But this is not the first time in recent years that the dollar’s dominance has been questioned. In 2008, an academic study by Mr Frankel and Menzie Chinn, a professor at University of Wisconsin – Madison, predicted that by 2022 the euro would surpass the dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency.
Existing literature in the field of applied psychology suggests women tend to be more successful than men at managing crises, said Dr. Alexander Stajkovic of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Dr. Kayla Sergent of Edgewood College decided to look at how states led by men and women stacked up in terms of coronavirus response, which has largely been managed by governors.
This is the root of the moral panic over cats: the struggle to move beyond treating other beings with domination and control, toward fostering a relationship rooted in compassion and justice.
Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infectious disease control at UW Health, said secondhand goods are, in general, safe to purchase and use during the pandemic. “The virus doesn’t survive very long outside the body,” Safdar said. “By the time thrift goods are sorted, sold and then taken home, enough time has passed where they should not pose a risk.”
If anyone in Wisconsin was poised to play a part in the coronavirus pandemic, it was Jonathan Temte. A physician and associate dean with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Temte is also an expert in vaccine and immunization policy who sat on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for eight years and is currently a member of the ACIP COVID-19 Vaccine Work Group, a panel that will help inform the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determine how a COVID-19 vaccine will be deployed.
Quoted: “In general, majorities of Democrats and Republicans believe that people should wear masks when they’re in enclosed tight spaces,” Wagner said.
Quoted: “I was disturbed, not shocked. We know this goes on,” Michele LaVigne, UW-Madison Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law Emeritus said. “I refuse to believe only African-American males are acting up.”
Yes, said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.“
One of the most important things to keep in mind when discussing public health is the fact that this is fundamentally a community issue, not merely an individual health concern,” she said. “We are all in this together. What I do affects everyone around me, and what they do affects me.”
Research on the effectiveness of wearing face masks is limited, but the idea is that wearing a mask helps reduce the transmission of the virus from the wearer to people in proximity through talking, coughing or sneezing. Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said cloth masks can achieve that quite well.
William Hartman, a doctor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is treating hospitalized Covid-19 patients with convalescent plasma, said FDA emergency-use authorization may prompt more hospitals to give the treatment earlier.
One committee member, Paul Hunter, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, offered this summary: “If I was looking at the data correctly, if you’re a middle-aged-to-older African American female medical assistant with diabetes and hypertension, it looks to me like you’re on top of the list to get the vaccine.”
Hart Posen, a professor who specializes in retail strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business, said Kwik Trip’s expansion in the Midwest can be attributed in part to its unique model. The company owns many parts of its own supply chain, like dairy facilities and bakeries. Posen said while this model has been part of the chain’s success, it also means that when the company expands, it’s likely to happen locally.
Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that larger operations are able to contain certain costs in ways that smaller operations can’t.
Christine Whelan, director of the Money, Relationships and Equality Initiative at UW-Madison, shares information about some free resources that could make the uncertain financial time a bit more manageable.
In 2015, she and two friends — Khoa Tran and Kelly Montgomery — founded an online publishing company called JKX Comics. At the time, all three were pursuing PhDs in science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Each knew how tough it can be to explain research and to engage students in its details.
Earlier this month, Patrick Remington, a UW-Madison emeritus professor and former chief medical officer for Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention in the state Division of Health, said the legal question behind a statewide mask mandate would come down to the court’s interpretation of “reasonable and necessary.”
Quoted: “We know that voter registration numbers have been lower this spring and summer than they would normally be in a presidential election year,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
“Data is (sic) suggesting that we may want to revisit the idea of projecting an image. Research shows that onlookers subconsciously register lack of authenticity. Just by looking at someone, we download large amounts of information others. We are programmed to observe each other’s states so we can more appropriately interact, empathize, or assert our boundaries, whatever the situation may require,” says Paula Niedenthal, Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are wired to read each others’ expressions in a very nuanced way. This process is called “resonance” and it is so automatic and rapid that it often happens below our awareness.”
