Quoted: At American Family Children’s Hospital, RSV is contributing to a very busy time at UW Health Kids. Currently, RSV hospitalizations make up approximately 10% of the patients admitted, according to Dr. Joshua Ross, the chief medical officer and pediatric emergency medicine physician, UW Health Kids.
“We are seeing a record number of patients in our pediatric emergency department, with most coming in due to upper respiratory illnesses like RSV,” Ross said.
Quoted: “There is substantial voter engagement in this year’s elections,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but the larger number of early votes compared to 2018 is more a sign of changing preferences about the method of voting than a sign of much higher turnout,” Burden said.
“It reached its height in the mid to late ’80s, especially at the federal level, [with] people voting [differently] for president and Congress,” Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Vox. But as political polarization, the decline of local news, and the nationalization of local politics have increased in the past two decades, split-ticket voting has been dying a slow death.
“Very few states [have] senators of different parties, and they’re even elected in different years,” Burden, who co-wrote a book on this history, said. “Even the number of split Senate delegations, where senators are from different parties, is now at a relative low.”
“We may see prices rise on certain things like gas or milk, but it’s not necessarily inflation unless you see prices rising sort of across the board, across many different products and services,” says Jordan van Rijn, who teaches agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Financial Security.
Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project, agreed that the video showed standard procedures for poll workers in Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison limnologist Hilary Dugan was part of the team and emphasized how the water quality must be improved for the health and vitality of the lake. Promoting ecology and restoration of the area would be key.
The UW-Madison School of Education hosted an event this fall meant to help teachers facing these challenges in classrooms.
Suzanne Eckes, a professor of education and law at UW-Madison, said she understands the “sense of urgency around many of these issues” given her own background as a classroom teacher.
“Having been a former public high school teacher, I know the stakes are high and feel that I can speak to this group — I don’t want to say more easily than others — but I understand a lot of the issues, and having been a practicing attorney can kind of break down some of the legalese into what do you need to know? What are the key takeaways from a specific case or a regulation or federal or state law?” Eckes said.
Seeing all this, Democrats, including President Biden, have made desperate appeals to voters to take to the electoral ramparts and protect the nation’s democracy. But these entreaties may prove insufficient, suggested Mark Copelovitch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at a time when Republican messaging about gas prices and economic pressures have consumed the conversation. “There’s an ‘in your face’ aspect to this that is much more tangible than ‘democracy is about to collapse’ or ‘Wisconsin’s electoral and legislative institutions no longer meet basic criteria of democracy,’” he wrote to me in an email.
“Having a governor who would work closely with our congressional representation in D.C. to move forward on something like a new worker visa program for dairy workers, I think would be huge,” said UW-Madison political science professor David Canon. “That’s another issue I’d put toward the top of the list in terms of being really important for the future of dairy in the state.”
If you ask a kid where a particular game or rhyme came from, they’ll likely tell you they invented it, Rebekah Willett, a professor at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied childlore, told me: “They cannot trace it, and they have no investment in tracing it.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said this election may see a “different style of observer” who is more aggressive about wanting to have close inspection of the process and is potentially disruptive about challenging voters.
“These are not nonpartisan, disinterested people hoping to help out the voting process,” he said. “These are people who start with the premise of denying or being skeptical of the results in 2020 and that’s what’s motivating them to be involved.”
Noted: Over 270 sessions were offered at the conference, including a keynote address by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the world’s most prolific educational researchers. Ladson-Billings is Professor Emerita and former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor in Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The widening racial disparities between Blacks and whites is dramatic, noted Ladson-Billings, who pointed out that in 2019, about 30% of Black children lived in poverty, with 1 and 4 Black children facing severe food insecurity. With regard to public schools, she noted that 45% of Black students attend high-poverty schools compared to 8% of white children.
During the COVID pandemic, a number of Black children were only able to access the internet through their smart phones.
“Think about remote learning,” she said, adding that children struggled to receive their lessons via a small phone screen. “But that’s the reality.”
Additionally, Ladson-Billings noted that 75% of Black students who are considered eligible for advanced placement (AP) courses never take one, in part because so many of these students are enrolled in schools where these accelerated courses are not even offered.
“They’re bright enough, but there’s no access,” she said, adding that too many Black students are frequently discouraged from achieving their full potential by schoolteachers and administrators, even as suspension and expulsion rates for Black children steadily inclines.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said there is not a lot of pressure on Michels to provide more details because he will be working with a Republican-controlled Legislature.
“Michels has not served in government, so he is getting educated during the course of the campaign about what he might do as governor,” Burden said.
