accomplish their goals, and Trump was unusually aggressive about it, finding things that really broke the norms,” such as declaring a national emergency on the border to redirect money to build a wall Congress refused to fund, he said.
“That was one very specific step that Biden thought would be important to take to symbolize to the world community that we’re back in the climate change game in terms of negotiations with the rest of the world,” said Stephen Vavrus, a climate scientist with the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
With Wisconsin getting just 70,000 first doses of vaccine each week, the committee acknowledged the challenge in making so many people eligible but didn’t address how to manage the expected large demand for a small supply. “To achieve that group is nearly an impossible task in short order,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, associate dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “We’re looking at months.”
Fenaba Addo is an associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ashley Harrington is the federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending.
The debate around canceling student debt has been front and center in the wake of the presidential election, and President-elect Biden should provide substantial cancellation on his first day in office.
“It’s a recognition of Chicana and Latina talent in acting and representation,” said Theresa Delgadillo, a Chicana and Latina studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and a woman innovator in music at the center of it.”
University of Wisconsin – Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer said Biden is starting out with a “challenging set of circumstances.””It’s historically difficult. The country is as polarized as it has ever been at any time in the last 140 years. We have serious economic distress…COVID-19 is not remotely under control,” Mayer said.
Allison Prasch, an assistant professor and expert on political speeches at UW-Madison, said Biden mentioned words like “we” or “us” roughly three times more than the word “I.” She compared his speech to the Gettysburg Address, in which Abraham Lincoln did not mention the North and the South as divided entities. He, instead, spoke about the Union and American unity.
“It is remarkable how little legislating the Legislature has done over the past year,” Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor, said in an email. “As Governor Evers points out, the Legislature has not actually passed any legislation and sent it to his desk since last April, despite the challenges of the pandemic, the economy and the election. Legislative leaders and their allies have instead been active in the courts, challenging many of the orders and actions coming out of the Evers administration.”
“We really need to come together to combat this,” said Dr. Jasmine Zapata, pediatrician and public health strategist with the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “And just like masks, social distancing and good handwashing are part of the solution, getting as many people vaccinated as possible is part of the solution.”
That’s partly because these tools are free, Rasband says. But it’s also because it’s easy for users to customize the tool to their needs, says Kevin Eliceiri, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, whose team has taken the lead on ImageJ development since Rasband’s retirement. ImageJ features a deceptively simple, minimalist user interface that has remained largely unchanged since the 1990s.
Trade policy is where the president wields the most economic power, as Congress has over the years delegated negotiating authority to the president’s office, according to Menzie Chinn, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Chinn documented the trade war saga on his macroeconomic policy blog Econbrowser.
Another key point? It doesn’t make sense to be happy all the time. “The goal isn’t to be happy 24/7,” Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center For Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told HuffPost.
Hallmark having its own PAC may come as a surprise to some, but these days, a major company not having a PAC is more of an anomaly, said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hallmark having its own PAC may come as a surprise to some, but these days, a major company not having a PAC is more of an anomaly, said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The financial aid office is your friend in this process,” explains Karla Weber, who works in the financial aid office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think sometimes we get made out to be the ones that are hiding or hoarding this money from students, where it’s really just the opposite.
Staying in separate rooms and using separate bathrooms, when possible, helps prevent household transmission, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director for infection prevention at UW Hospitals and Clinics in Madison.
Joy Kirkpatrick is an outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Profitability who meets with farmers to help them navigate farm succession planning.
Kirkpatrick said she thinks the opportunity for anonymity online could make some farmers feel more comfortable sharing tough realities.
In that test, the children correctly identified the emotional expression on uncovered faces about 66% of the time, well above the odds of just guessing, psychologist Ashley Ruba at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said. Looking at faces in surgical-type masks, however, the children were only able to correctly identify sadness about 28% of the time, anger 27% of the time, and fear 18% of the time.
“For very young children, I think it is still an open question as to how they’ll navigate these situations,” said Dr. Ruba, who studies how children learn to understand other people’s emotions. “Infants can use all these other cues, like tone of voice.”
Though the law allows employers to mandate vaccines, UW-Madison professor emerita of law and bioethics Alta Charo said requiring employees to get the shot could lead to pushback from employees who might get vaccinated on their own but bristle at the mandate. “In the history of public health, we have frequently seen that voluntary compliance winds up more successful at the end than mandates,” Charo said.
