Democrat Joe Biden led GOP President Donald Trump in Wisconsin and two other battleground states in a poll released Monday by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The virus, and people’s reaction to it, are at the root of the problem — not the Safer At Home order from Gov. Tony Evers that ran from March 25 until the state Supreme Court threw it out on May 13, says Steven Deller, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
“We were lucky in April here, I don’t know if we would be that lucky again,” said Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography for the applied population laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In early April, there was “very little disease circulating,” in the state, Jones said, noting that voting by mail “is clearly the safer option.”
Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spent eight years interviewing rural Wisconsinites for her book “The Politics of Resentment,” published months before Trump’s election. “I heard so many complaints about teachers,” she told me. “ ‘How is it that they can get off of work? People who really work hard don’t have time to go out and protest.’ ”
Steve Deller, agricultural and applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he agrees that the high number of Chapter 12 filings will likely continue this year.
Because the messages are individualized, the often-false or inflammatory content is seen only by a few people, which can keep racially charged or untrue messages from being exposed and refuted, notes Young Mie Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who specializes in studying social media.
“The dam is holding but there are dark clouds on the horizon,” said Kurt Paulsen, a professor at UW-Madison who is surveying housing providers in the county to get insight into the extent of problems and the impact of rental assistance programs.
“When a kid is at school for seven hours there is a good chunk of time that is social or play,” said Jason Horowitz, a clinical assistant professor in the UW-Madison Department of Psychiatry. “We have to recognize there’s more to school than learning. We need to try to replace all the different aspects that help a kid grow.”
Beth Graue is a Sorenson Professor of Early Childhood Education at UW-Madison and the director of the Center for Research on Early Childhood Education at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. She’s also a former kindergarten teacher. Her research focuses on how school policies translate into opportunities for teachers, students and families.
Quoted: UW Health psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain shared tips on how to stay physically and mentally healthy, while dealing with different kinds of social pressures.
Quoted: “There is increased concern not because of all the data that’s being collected by TikTok, but also because of who has access to the data, where it’s being stored and what the implications of that might mean,” Nicholas Davis, UW System Director of Information Security said.
Quoted: “I think the tricky thing with COVID-19 is you can’t assume that if you get it that you’ll do fine,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof with UW Health.
Quoted: “We’re seeing people with addiction being impacted by COVID stress a little bit more than the rest of the population,” said Dr. Michael Miller, an addiction medicine specialist at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “As a political institution, conventions have been in decline for a very long time,” said Byron Shafer, a political scientist, expert on conventions, and retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
“The players can’t leave the facility to go to restaurants. It’s very clear what they can and cannot do because they’re in a facility and many things are just not accessible to the players,” said Laura Albert, professor of industrial and systems engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This drastically reduces the risk.”
“The lottery is a form of entertainment for many,” said UW-Madison Engineering Professor Laura Albert, who has studied sports analytics.
Quoted: “Wow,” was the reaction of political scientist Byron Shafer, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and a scholar of conventions, to the news that Biden would not be present here.
“That was really all that was left” of a traditional convention, Shafer said of Biden’s now canceled-plans to accept the nomination in Milwaukee.
Malia Jones, a UW-Madison infectious disease epidemiologist who runs the Facebook page Dear Pandemic and is the mother of two elementary students, sent the letter to local officials last week. The letter, signed by 363 other people, asked for an immediate ban on nonessential, high-risk gatherings in public and private settings to further reduce the spread of the coronavirus. That could allow schools to reopen in person more quickly, the letter said.
Quoted: According to University of Wisconsin-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden it will take at least a few days until anything is official.”It’s possible for people to challenge the signature, the individual signatures not being legitimate or being signed more than once, or maybe one of the circulators not being eligible to circulate the petitions, that’s a pretty standard part of the process,” Burden said.
But during the early months of the pandemic, the disagreements — what one critical-care doctor called, on his well-read blog, the profession’s “intellectual food fight” — provided another layer of painful stress to some doctors already near their limits. “It became like Republicans and Democrats,” said Pierre Kory, a critical-care doctor who faced that tension himself at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. “The two sides can’t talk to each other.”
Joseph Salmons, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, chalks these similarities up to a number of factors.
Quoted: “People have no way of knowing if they get it if they will have these long term effects, whether they have scarring in their lungs or inflammation of the heart so this disease you don’t want to get because we don’t know enough about it,” said Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health.
The pattern has suggested that the company, controlled by the heirs of founder Julian Sinclair Smith, has harnessed its station group as a political vehicle. “Their purpose seems to be to [promote] Donald Trump and far-right opinion,” said Lewis Friedland, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin.
As with many of Trump’s comments, it’s difficult to tell whether or not he actually believes he has the power to delay the election, or if he’s simply kicking the beehive. Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin Madison spoke with Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on August 3, 2020.
Researcher Young Mie Kim was scrolling through Instagram in September when she came across a strangely familiar pattern of partisan posts across dozens of social media accounts.
Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in political communication on social media, noticed a number of the seemingly unrelated accounts using tactics favored by the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency, a group that U.S. national security agencies say carried out a multiyear misinformation effort aimed at disrupting the 2016 election — in part by stoking existing partisan hatred.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the list is not surprising given the geographic size of the counties and the number of farmers located there.
“We’re being much more vigilant about sanitization and as a result, there’s a lot more of these supplies for people or kids to get into inadvertently. We’ve had some very bad advice from out national leadership. There are people who are doing things that may have been said in jest that they don’t realize, because of who it’s coming from,” says Ed Elder, director of the Zeeh Pharmaceutical Experiment Station at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The calculus, though, is more complex than a binary choice of learning vs. health, or equity vs. safety, says Gloria Ladson-Billings, an emerita professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
And “getting back to normal” is the wrong goal.“Normal is the place where the problem was for a number of kids,” says Ladson-Billings, who is president of the National Academy of Education. The pandemic has uncovered longstanding “social and economic inequities. A specific group of kids were not doing well in school as it was. I think going back to that is not a remedy.”
“We believe that there’s going to be a connection between the communities of color that are around prisons, and the prisons themselves,” says John Eason, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who spoke to Science Friday over the phone earlier in the week. In an ongoing study with the Dane County Criminal Justice Council, “we’re going to be able to parse that out to see the role of corrections officers.” He suspects they may find officers are “basically incubators — or vectors between communities and the prisons that they work in.”
Steve Deller, a professor in the department of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said loss of benefits could be “another body blow” to the state’s economy.
“The board is stacked with people who are known to oppose use of tissue from induced abortions, regardless of the scientific necessity and regardless of the fact that using such tissue does not in any way affect whether an abortion will take place,” says R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Charo concedes that the board includes “real scientists who understand the research importance of this tissue.” But because it does not need to reach unanimity in order to reject a proposal, their presence “will not stand in the way of a majority dismissing it out of hand.”
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.”
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.