Burden also said a broader trend emerging in 2022 is candidates “not really making themselves open to public questioning,” noting the race’s single debate, which hasn’t happened since the 1990s.
“Candidates have decided to package themselves through press releases, controlled events and social media, which means they’re not really called upon offer specifics,” Burden said. “That’s not just a Wisconsin thing — that is happening across the country this year.”
Noted: Nick Buttrick is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Parenting tweens can be challenging for parents, because their ‘little kid’ who liked to cuddle, learn about the world around them, and was generally happy has suddenly been replaced with a moody, impulsive, physically maturing little human says Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. As frustrating as this might be sometimes for parents, it is all developmentally normal.
Wisconsin’s workers might be riding a new wave of unionization, but they’re still swimming against the tide, said Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison think tank COWS. She pointed to the ways corporations have consolidated power in recent decades, gaining market share and suppressing wages.
“I don’t want to give the impression that this is some sort of workers’ paradise in any sector,” Dresser said. The tight labor market gave employees some additional power, “but there’s a lot of ways that power has shifted against workers over the last 40 years that one year doesn’t really make up for.”
Quoted: “There could likely be big changes to election law in Wisconsin between 2022 and 2024,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “There’s an array of things that have been proposed in not very concrete ways.”
Quoted: Ross Milton, an assistant professor at La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the pass-through provision is “still a hotly debated topic among tax policy people.”
“I think these pass-through provisions have been criticized because much of the benefit of them goes to very high income and/or high wealth households,” Milton said. “And presumably the Johnson family is a high-income household.”
“We discovered neutrinos reaching us from the cosmos in 2013,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and part of the IceCube collaboration who authored the paper, “which raised the question of where they originate.”
“A pattern emerged but we weren’t sure whether we were seeing fluctuations in the data or if this was real,” says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
These ghosts, as Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IceCube team member put it, are fit to solve two major mysteries in astronomy. First off, a wealth of galaxies in our universe boast gravitationally monstrous voids at their centers, black holes reaching masses millions to billions of times greater than our sun’s. And these black holes, when active, blast jets of light from their guts — emitting enough illumination to outshine every single star in the galaxy itself. “We don’t understand how that happens,” Vandenbrouke simply summarizes.
“Mostly what regulators have is moral appeal and they’ll wag their finger,” said Manny Teodoro, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on public policy and water.
“Considering there are more than 100 types of A and B rhinoviruses,” notes Yury Bochkov, a respiratory virus specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, “you would have to put all 100 types in one vial of vaccine in order to enable protection” against just A and B rhinoviruses. Add in all the C rhinovirus types (more than 50), then cram in RSV’s virus types (more than 40), and that same vaccine would have to be packed with more than 200 strains. Even then, it would only offer protection against about two-thirds of all common colds. “That was considered the major obstacle in development of those vaccines,” Bochkov says.
The trick is to develop a bird vaccine that works for a long time even as the virus mutates. Adel Talaat, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is developing a so-called “nanovaccine” that blends tiny particles of several different bird flu strains.
In state courts across the country, there were 143 election-related lawsuits in 2018, 203 in 2020 and 272 in 2022, according to the preliminary findings of UW-Madison law professor and State Democracy Research Initiative co-director Miriam Seifter along with staff attorney Adam Sopko.
“An election litigation deluge may undermine voter confidence in the electoral system,” Seifter and Sopko wrote in media outlet The Conversation. “Litigation over every detail of the election process lays the groundwork for false narratives or subsequent challenges to the validity of an election.”
According to University of Wisconsin-Madison Law Professor Howard Schweber, “it makes it sound as though the law that’s being tested has no exceptions whatsoever. So it’s misleading.”
Quoted: Prior to the Great Recession, University of Wisconsin-Madison applied economics professor and community development specialist Steven Deller said there was a typical “flow” of new houses being developed.
Construction of new housing “plummeted” after the housing bubble burst in 2008 and never came back, Deller said.
He said many of the developers in the starter home market were crushed during the Great Recession, banks have become hesitant to make loans for starter home developments and the cost of building materials continues to rise.
“The economics are just not in favor of building those starter homes,” he said. “And that’s where a lot of communities are really struggling because the developers that they do have that are interested are saying, ‘I just can’t make it pencil out.'”
Quoted: Administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are also coming up with ways to solve the current training problem, but they’re also beginning to worry about future recruitment.
Dr. Laura Jacques, an assistant professor and the director of medical student education at UW-Madison’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, said the repercussions could be felt for years.
