Dr. Noelle LoConte is an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center. She said for some of the sickest cancer patients, the idea of contracting coronavirus is too much to take, and they decide it’s time to stop fighting.
“There has been increasing evidence that mindfulness meditation – or the ability to pay attention to one’s body, thoughts and emotions in a nonjudgmental way – can have an antidepressant effect,” says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The idea is that just like physical exercise builds muscle, we can build our mental muscles to become more aware and calm in the faces of challenges and stress.”
Some companies, including Midwest Prototyping, that already provide shields to hospitals are also starting to sell to consumers. Additionally, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers open-source shield design for its Badger Shield, which is being used both in hospitals and nonmedical settings, says Lennon Rodgers, director of the university’s Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab.
Quoted: As a professor of Black history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Christy Clark-Pujara said she sees the disparities told in history from the students in her classes. “They come in with a lot of fairy-tale,” Clark-Pujara said. “The vast majority of them have no idea how central and important race-based slavery was to the economic stability of the colonies, nor do they have an understanding of the centrality of slavery and the founding of the nation.”
UW-Madison law professor Keith Findley said both the monitor and civilian board would only have the power to make recommendations. The ultimate decision-making authority on hiring and discipline would still lie with the PFC.
Quoted: In the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch sided with their four liberal-leaning counterparts, a move that UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber said is unusual. “It’s not as though it would have been impossible for Roberts and Gorsuch to join that other opinion,” Schweber said.
Beyond damage control, it’s become common practice in leadership to work in moments of silence. As University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of psychology and psychiatry Richie Davidson, a confidante of the Dalai Lama, shared in a recent interview with my home institute, his team regularly takes “2-3 minutes between meetings” to sit in meditation. What this silence does for the problem at hand, far from turning away, is allow us to turn toward it—the problem within ourselves.
But beauty brands have historically enabled a “consistent erasure of people of color,” said Sami Schalk, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Because black folks have not been in power, the beauty industry has always marginalized us and told us that our bodies and hair is not okay and needs to be changed.”
Katy Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, said the economic incentives to boost users and engagement often inform how companies approach corporate social responsibility.
Small-dollar donations — defined as $200 or less — are important to both candidates and voters, according to Eleanor Powell, a political science professor at UW-Madison whose research focuses on the influence of money in politics.
Ruthanne Chun, a clinical professor in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and director of the UW Veterinary Care hospital and clinic, said she and 30 or 40 colleagues she contacted via a veterinary medical Listserv had never heard of the drive-thru concept before, excepting the switch during the pandemic to curbside service.
The number of guests should also depend on how much space you have. Monica Theis, a senior lecturer in the department of food science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, notes that you need to keep social distancing even as people move around. “What’s the setup — can you really keep all guests six feet apart at all times?”
Only about 40% of small firms have business interruption coverage, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and most of the policies explicitly exclude pandemics, according to Tyler Leverty and Lawrence Powell, professors who specialize in insurance at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Alabama, respectively.
There is disagreement about whether such old laws could immediately take effect or whether they would need to be re-enacted, said University of Wisconsin-Madison law and bioethics professor Alta Charo, because they have been rendered ineffective for decades.
Health care precautions for COVID-19 are built around stopping the droplets, since “there’s not a lot of evidence for aerosol spread of COVID-19,” said Patrick Remington, a former CDC epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I don’t think we’re at the stage yet where we can go all in on one possible explanation,” says Donna Werling, assistant professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study. Instead, the sex bias is likely due to a combination of many factors, which could include both those that protect girls and those that sensitize boys, among others, she says.
Patrick Iber, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said one thing about this semester that rings true among all students and teachers: “People ended it on terms that they hadn’t signed up for in the beginning.”
Quoted: UW Expert in Virology Kristen Bernard said that chlorine is one of the best disinfectants for viruses like COVID-19.”Chlorine is one of the best things to kill viruses, it’s gonna kill any virus not just the coronavirus, any virus like polio, any virus we can get from water like that,” Bernard said.
Quoted: “We watched for 8 minutes while a man slowly lost breath, and we heard him cry,” Dr. Alvin Thomas, a clinical psychologist, said about the viral video depicting the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. “That can be experienced as traumatic for quite a few people, vicarious trauma.” Thomas teaches at UW-Madison.
Cascio, a assistant professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, moved one floor down in his building to a two-bedroom apartment. Aside from his unit number, Cascio’s Madison street address and ZIP code stayed the same.
