Uncertainty can provoke a vicious cycle of anxiety, says Jack Nitschke, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Our brains help us get good at what we’re doing,” he says
“It’s not a fair election system when one side has such a severe election advantage, and it was done intentionally,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Prof. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that Mendelsohn’s prediction was unlikely.
“The backers of Jill Stein were young and disaffected from the political system,” said Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Typically, minor-party voters are looking for somebody that’s different from what the major parties are offering.” (The Libertarian candidate in 2016, Gary Johnson, received more than 106,000 votes in Wisconsin.)
It is not unusual for communications people within the CDC to be involved in an MMWR report before publication, said Dr. Patrick Remington, a member of the journal’s editorial board and a former CDC staffer.
That involvement, however, was previously restricted to officials within the agency who let political leaders know what was coming so they could be prepared with a communications strategy, said Remington, now associate dean for public health at the School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The state’s capacity for testing is very good and continues to increase,” Dr. Ajay Sethi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said via email.
Quoted: “We are in pretty uncharted economic territory,” said Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: In the last presidential cycle, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim found that Russian-linked disinformation campaigns focused ads on the swing states of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in particular, targeting both sides of the political spectrum with inflammatory posts on race, gun rights and increasingly, feminism.
“Everyone is rooting for them to succeed beyond anyone’s expectation, but it’s prudent to think about what happens if they don’t,” says Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We need to make sure we have back-up plans — and back-up plans to those back-up plans.”
Just days after moving ahead with a critical Phase 3 trial in the U.S., pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has hit pause, even as the nation tops 6 million coronavirus cases and 190,000 deaths. NBC’s Tom Costello reports for TODAY. (Dave O’Connor and Shelby O’Connor)
For as long as federal funding for school lunch programs has existed, the labor that makes those meals possible has been low-paid and underappreciated. “A lot of teachers were forming unions in the 1960s and ’70s, but there was a reluctance for cafeteria workers to do the same,” Jennifer Gaddis, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, told me. “There was this idea that you’re taking money away from free-lunch programs for kids. But historically, there’s never been a lot of national or state-level support within school nutrition, until recently.”
More than a century ago, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology was the Department of Home Economics, students learned in a Practice Cottage, a house in which they were required to live for a period of time to apply and test what they had learned in their classes. Learning through doing expanded and amplified what happened in the classroom and reframed the home as a place of innovation, change and possibility.
Quoted: “That will really look different depending on the community resources and assets,” Paula Tran Inzeo, MATCH Director with the UW Population Health Institute said. “Whether there’s a place for folks to go depending on the system or if they’ll be sending folks home, but you’ll want to separate people.”
Thorough testing can also affect which bodies are autopsied at medical examiners’ offices, where resources and staff have been strained, said Dr. Erin Brooks, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Someone whose cause of death can be confirmed by a positive test for the coronavirus, for instance, might not need to be investigated further.
For all of the attention on voting by mail, perhaps four in 10 votes — 60 million ballots — are likely to be cast in person this fall, either early or on Election Day. Overall turnout could well reach 150 million for the first time, up from 137.5 million in 2016, according to Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “We’re trying to make policies for the collective good,” Paula Tran Inzeo, MATCH Group Director with UW Population Health Institute said. “No single decision is made by one person.”
“It’s really hard to persuade people … to convert or convince the disinterested, but it’s easy to suppress turnout if you target people who are marginalized, like non-whites and female and younger voters,” said Young Mie Kim, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied misinformation networks on social media. “All you need to do is make sure they don’t turn out to vote.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has set aside such housing for sick students to keep them in Madison. “The concern about sending all these college kids back home is that we potentially increase transmission in many communities,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, an emergency medicine physician who is the university’s chief quality officer.
“I welcome the commission’s report, which continues to add depth to the ongoing global conversation about the science of germline editing,” says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is part of a committee organized by WHO that is examining how to best govern this controversial arena.
These experiments follow a long history of scientists openly testing vaccines on themselves and their children, but they have become less common in recent decades, according to a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: As explained by Jeff Pothoff, the chief quality officer at UW Health, the herd immunity approach assumes that people who get infected with COVID-19 develop antibodies preventing re-infections. Currently, experts aren’t completely sure how long antibodies can last.
But UW-Madison law professor Keith Findley said civilians need help accessing the PFC’s process for disciplining officers because it’s complicated and officers usually have legal counsel while residents do not.
Quoted: “It is hard to find these causal relationships,” said Nasia Safdar, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
How are people going to figure out how students are doing in school this year?
“I can’t imagine how this isn’t going to be the most challenging year that we’ve ever had for answering that question,” said Brad Carl, an expert on the subject who is with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “How are we going to tell?”