“I’m worried that we’re going to have a challenging time recruiting the best residents to our program because of these concerns, and not just for obstetrics and gynecology, but for all types of medicine,” she said.
Quoted: Julie Underwood, former dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Education, said the proposal would require a massive amount of money to fund while also meeting constitutional obligations to provide adequate public school education.
“If you take the 133,000 students that are in private schools right now and give them vouchers, and you run two parallel structures, I don’t know how the Legislature would would manage to fund that,” Underwood said. “And if they further reduce the amount of funding giving to schools at this time, I really think that we’re going to go below the standard that the Wisconsin Supreme Court set.”
The model I use because it was so helpful for me refers to Eudaimonic (or Psychological) Well-Being.” It’s Carol Ryff’s model out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. To make the model stick, I came up with the acronym PAGES.
“The sample size seems concerningly small for devices that affect the health of millions of patients,” said David Sterken, a hospitalist at the University of Wisconsin who spoke before the panel, which met virtually for eight hours.
Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the Election Research Center, talked about the 2022 midterm elections in the battleground state of Wisconsin.
With little to no chance of receiving 60 votes on the bill to defeat the filibuster, Democrats likely brought the bill to use against Republicans in the upcoming election, said David Canon, a political science professor at UW-Madison.
Barry Burden quoted.
However, Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while “this would clearly be a conflict of interest for a business or financial reporter, I doubt Kudlow’s audience views him as that and I don’t recall his laying claim to being a journalist.” She added that Kudlow is clearly a “commentator and is being transparent with his audience about an entanglement that could be seen as a conflict.”
“Is that a form of recycling? Kind of,” said George Huber, the Harvey Spangler professor of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Melting down grocery bags degrades the plastic, a process the industry calls “downcycling.”
Autonomous flying drones could deliver life-saving defibrillators to people experiencing cardiac arrest, says a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who’s been involved in the research.
Ambulances aren’t always fast enough, especially in rural areas where an automated external defibrillator, or AED, isn’t available.
Survival rates drop by as much as 10% for each minute that passes without treatment, according to Justin Boutilier, an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering and co-author of several medical journal articles on the use of drones to deliver AEDs.
Noted: The state’s two other OB-GYN residency programs − at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and Aurora Sinai Medical Center in Milwaukee − are vulnerable as well.
An Aurora spokesperson said Thursday the hospital also plans to send OB-GYN residents out of state, though they would not provide specifics of the arrangement. A UW doctor said they are in the process of determining a course of action.
“We are committed to following the ACGME mandates of training our residents and putting out well-trained obstetrician gynecologists,” said Dr. Laura Jacques, an assistant professor and academic specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. “We are actively exploring options.”
In many cases, it’s done by bipartisan teams of poll workers, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison. That’s not the case everywhere, though it’s common that it’s performed by at least two people — even two staff members — said Jennifer Morrell, a partner at The Elections Group, which works with election officials to improve processes.
Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum) are among the most popular houseplants, and they are nontoxic to children, dogs, and cats. According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, these plants can tolerate some neglect and grow well in almost any home environment. Perfect for beginners, spider plants make beautiful hanging greenery and are available at nearly any garden center. Not only are they pretty and easy to grow, but these plants are also efficient at improving the air quality in your home by removing air-borne toxins like formaldehyde and carbon monoxide
Artist Dakota Mace is leading the development of a curriculum dedicated to cultural appropriation within the Center for Design and Material Culture at UW-Madison. The curriculum examines what cultural appropriation may look like through design as participants explore larger themes of privilege and intent versus impact. Mace, who is Navajo, hopes this work encourages others to consider the stakes of cultural appropriation.
It’s hard to believe that hard cider almost disappeared in the U.S. In a time we like to call the “golden era of hard cider,” 18th-century American colonists were known to offer a glass of the stuff to house guests (via New England Historical Society). Sadly, Prohibition led to the chopping down cider-specific apple trees, devastating the industry for decades, according to the University of Wisconsin. The industry started to pick up again in the 1980s. Thanks to a massive resurgence in all things craft alcohol, the industry’s market value will nearly quadruple by 2027 (via Market Data Forecast).
“Wisconsin is really at the very edge of the carp invasion front,” said Zach Feiner, a research scientist with the DNR and UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology and coauthor of the study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. “They’re adapted for warmer temperatures.”