So this means some travelers will slip through the net. Skipping quarantine yet out in the community. Even if rapid (less accurate) tests miss some infected people, they can still have a significant impact on transmission says Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said tests can miss lots of people with low levels of the virus and yet have a profound impact on transmission.
Kathy Cramer, who leads the BadgersVote committee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that group’s activities have shifted to virtual engagement and absentee voting education.
Ajay Sethi, faculty director of the master of public health program and associate professor of population health sciences says the public and patients need to be thoughtful and careful when absorbing information about the coronavirus.
Ajay Sethi, Faculty Director of the Master of Public Health program at the UW SMPH says there’s a lot of false messages being circulated around COVID-19.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist, who offered her thoughts early in the pandemic in a pair of Q&As with the Cap Times, is also a parent of two school-age children.
“The main issue is transparency,” said Kathleen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It would be a very simple move to disclose that to readers. That just builds trust with your readers.”
Molecules that fold are fundamental to life. ‘If you look at biology as a chemist, you can’t escape the conclusion that almost every complicated thing that biology does at the molecular level is carried out by a sequence-specific folded heteropolymer,’ says Sam Gellman from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US.
Quoted: Trump’s rhetoric and actions, however, continue a century-long history of the federal government working with private real estate interests to develop and maintain segregated communities, especially in the suburbs, said Paige Glotzer, a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of the book “How the Suburbs Were Segregated.”
Songbirds seem to enjoy singing. And while a great deal of research has investigated the development and production of birdsong, little is known about the motivation to sing.
New work out of Lauren Riters’ lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teases out the relationship between singing, reward, and endogenous opioids in songbirds. The results suggest that studying songbirds can teach us about the shared neurobiological mechanisms underlying social reward in all vertebrates, humans included.
Noted: One approach focuses on improving teachers’ own mental health. Matthew Hirschberg and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that randomly assigning a group of aspiring teachers to a preservice course on mindfulness reduced those teachers’ implicit bias and fostered their provision of emotional, instructional, and organizational support to students. The 22-hour course emphasized kindness, compassion, and managing one’s emotions. Another mindfulness program, CARE for Teachers, saw similar results.
Quoted: “We don’t want Wisconsin to become a poster child of how not to do an election,” said David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: That lines up with experts that say a diverse police force is only part of the answer when the discussion centers on racism, representation, and bias in communities. Police forces are often a reflection of the communities where they serve, UW-Madison Professor Emerita of Sociology Pamela Oliver noted in an email exchange with 7 Investigates. “It isn’t clear that changing the composition of the police force when the community hasn’t changed would make much of a difference.”
A 2003 study found that higher diversity in law enforcement did not necessarily mean a lower number of deaths caused by police, and Prof. Oliver said that the overall body of research “is mixed at best” in relation to the idea that diversity alone in law enforcement will result in less implicit bias.
Noted: While getting rid of non-native plants is a pesky and time-consuming job for most humans, it’s no tough task for goats, according to UW-Madison grazing specialist Jacob Grace.
The CJC also received a report from Professor John Eason on an analysis he completed to determine the impact of jail population reduction on the incidence of COVID-19 in the jail as well as the projection of COVID-19 infection if the reduction had not occurred.
Professor Eason is currently an associate professor of sociology at UW-Madison. Eason previously served as assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, as well as assistant to associate professor of ociology at Texas A&M University. His primary research interests link race, health, punishment, and inequality to community processes.
His early research has shown that the jail infection rate would have been substantially higher had decreases in the jail population not occurred. Professor Eason will continue his research through May 2021.
“Working with the CJC to look at data and policy can bring the power of academia to the practical application of justice in Dane County” said Eason. “I am excited to work with CJC members bridging the gap between government and the UW.”
Noted: Madison365 spoke with three local experts: Public Health Madison Dane County data analyst Brittany Grogan, University of Wisconsin infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi, and Dr. Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “It takes a brave actor to stand up and run against the boss,” Lanny Glinberg, director of the University of Wisconsin Prosecution Project, says.