The number of people who are uncertain where their next meal is coming from is likely beyond anything seen in recent history, according to Judi Bartfeld, food security research and policy specialist with the Division of Extension at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The indictments could be a sign that more charges are to come in the agency’s investigation, says Peter Carstensen, an emeritus law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former attorney in the DOJ’s Antitrust Division
“People start to synchronize their laughter and their facial expressions over time,” says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in the science of emotion. “And that’s really useful, because it helps us predict what’s coming next.” Constantly making micropredictions of our partner’s state — and having these turn out to be correct — is, it turns out, crucial to feeling connected.
Noted: A three-day short course in ice cream making has been taught for decades at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Dairy Science in Madison. Students travel from as far away as Asia, often with a goal to make ice cream with indigenous ingredients and flavors.
“Certain ingredients behave differently when added to ice cream,” explains Scott Rankin, who heads the UW program. “Alcoholic beverages are one example. You can’t just add them” without consequences.
The novel coronavirus’s overall impact on internships and entry-level hiring could be huge. “I think this will end up being a pretty devastating event for college students,” said Matthew Hora, director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Cats are still much more likely to get COVID-19 from you, rather than you get it from a cat,” researcher Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said in a University of Wisconsin news release.
Quoted: UW Health pediatrician and sports medicine expert Dr. Alison Brooks urges them to set realistic expectation for what they can expect to do this summer and when fall sports come.
Interviewed: NBC15 sat down with Jirs Meuris, a professor at UW-Madison and an expert on law enforcement management to explain what defunding or disbanding a police force might look like.
Psychology Professor Diane C. Gooding: Especially now, people should not be forced to choose between risking their mental health and risking their physical health to go to their mental health practitioner’s office. It is imperative that folks’ mental health treatment experience little to no disruption.
But by 2018, young Harry Styles fans were exerting pressure from the bottom-up: They started bringing Black Lives Matter flags to his concerts and urging him on Twitter to recognize the cause, wrote Allyson Gross, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in a recent paper on how fans identify with celebrities and view them as representatives for their values. They were guiding him toward action, hoping “to mobilize his image for their own political purpose,” she argued. (The pressure campaign was largely successful.)
Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the USDA program likely focused on processors who already produce retail-size packages.
J. Wesley Pike, a biochemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there is not enough proof yet to suggest a meaningful relationship between vitamin D and COVID-19. Researchers will need to conduct further studies to determine if that vitamin is effective in combating the coronavirus.
Noted: I read this past week an article in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change by McKenna Kohlenberg, a Milwaukee area native who is in the home stretch of getting both her law degree and a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It uses Madison as a case study in what Kohlenberg calls the “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline.” She cites research that 70% of adults who are incarcerated and 85% of juveniles who have been involved with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate.
“Literacy strongly correlates with myriad social and economic outcomes, and children who are not proficient by the fourth grade are much more likely than their proficient peers to face a series of accumulating negative consequences,” Kohlenberg writes.
Quoted: “We found substantial variation across communities in the proportion of people who had these risk factors for severe complications,” said Maureen Smith, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “That finding suggests that matching community with the right resources needs to take into account that communities are different.”
The information compiled by UW researchers can help identify potential hot spots, said Jessica Bonham-Werling, director of the Neighborhood Health Partnership Program, which prepared the reports, at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. That in turn can help public health and other officials make decisions on where to allocate resources, from testing and contact tracing to community services, such as delivering groceries.
Quoted: While outside events — such as a big public gathering or road construction — do sometimes create major changes in traffic, those shifts are usually localized and very temporary, said Jon Riehl, a traffic engineer and researcher with UW-Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety (TOPS) Laboratory.
Douglas McLeod, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the impact of news coverage on social movements, said people consumed a wider variety of information today, pointing in particular to social media. T
Quoted: ARDS is the most common cause for COVID-19 patients being transferred into the intensive care unit, said Lynn Schnapp, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: Jim Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, said the good news is that being outdoors decreases the risk of transmission.
“However, since the primary transmission is from human to human, individuals in close quarters with little movement do have increased opportunity for higher ‘quality’ contact and subsequent infection,” he said in an email. “Obviously it depends on how many infected people there are in the group, and how careful individuals are about their own hygiene.”
“It’s really disappointing to hear that the police in Madison took actions that exacerbated the risk of transmission at the protest, like pushing people together into crowded spaces, forming riot lines, and using chemicals that make people cough and spread more droplets,” said Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist and assistant scientist in health geography at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Being outdoors might reduce your risk, but being in a protest where people are shouting and talking loudly — that might put more virus in the air. So, it’s really about staying physically distant from others and wearing a mask, so in case you’re sick and don’t know it, you reduce the chances of transmitting it to others,” said Patrick Remington, professor emeritus of public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“The challenge this year is that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic,” says Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s pretty exceptional. So any stress on top of that seems magnified.”