Quoted: Dr. David O’Connor is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UW-Madison’s school of Medicine and Public Health, where he runs a lab studying viral infections. Speaking with WORT, O’Connor said it’s common for viruses to mutate as they find new hosts.
“The genetic material for the coronavirus is called RNA, and when RNA makes copies of itself, sometimes those copies are sloppy, and a mistake gets made,” O’Connor said.
The Associated Press and other news outlets have focused on the fact the B.1.1.7 strain appears to transmit between people more quickly than other strains. Dr. Thomas Friedrich, who studies diseases and immune systems at UW-Madison, shares this same suspicion.
“This variant does appear to be more contagious, more transmissible between people, about one and half times as transmissible as previous strains. So, that’s concerning to us because it means that virus might spread a bit easier, and might be a little harder to control,” Friedrich said.
Quoted: Stanley Payne, a University of Wisconsin historian of Spain and author of A History of Fascism 1914-1945, agrees that Trump’s lack of coherent revolutionary fervor makes him fall short of fascism. “Never founded a new fascist party, never embraced a coherent new revolutionary ideology, never announced a radical new doctrine but introduced a noninterventionist foreign military policy,” Payne wrote to me in an email. “Not even a poor man’s fascist. Ever an incoherent nationalist-populist with sometimes destructive tendencies.”
Professor emeritus of dairy science and former dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Neal Jorgensen, passed away at 85 on Dec. 22.
Quoted: “In meat systems, permeate can be used to reduce the amount of sodium, enhance browning, protect color, mask bitter flavors and improve structure formation,” said Susan Larson, associate researcher, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for the US Dairy Export Council, Arlington, Va. “The lactose in permeate also provides a carbohydrate that could replace a portion of the sugar in a fermented sausage.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, professor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Johnson’s strong allegiance to President Donald Trump, as well as his position within the Senate majority and chairmanship of a powerful committee, positioned him squarely in the national spotlight.
“That combination has been really effective for him for the last several years and has given him a national platform,” Burden said. “And now he’s essentially losing all of that.”
Quoted: Laura Dresser, an economist with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said prior economic declines were led by male-dominated fields, such as construction and manufacturing. The pandemic-driven decline, she said, has strongly affected areas – such as the restaurant and education industries – with a high number of women workers.
“And those jobs are low-wage jobs,” Dresser said. “They’re held disproportionately by women. They’re held disproportionately by people of color.”
Quoted: The motivation for the crackdown is “a combination of corporate pressure through fear of losing advertisers, and some sense of responsibility that this (insurrection) was a bridge too far,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The question is how sustained the corporate response will be,” Culver said. Currently, companies including AT&T, JPMorgan and Coca-Cola have paused their political contributions to the 147 Republicans who objected to certifying the election results, for instance. “Is it performative in the moment or will it last? It feels unlike any moment I’ve seen before.”
Quoted: But fellow co-chairman Dr. Jonathan Temte, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said politics shouldn’t play a role in public health decision-making.
“It is our purview to make whatever we think is the best recommendation,” he said. “I don’t think it’s ethically acceptable to say we’re going to do congregate living but exclude the incarcerated, because by definition, that’s congregate living.”
University of Wisconsin professor and political science expert Mike Wagner answered your questions on News 3 Now This Morning.
The 2010 map, as UW-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer explained, was widely criticized after being created by the Assembly’s top Republicans and their lawyers. According to the rulings of federal courts, the party claimed attorney-client privilege and did not release the details of its map.
Quoted: In Florida, for example, a nursing home offered vaccines to members of its board and major donors, the Washington Post reported.
But that doesn’t seem to be the norm, said Ajay Sethi, an infectious disease expert with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said the top concern should be that no doses go to waste.
“It’s far better to get a shot in somebody’s arm than throw it out. Throwing it out is a complete tragedy,” Sethi said.
“If it’s happening to the point where the original plans are being abandoned, then I think that would be an issue,” Sethi added. “But I don’t think we’re at that stage right now.”
Quoted: “What we’ve heard more and more is that there are organizations that end up with unfilled slots in their immunization schedules who would like to reach out to members that would technically be in that next (rollout) group,” said Dr. Jim Conway, a professor of pediatrics at UW-Madison.