Glinberg also points to the decline of local news as an impediment to contested races. If the community isn’t aware of the daily goings on in the courthouse, how will they know if there have been any problems?
“Another factor — how well informed is the public of the role of district attorney?” he says. “The most powerful actor in the criminal justice system in terms of discretion. The public needs quality investigative journalism to know that. That’s in shorter and shorter supply.”
Many businesses are open. Mask orders have been implemented as cases are trending up. We are tracking the numbers, but many of you have questions about how we can protect ourselves and others. What can we do to slow the transmission of COVID-19?
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has assembled a panel of experts from the University of Wisconsin’s Madison and Milwaukee campuses. They will periodically answer questions from readers.
Quoted: “Even though states are putting the 14-day quarantines up, there are big questions about how it’d be enforced on a campus and for students who live off campus,” said Nicholas Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The impact seems really uncertain unless it’s strictly a residential campus.”
Quoted: “I don’t think (the finding) was surprising, but it was good to see data that actually described it,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health in Madison.
Noted: Other staples of everyday life, especially the resumption of school, may differ widely in cities and towns across the country. Without data to measure the effect of different educational methods on the spread of the virus, the U.S. will soon embark on what amounts to “uncontrolled experiments,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW virologist and influenza expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka said that although he is confident COVID-19 will become endemic, he believes the lifestyle changes people have made should not become permanent.
“Once everyone gets vaccinated we should be able to go back to normal life,” he said, predicting that day might come “in three years, maybe four years.”
While getting rid of non-native plants is a pesky and time-consuming job for most humans, it’s no tough task for goats, according to UW-Madison grazing specialist Jacob Grace.
Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellow to the Hebrew University. His research focuses on Jewish resistance at the extermination camp Treblinka.
Quoted: It’s also critical for avoiding what Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls “prevention fatigue.” For example, if teachers at a school, who otherwise feel perfectly healthy, come to dread their twice-weekly swab, surveillance testing will quickly become unreliable. “They’ll say, ‘I feel fine’ and find a way to skip it,” O’Connor says. “We’re a nation of wusses, myself included.”
Noted: Research by Scott Sanders, a professor in the mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has shown that in situations where people can social distance, three-layered masks are best, with cotton for the internal layer, a non-woven synthetic for the middle and an outer layer of polyester.
But even if there is leaking from the mask, some kind of barrier is better than nothing, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
And, the masks should really be combined with social distancing, added Sethi, who is part of a team developing a model to forecast potential surges in hospitalizations in southern Wisconsin.
Quoted: Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Department who specializes in regional economic development, said it’s encouraging to see unemployment improving across the state. However, she said the numbers show that the economy has not gotten back to normal for a lot of people in Wisconsin.
“Even though things are better, we’re still quite a ways from where we were before the pandemic hit,” Conroy said. “So if we were to compare to say a year ago, we have a ways to go in terms of improving things again.”
The best explanation of how Donald Trump took the Midwest, and so the White House, came in a book published eight months before he did it. Kathy Cramer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison spent years interviewing small-town voters, such as retired farmers in rural petrol stations chatting over bad coffee. She asked how Wisconsin, a once-placid sort of place, had become bitterly confrontational. Her book, “The Politics of Resentment”, tracked how Scott Walker, the two-term Republican governor who left office in 2019, inspired fury from half the population and adoration from the other half. In every election of the past decade, voters were herded into rival camps.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease physician and the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said it’s impossible at this point to establish a scientific correlation between evictions and COVID-19 spread and deaths; diagnosed coronavirus cases are up 150% in Milwaukee, for example, since the eviction moratorium ended.
What is not in doubt among public health experts, she said, is that evictions are dangerous during a pandemic. “A key tenet of prevention in a pandemic is to have the infrastructure that will minimize transmission from person to person,” Safdar said. “Any activity that breaks down that structure … makes containment of a pandemic exceedingly difficult.”
