As established under Wisconsin law, officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties convene at the state Capitol and nominate one slate of electors per party, according to UW-Madison Law School professor Rob Yablon. Each slate contains 10 electors, one from each of the state’s eight congressional districts and two at large.
“It’s fair to say it’s a buyer’s market because of that pent-up up supply,” said UW-Madison Associate Professor Cliff Robb.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, an agronomy professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were grateful for more normal weather patterns this year after an extremely wet season in 2019.
“There’s a little more peace of mind, if you will, in kind of going through what I just call an average normal production season,” Lauer said. “We’re going to end up with record yields but it’s just kind of easier psychologically to take.”
Shawn Conley, soybean and wheat specialist for UW-Madison’s Division of Extension, said a lack of precipitation throughout the state at the end of summer caused the USDA to lower their forecasted yields to 53 bushels per acre. That’s six bushels, or almost 13 percent, higher than last year.
But Conley said most farmers were happy to have the dry weather.
“That allowed farmers to have a lot of days in the field that they can push through and get their crops out of the field in a timely manner,” Conley said.
Quoted: “The in-store experience is going to be so much different,” said Hart Posen, a professor of management and human resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business.
Quoted: “It will be unlike any other Thanksgiving week shopping that we’ve had, I imagine,” says retailing expert Jerry O’Brien.
Perhaps this year’s biggest Black Friday change is that retailers effectively started Black Friday weeks ago.
“They’re pretty much all coming out openly saying, ‘We’re going to spread Black Friday out through November,’” says O’Brien, who is executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi is hoping that foot traffic will be modest and safe.
“I anticipate there’ll be less Black Friday shopping this year compared to last year, because a sizable proportion of people are well aware of our pandemic,” says Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences and faculty director of the UW-Madison master of public health degree program. “It obviously needs to be minimal, because we want to have really no crowding anywhere, for at least the next several weeks or months, so we can stop the spread of COVID in the state.”
Quoted: 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, said the best approach to tackling the massive outbreak is working together.
“To beat this virus, we have to be united in response,” he said.
But David Noyce, a UW-Madison engineering professor and director of the university’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory, said many of the most serious crashes don’t have anything to do with the number of vehicles on the roads.
Many customers are either canceling subscriptions or never signing up in the first place if they are able to instead subscribe to streaming services, which may be cheaper or more tailored to their interests, UW-Madison professor emeritus Barry Orton said. “They’re all focusing on exclusive content,” Orton said of streaming services. “Something you can’t watch anywhere else.”
The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The other, media, is taking on new forms in a digital age, but if recent statements by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke are anything to go by, this is a national problem for Democrats that a growing chorus within the party are already well aware of. Grenier tells me that Democrats in Florida are already well aware that the GOP’s hold over the Cuban-American community was not built overnight. We can’t expect Democratic inroads to be either.
Andrés S. Pertierra (@ASPertierra) is a PhD student in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Washington, DC, he previously received his undergraduate degree from the University of Havana, Cuba.
Quoted: Just this year, researchers spotted pores in the double-membrane-bound viral factories of coronaviruses, which are eerily reminiscent of the pores found in cell nuclei. “If this result holds up, and assuming that the pore-forming protein was not derived from a eukaryotic genome, then it does blunt one argument against the virus model,” wrote David A. Baum, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in an email.
Quoted: The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We were really excited to find [this in] one of the most well-studied insects in nature,” he says.
Ryan J. Owens is an attorney, the George C. and Carmella P. Edwards professor of American Politics, and the director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He writes this in his personal capacity.
Biden’s platform states that “student debt both exacerbates and results from the racial wealth gap.” Of the 1 in 5 Americans with student loan debt, a disproportionate number are Black. Nick Hillman, associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that data shows in communities of color, 17% of borrowers are in default and their median loan is $9,067.
“The top line is this is more great news,” said Dave O’Connor, a vaccinologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is a volunteer in the AstraZeneca trial. (He believes he received the placebo, because he had no side effects after either dose.)
The scale of the pandemic is straining health care systems in Wisconsin so badly that even large hospitals like UW Health University Hospital in Madison are nearly full, said Jeff Pothof, a physician and chief quality officer at UW Health … “Early on, we managed the surge, we had contingency plans, we were keeping up,” said Pothof. “But now we’re getting towards the end of that book. If we get there, we don’t have anything magic. We don’t have anything else left up our sleeve.”
It said the clerks did so following “illegal guidance” from the Wisconsin Election Commission, but the campaign has presented no evidence of wrongdoing. David Canon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said such charges sounded more like something that belonged in a lawsuit rather than a request for a recount.
“In a recount, all you are doing is recounting the ballots to make sure they were recorded properly,” Canon told WMTV, an NBC affiliate in Madison.
Landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed the lush meadows of Central Park, brought the status symbol to the masses by designing sweeping, pastoral parks for public use, says Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.
Jonathan Temte, associate dean for public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said lab tests are imperfect, and there are factors people should consider before making the assumption that a negative result means they’re safe to be around others.
Money given directly to nonprofits can be more helpful to some charities, said Mary Beth Collins, executive director of the UW-Madison Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, but the United Way has also shown its worth by collaborating with other local leaders to raise emergency funds at the onset of the pandemic.
“The result of the election was not terribly different from four years ago; it went to the Democrats rather than the Republicans, but Wisconsin remains a narrowly divided state,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison. “I think election officials managed to operate in that highly partisan environment quite well.”
Professor Song Gao, researcher at the UW Geospatial Data Science Lab says he’s part of a team partnering with different data vendors that track location based service apps. Through a grant, this research is able to track and help analyze travel distance using cell phone mobility data.
Fungal infections affect hundreds of millions of people globally each year. “They’re particularly a problem for people whose immune system is suppressed,” says David Andes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This includes people being treated for cancer, organ transplant recipients and premature babies.
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the recount effort is clearly not actually about changing the election result given the margin.
Katherine J. Cramer is professor of political science and chair of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
The past few years have taught me just how removed the cultural elite in the United States is from many of the other people in this nation. By cultural elite, I mean those of us who create the knowledge and the media content people consume, as well those of us in positions of political and other decision-making power. There is a deep well of people in this country who are sure the system is not working for them, and we seem to be only coming around to recognizing how deep it goes.
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the recount effort is clearly not actually about changing the election result given the margin. Instead, he said, Trump’s goals could be to put a cloud over the election results, raise suspicions, and to lay groundwork for the future.
According to Tino Balio, a Professor Emeritus of Communication Arts at UW-Madison and an expert on the history of American cinema, the 1918 pandemic ultimately didn’t leave a lasting impact on the industry. “Throughout the 1920s, the film industry grew exponentially and it became well-entrenched and, during that period, there was a tremendous theater construction boom,” he says. But, Balio makes that caveat that things are different this time around.
In another of the studies released earlier this year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that, based on autopsies, people who lived in the poorest neighborhoods at the time of their death were about twice as likely to have brain changes typical of Alzheimer’s disease as people who lived in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Researchers used the Neighborhood Atlas, a map developed by the University of Wisconsin that charts neighborhoods by socioeconomic status.
“We are in the baby steps of trying to understand what is driving this,” says Ryan Powell, a scientist who helped lead the study.
After Wisconsin’s economy made significant strides toward recovery following the downturn caused by the coronavirus, improvement has recently slowed. That’s according to Dr. Noah Williams, director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A UW Madison political science professor, David Canon, detailed the move to get a partial recount could be more of a political power move.
Ajay Sethi is an epidemiologist and associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For some people, for any number of reasons, the immune system kick that the virus causes then sets in motion long-lasting changes in how the brain works,” Dr. Charles Raison said Saturday. “It diminishes the brain’s ability to work effectively, and so you get all these symptoms.”
Although the neuroscience of video gaming is not conclusive, there may be evidence that the benefits are not (pardon the phrase) just in your head. Recently, a group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine developed Tenacity, a game with the goal of increasing mindfulness.
“From a partisan perspective, Trump’s vilification of cities makes no sense,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email. “It has little to do with his loss in Wisconsin, which resulted mostly from small shifts in the white vote outside of the city, particularly the suburbs, Dane County, and other parts of Milwaukee County.”
“It culminates in having designated state officials provide a formal stamp of approval for the election,” said Robert Yablon, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on election law. Depending on the state, that official could be the secretary of state, an elections commission or a board of canvassers created for this purpose.
“Direct appointment of electors by state legislatures is being discussed in some circles as an extreme measure, but is not actually a plausible scenario,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Skipping those beloved traditions and not celebrating with family members and loved ones adds stress to what has already been a difficult year, said Shilagh Mirgain, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Dr. Jeffrey Pothof, an emergency medicine physician and chief quality officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s health system, said exit testing can be helpful as long as students understand the limitations, stressing that a negative result “doesn’t give you a free pass” to act recklessly.
Students should take other preventive actions to avoid spreading the virus over the holidays. That means limiting social activity with groups, wearing face coverings and social distancing as much as possible, Pothof and others said.
“There are people who are talking about suicide. Because they’re just waiting and waiting — because the backlog is so bad,” said Victor Forberger, supervising attorney for the University of Wisconsin’s Unemployment Compensation Appeals Clinic, who has represented dozens of jobless clients during the pandemic.
Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Center, said politicians have a role to play in how the public perceives elections. “When they raise questions about elections that are not based on fact or don’t have that kind of substantial foundation below them that actually undermines confidence,” Burden said. “A person saying publicly that they lack confidence or they have a suspicion about something going wrong, that actually fuels suspicion or lack of confidence so it becomes kind of a vicious circle.”
The coronavirus pandemic is still here, and it’s not going anywhere for a while. Experts say it’s worse than ever before. UW Health’s Director of Infection Control Dr. Nasia Safdar joins Live at Four to talk about the state of COVID-19 in Wisconsin.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news. We used to say 10 people, that was an OK number to gather with. Right now with covid so prevalent in our communities, we really cant be gathering,” Dr. Jeff Pothoff, UW Health chief quality officer said.
“We’re not spared, we’re in the middle of it. We’re doing worse than most any other state.”
The research team, led by two experts in the genetics of viruses — Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — studied the so-called D614G version of the coronavirus.
Amid the bleak landscape that has been 2020, finding moments of brightness and pleasure has been an understandable challenge. For Sami Schalk, a Black and disabled writer and professor, navigating the physical and emotional strain of the pandemic has proved particularly challenging. Enter her multi-part project, #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane, soon to be presented as part of the ongoing exhibition Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, now online via the Ford Foundation Gallery.
Oguz Alagoz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering professor who specializes in modeling the spread of infectious diseases, said many factors, like changing human behavior or the availability of a vaccine, could impact the accuracy of a projection. But he agrees with IHME’s estimate.
“If you’re a rural resident, you’re seeing that economically, your type of community is struggling,” said Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“This is what exponential math looks like,” Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist with the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Laboratory and the UW-Madison Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, told MarketWatch.
And while it’s not easy to ignore Indigenous lawmakers if they’re sitting across the table, they often can be pigeonholed, said Richard Monette, who teaches federal Indian law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Surfaces can occasionally be a source of transmission,” said Dave O’Connor, an expert on the genome of the virus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “They do not appear to be a major, or the major, source of transmission in areas where the virus is already endemic. If you have otherwise eradicated the virus, such as New Zealand or this region of China, vigilance will be required to prevent reintroductions by both goods and travelers.”
Much the same occurred in Wisconsin, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden.”Biden won the state by a narrow margin and only shifted the vote about a point and a half from 2016,” Burden says.
“Such a small change did not produce significant shifts in the state legislature, where districts have been drawn to prevent it from responding to movement in the popular vote.”
Professor Robert Yablon, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school, told Checkpoint Trump has the same power he always has had as president, and can do what he wants, “within the standard bounds of the US Constitution and the law.
“We’re shedding farms,” Randy Jackson remarks grimly one autumn day over video conference. A professor of grassland ecology in the department of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jackson points to the fact that a record 10 percent of dairy farms in his state of Wisconsin shuttered in 2019, another milestone for a local economy that led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year.
Ryan Owens is a UW-Madison professor of political science. He’s also the director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on public leadership.“There’s an expression in politics that you don’t say something unless there’s something to say and surprisingly there was nothing to say here,” Owens said. “This is his first major public address on the issue so I think this in fact had a place in the spotlight.”
David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he believes a two-day head start in pre-processing absentee ballots is reasonable. Such a measure would have allowed Wisconsin to finish counting absentee ballots almost simultaneously with in-person votes, staving off now-rampant claims of voter fraud occurring in the middle of the night. “You would have been done by 8 p.m.,” Canon said. “For sure it would have taken care of the problem.”
Scheufele, Schweber and Dresang all agreed a recount would result in little to no change in the results. “Historically, Wisconsin recounts have never — in modern history — resulted in changes of more than a couple hundred votes,” Schweber said.
And while it’s not easy to ignore Indigenous lawmakers if they’re sitting across the table, they often can be pigeonholed, said Richard Monette, who teaches federal Indian law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think that, in the end, the scale tips toward being more good than bad,” said Monette, a former chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. “That’s fair to say, but I will say this is complex.”
“They would effectively be nullifying the votes of the 3 million plus Wisconsinites,” UW-Madison Law Professor Rob Yablon said. He added that is not allowed under current Wisconsin law and can’t see the Legislature trying to change it.
Simple self-care practices can be easily integrated into your daily routine, said Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, noting that you can listen to a guided audio practice while you’re doing chores. “You literally don’t need to take a single extra minute out of your day,” said Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry.
Tony Goldberg, a veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the head of the Kibale EcoHealth Project, said that he has seen the devastation wrought by respiratory diseases among chimpanzees. A deadly outbreak in 2013 at the reserve turned out to be the result of human rhinovirus C, the most common cause of the common cold worldwide. Until then, it had never been seen in chimps.