Quoted: UW-Madison Population Health Sciences Professor Ajay Sethi says it actually backs up what epidemiologists have been saying since March.
Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s consumer science department, calls this a “substitution effect.”
“It’s pretty clear people behave as if they have different pots of money,” he said. “Now I don’t eat out at all, so I have a couple of hundred dollars of new income not allocated to anything. I can substitute that money away from eating out and treat myself to other things.”
“Comorbidities” reported by the CDC include heart disease, obesity, diabetes and hypertension — conditions that can make a person more vulnerable to the virus. Each would be listed on a person’s death certificate, along with covid-19. Death certificates may also list sepsis, respiratory arrest, kidney failure or other conditions as the immediate cause of death, but those are caused by the infection. The virus remains the reason that they died, said Nasia Safdar, an infectious-disease professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The extent of the microbiome’s role in chronic wounds is “a really big question in the field of healing and repair,” notes Lindsay Kalan, a medical microbiologist and immunologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the study. While the paper’s results are “not immediately translatable” for patient care, she says, it is “definitely a step in the right direction.”
In the 1920s and 30s, cities and towns across the country built “serum depots,” says Susan Lederer, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These hyperlocal blood banks collected and helped distribute blood from disease survivors. While not much is known about these sites, Lederer posits they may have functioned similar to milk depots, responsible for the safe collection and distribution of milk in municipalities. Convalescent serum therapy was used to treat many feared diseases during this period, including pneumonia, measles, meningitis, plague, and scarlet fever. Serum therapy also formed the basis for state-led pneumonia control programs in the late 1930s, adds Podolsky.
There is a long history of scientists openly testing vaccines on themselves and their children, but in recent decades it has become less common, according to Susan E. Lederer, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What’s ethically and legally acceptable for testing and distributing your own medical product varies by institution and by country.
“Midwesterners don’t understand their history of racism, and so these things seem surprising. They seem to come out of nowhere or be new when they’re really a reflection of who we’ve always been,” says Christy Clark-Pujara, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Afro-American Studies. “It’s not terribly surprising to me what happened in Kenosha.”
Christy Clark-Pujara interview
Jim Kossin, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Wisconsin, says the warm ocean waters and exchange of heat between the ocean and atmosphere, plus the lack of dry air or strong upper-level winds, created an ideal environment for Hurricane Laura to rapidly intensify all the way to the Louisiana coastline.
“It’s like a funhouse mirror,” said Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “People look at the same facts and have wildly different reactions. It is troubling because when people are having such different reactions, I guess tragedies like this shouldn’t be a surprise. People are afraid of each other and that is a situation that creates danger for everyone.”
Young Mie Kim, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied misinformation networks on social media, said the accounts “look like coordinated behavior and share some similar traits with Russian tactics,” but she cautioned about making firm attributions.
Quoted: UW Political expert Mike Wagner helps highlight impactful moments from RNC.
Quoted: According to Dr. Christine Whelan, a clinical professor at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology, these pods are typically made of small groups of three or four students in a similar age or grade range in order to share resources.
Quoted: According to Dr. Dustin Deming, a cancer researcher at UW-Madison, patients getting diagnosed with colon cancer are typically in their late 60s and early 70s. But in the last 50 years, Deming explained that the number of colon cancer patients under age 50 has more than doubled.
Athletes today aren’t necessarily risking life and limb by staging protests — if anything, NFL players are sparing themselves some harm by canceling practices — but according to a professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, their platforms give them “a unique role to play” in effecting change.
“Their protest reaches ordinary people in the United States and worldwide,” Linda Greene said via email Thursday. “Their protest also touches and concerns the multibillion dollar interests of coaches, franchises, and media and other corporations, including advertisers, who depend on their labor.”
Noted: Hart Posen interviewed in video beginning at 3:13 mark.
Quoted: The idea of using azithromycin for COVID-19 was based on preliminary French research suggesting a benefit that later was found to be flawed, said Ann Misch, an assistant professor of infectious disease at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Separately, laboratory research showed hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin reduced viral replication of cells infected by the virus, though not azithromycin alone. But, she said, “there’s a huge chasm between an effect in cell culture and in humans.”
She said there is no evidence azithromycin is effective against COVID-19.
“If people are using azithromycin, I am sorry to hear that,” she said.
Quoted: “Many citizens and officers like body camera footage because it provides objective documentation about one portion of an interaction,” Cecelia Klingele, UW-Madison associate professor of law said.
The work also stands out because it documents such a widespread and lasting ecological shift, adds Steve Carpenter, a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. More typically, researchers have observed such shifts in a single location, often a lake, showing how dominance swings back and forth between two species as temperature changes or fishing becomes more intense, he says. The new results “show that regime shifts can spread among connected habitats and transform an entire coastline rather rapidly.”