Written by Todd Newman, Assistant Professor of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quoted: But Julie Mead, who researches legal issues related to special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there’s a potential problem with these lawsuits.
“Students with disabilities require programming that is special. That’s the whole point — ‘special’ education,” she says. In other words, for the very reason that each of these students is different, and needs different services, it may be harder to get courts to recognize them as a class, Mead says. She notes that, ever since a 2011 Supreme Court decision, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, certifying a class for a class action suit has gotten more complicated.
Noted: William R. Hartman, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology, is principal investigator for the UW COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
Quoted: “I’m acknowledged for who I am, and I’m supported to do my best and to contribute at my best. That is the culture that we want to strive for,” Binnu Palta Hill, the associate dean for diversity and inclusion at the Wisconsin School of Business, said.
Palta Hill is also a consultant, workshopping with companies around the nation on different aspects of inclusion. She turns to research suggesting employees perform better when they feel like they belong and says the topic matters at every industry.
While Muir spoke disparagingly of Indians, the greater problem is that he largely ignored them, said Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. Robbins said Muir was “using the same playbook as everyone else was working from” at the time, but that the Sierra Club was founded on the premise of preserving “sacred spaces” devoid of the people who previously inhabited them.
UW-Madison economist Noah Williams said it would be inaccurate to blame government regulation for the economic slowdown that’s accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Economic activity started falling early in March, before there were any restrictions in place,” Williams said. “What the lockdowns essentially did was keep that activity at a very low level. Things deteriorated much more quickly than people expected.”
The night sky is giving us many good reasons to look up this summer.
From Neowise, the recently-discovered comet that’s only viewable every few thousand years, to the annual Perseid meteor showers, there’s a lot to watch for in the evening and early morning skies, said Jim Lattis, director of the University of Wisconsin Space Place.
Lattis walks through the summer sky’s brightest objects, and gives tips for where and how to see them.
Quoted: “His stupid, careless talk is not really fascist but conceivably subfascist,” said Stanley Payne, a well-known historian of European fascism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Both Hitler and Mussolini spoke more toward theoretically coherent goals.”
Confusion this week over whether Milwaukee’s private schools could start in-person education in the fall led several parents to ask FOX6: Who has the power to veto school plans during a pandemic?
“If you had asked that question a couple months ago, it would have been pretty clear,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus Dennis Dresang said.
Dresang’s research focuses on state, local, and federal government.
The COVID-19 pandemic imposed significant new hardships on American workers — and it’s exposed just how much hardship many of them have been enduring for years.
That’s a central conclusion of a report published today, the 2020 edition of the State of Working Wisconsin. The report is published by COWS — formerly the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — a policy research and analysis organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Sue Robinson and Kathleen Bartzen Culver, journalism professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, use coverage of the proposed charter school as a case study to explore ethical obligations white reporters have when covering race. They conducted three focus groups and 39 in-depth interviews with 24 white reporters and 15 community leaders of color. They also analyzed more than 1,000 news stories and social media posts about racial disparities in educational achievement in Madison from 2011 to 2015.
Quoted: “If we look at crises throughout history, they can be a kickstart for progressive social and urban change,” says Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at UW-Madison. “But they can also be an opportunity for backlash and anti-progressive forces.”
Quoted: The effort to de-densify campus could have a public health benefit if the extra space is used to spread people out across classrooms and residence halls, said Craig Roberts, an epidemiologist emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a member of the American College Health Association’s COVID-19 task force.
“If the reduction is being done solely for budget reasons, however,” he said, such as to “keep class sizes the same but have fewer classes with fewer instructors, then I don’t think it’s going to make much difference.”
Noted: Before that, on Thursday, Aug. 6, there will be a virtual program entitled “Black Male Suffrage in Early Wisconsin,” presented by Dr. Christy Clark Pujara, assistant professor of history, Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It will tell the story of Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black Milwaukee resident, who asked that his name be added to the list of eligible voters on Oct. 31, 1865.