It is productive to share your personal views, as long as you don’t say “you’re wrong” about alternatives. Patricia Devine, PhD, psychology professor and director of the Prejudice Lab at University of Wisconsin Madison, recommends statements like, “I want to share with you what my perspective is, how I understand these issues, and how it makes me feel.”
‘As anticipated, since the Safer at Home order ended, we are seeing slightly increased volumes of hospitalized patients who are suffering from COVID-19,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, Chief Quality Officer at UW Health.
Quoted: Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health, said she noticed that the gatherings violated distancing recommendations. But she said she had to weigh which was the greater threat to society: COVID-19, or accepting what Safdar called “murder in broad daylight” by police.
Protests are another way of engaging in the political process — which is “essential,” said UW-Madison epidemiologist Patrick Remington.
“We have to get back to being engaged in society, we just have to do that understanding that there’s an infectious disease that could make you pay a high (price) for that involvement,” he said.
Protesting in a pandemic is about “harm reduction,” UW-Madison epidemiologist Malia Jones said, though the risk of infection cannot be completely eliminated.
If you are contemplating a play date, taking into account all these risks, you will need good communication with the other parents. “A start would be, hi, our kids have been asking about getting together, and as you know, this is a complicated conversation right now,” said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. A parent could continue, “I wanted to start with an open conversation, see where you are, tell you where I am, and see if it’s possible to send a consistent message to our kids.”
With their water-rich interiors, baobabs are part of the park’s attraction to elephants. The natural process of elephants digging into these trees doesn’t usually cause lasting damage. Baobabs have a unique ability among trees to recover their bark and tissue, says David Baum from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied the trees for more than 30 years. “Baobabs have coexisted with elephants for millions of years, which probably explains why they have evolved such a remarkable ability for regrowth,” he says.
Pamela Oliver, a sociology expert from the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in protests, said politicians sometimes blame outsiders for causing trouble as a way of pretending there’s no real problem within a community. That’s not what’s happening here, she said: Political leaders acknowledge Floyd’s death focused sharp attention on longstanding problems.
Sandra Newbury, director of the Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worked with the shelters to contain the virus. Thanks to the private donor, they were able to offer free testing and medical care for the adopted cats, eventually isolating hundreds that had been infected. “We were really aggressive in our efforts to not let it spread,” Newbury said. She believes identifying such a large number of infected animals and quarantining them allowed the authorities to eradicate the virus. According to Newbury, no positive tests have been reported since March 2017.
Financial education can reduce use of alternative financial services, particularly payday lenders, says Melody Harvey, a national poverty fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Increased eating and alcohol intake are two trends UW Health registered dietitians are seeing during COVID-19.
“People looking at those indicators, I think would say Trump is doing a reasonable job of managing the economy,” UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said.
Quoted: Dr. Jon Temte, an associate dean in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and a former chairman of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and Dr. James Conway, also at UW-Madison, is a leader over time in the American Academy of Pediatrics for immunization and infectious disease strategies.
More people than ever are struggling with mental health problems due to the novel coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout, and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Richard Davidson said there are solid scientific findings to support this.
Quoted: “It looks really similar,” Pamela Oliver UW-Madison Professor Emerita of Sociology said. “Racism is an issue and structural racism is still an issue, but how it works is still changing, moving and evolving.”
Germany’s demand for solar power “not only installed a lot of solar, but it catalyzed the learning curve,” said Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written a book on how solar energy became cheap. In China, where most of the world’s solar panels are now made, production processes were refined further to bring prices down to levels that compete with coal.
“It worries us,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison. “We wonder if this is a trend in an unfavorable direction.”
Patrica G. Devine, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies unintended bias, argues that there has been little rigorous evaluation of the training strategies deployed to combat it, and as a result we simply don’t know enough about what makes a difference.
Earlier this month the department store JCPenney filed for bankruptcy. Department stores make up 30 percent of total mall square-footage. We examine the ripple effects large retailers’ bankruptcy can have on America’s shopping malls. Guest(s): Jerry O’Brien
But other researchers stress that these findings do not constitute an outright proof of the weak gravity conjecture. Gary Shiu, a theoretical physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the belief that entropy should always increase when you take quantum gravity into account is “an intuition that some might have, but it’s not always true.”
But Judith Leavitt, professor emerita in the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says Mary Mallon may have only been directly linked to about 50 cases over a 12-year period when she wasn’t forcibly quarantined and may have been mislabeled due to fear and prejudice.