Patricia Devine, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the study, poses a situation in which a tall, young black man is walking on a college campus. “A student might assume he’s on the basketball team,” she says. In this situation Devine suggests if people check the assumption, they will likely realise there is no evidence other than the stereotype.
“Part of what’s going on this spring is continuity from six years ago,” said Pamela Oliver, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Groups had actually never stopped. All those street protests that were happening 2014 to 2016 died down after the fall election, but the issue didn’t die down.”
Athletes today aren’t necessarily risking life and limb by staging protests — if anything, NFL players are sparing themselves some harm by canceling practices — but according to a professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, their platforms give them “a unique role to play” in effecting change.Mets GM apologizes for criticizing MLB commissioner as Mets, Marlins stage silent protest“Their protest reaches ordinary people in the United States and worldwide,” Linda Greene said via email Thursday. “Their protest also touches and concerns the multibillion dollar interests of coaches, franchises, and media and other corporations, including advertisers, who depend on their labor.”
“Rapid intensification events are more likely because of climate change,” Jim Kossin, a hurricane researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Wisconsin, told The Post.
The findings are exciting but “a stepping stone,” says Qiang Chang, professor of medical genetics and neurology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the work.
But how was this critical food provisioning infrastructure established? Who are the workers that make it possible? And where should it go in order to advance a more just food system? These are the questions Dr. Jennifer Gaddis seeks to answer in her 2019 book The Labor of Lunch.
Dr. Gaddis is an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this conversation, we discuss the politics of participatory research, the centrality of racial justice organizing to the success of the food movement, and the stunning connections between school food and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and uprisings against white supremacy in the United States.
Quoted: Richard Monette, director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, largely agreed that the messaging would not have much influence on Native people.
He doubled down on Greendeer’s statement that U.S.-tribal relations are not as bad as some make it seem, but he added the presence of these tensions opens Native groups up to these types of social media attacks.
“America has got this history of trying to separate the Native American from her land and from her wealth. That’s true, and that gets exploited by people throughout the world,” Monette said. “If we don’t want them to use this against us, then we should stop doing that.”
UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner said Democrats appear to be trying to win back some of those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but shifted to Trump in 2016. Trump’s narrow Wisconsin victory four years ago was aided by the fact that Clinton received nearly a quarter-million fewer votes than Obama did four years earlier.
Thongchai Winichakul, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the 2014 coup “brought back strong waves of ultra-royalism” to Thai society, boosting the king’s standing. At the same time, “it is no secret that the coup regime remains in power due to the support of the palace,” he said.
Interviewed: As the country struggles to rid itself of the pandemic, many people are left wondering why are stocks doing so well? Moses Altsech from the UW-Madison Business School discusses the economy on Live at Four.
If Tropical Storm Laura does undergo rapid intensification, says Jim Kossin, a researcher at NOAA and the University of Wisconsin, “It’s very likely that climate change is playing some role in that.”
The findings match what has been observed on a smaller scale in other studies, said Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Superspreading events, which provide the virus with huge numbers of hosts in a small amount of time, are driving the global outbreak. Delays in returning test results make it much more difficult to mitigate their effects; by the time those infected in such events know they’re sick, they have probably infected many more people
“We’re terrified of the possibility of a ‘twindemic,’” said Dr. James Conway, medical director of UW Health’s immunization program. “If we did get a particularly bad flu season and COVID-19 continues to have these surges, both the health systems and the communities would really be in great stress.”
Gay Seidman, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was the first person who ran by petition to win a Harvard Board of Overseers election, and who campaigned on an anti-apartheid divestment platform in 1986, said she had not expected to win; instead, she said, she saw the candidacy as “a way to start conversations about what’s an acceptable business practice.”
She said she would warn the members of the new slate that “change happens really slowly in institutions that are as complicated as universities,” but that “if you think of the goal as to start conversations, then they have already won.”
Akin to archaeological digs for the digital age, participants’ experiences also suggest strategies for maximizing code reusability in the future. One common thread is that reproducibility-minded scientists need to up their documentation game. “In 2002, I felt like I would just remember everything forever,” says Karl Broman, a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was only later that it became clear that you start to forget things within a month.”
Quoted: “Face to face campaigning is a known positive … the positive on the Republican side is they know this can work. One of the negatives is that we don’t know that it works in a pandemic,” said Michael Wagner, a journalism professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in political communication and behavior.
Other factors linked to low IQ could also contribute to the disparity, including lead poisoning and quality of nursery schools, says Maureen Durkin, professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the research. Some families have reported difficulty getting therapists to visit their homes if they live in a neighborhood perceived as “dangerous,” she says.