As an added bonus, humans would also die on all the moons of the Solar System. Betül Kaçar, a professor and lead scientist at the NASA Center for Early Life and Evolution at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told Newsweek that, aside from not being able to breathe, people could experience being “bathed in irradiation as you pass through Jupiter’s magnetic field lines” on Europa, being “flash-frozen in a lake of methane and ethane” on Titan, or being “blasted out into space in an icy geyser” on Enceladus.
“There is a nationwide movement this year among conservative election skeptics and (Donald) Trump supporters to recruit election observers and aggressively challenge proceedings,” Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said in a phone interview Thursday. He fears those challenges will disrupt election proceedings and slow down the process, but doubts they will lead to any significant changes to the results of the crucial midterms, for which early voting is already underway.
Finn Enke, a professor studying the history of gender and sexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says historically, anti-LGBTQ movements rise and fall with electoral cycles. “It’s organized by people who are funding specific politicians and a specific political agenda,” Enke says. “It really is about political power and not about gender and not about sexuality.”
Keith Findley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School told Newsweek that it is unlikely the post will have any impact on the case.Even if the poster was determined to have been a member of the jury, Findley said it means that person acted in violation of the judge’s instructions, but it does not mean it invalidates the jury’s verdict.
The run-up to Election Day is often a contentious time.In recent years, it has also become a litigious time – parties increasingly turn to courts to resolve disputes about the rules for voting.
Becky Schachter, a nurse with University of Wisconsin Health, has been in the field for 25 years. She said that experienced nurses just keep leaving and that she’s never seen this many vacancies.
Spiritual psychosis expert Ari Brouwer discussed Lori Vallow’s possible religious psychosis. According to Religion News Service, Brouwer is a Ph.D. student from the University of Wisconsin. He studies the similarities between spirituality, psychosis, and psychedelics and says Vallow displayed warning signs.
“There’s been a lack of a proactive message from the Barnes campaign top to bottom,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison, who added that Barnes’ messaging around the economy was more effective in the summer and that he’s had a focus on defending himself since.
Russia specialists warned that the intervention could embolden Putin and loosen US commitment to lead the international coalition in support of Ukraine. Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “The biggest problem in the letter is that it may weaken US support for Ukraine by fostering the appearance of divisions among those who support Ukraine.”
“It reached its height in the mid to late ’80s, especially at the federal level, [with] people voting [differently] for president and Congress,” Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Vox. But as political polarization, the decline of local news, and the nationalization of local politics have increased in the past two decades, split-ticket voting has been dying a slow death.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Gender and Sexuality Campus Center (GSCC) works to support and foster community among UW’s trans and queer students. The organization planned a day-long community-building event and trans film festival on Oct. 24, the same time as conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s talk at Memorial Union. GSCC organized several other initiatives throughout the fall to support LBGTQ+ students on campus.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) announced the monetary amount it will contribute to research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the 2022-23 academic year last week. A total of $130 million will be used to support its programs.
The potential for adults returning to school to reach goals of obtaining degrees and knowledge is often most affected by external factors that can make everyday life and returning to academics a difficult balance. The UW Odyssey Project is a remedy to that problem, and over their 20 years working to bring adults to higher education, they have gone the extra mile every time.
The Odyssey Project started in 2002 and quickly started changing lives. Acting as an avenue for adults to return to higher education through the resources and knowledge that run throughout UW-Madison has allowed the Odyssey Project to serve a plethora of people each year to achieve their academic, career, and personal goals. A celebration at the UW-Memorial Union was only fitting.
Hospitals across the nation are experiencing a surge in respiratory illnesses among children.
And hospitals in Wisconsin aren’t immune.
University of Wisconsin assistant professor of adult and pediatric infectious disease Dr. Joseph McBride says practitioners are “without a doubt” seeing higher numbers of respiratory issues in children. He specifically points to “respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.”
“RSV is a common seasonal virus that pediatricians, healthcare providers, young parents and families are well aware of year-in and year-out,” McBride says. “What’s interesting about RSV is that in the setting of COVID and all the mask use, it kind of threw off our normal seasonality of it. Usually it’s pretty predictable each year starting toward the end of fall, in to the winter during our normal cough-and-cold season that we would see spikes in RSV.”
Quoted: “They vote for the Democrats. And it’s been pretty consistent,” said Marquez, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in Chicano and Latino studies.
“The Democrats have to have a good strategy for reaching out to Latino voters. They have to make contact on the ground. They have to convince them that the election is important, that their vote matters, and that they should go to all of this trouble to get out and vote for a party that oftentimes doesn’t deliver,” he said.
Morning rounds at the animal hospital on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus start at 8 a.m. sharp. That means the days begin around dawn for veterinary medicine students in their fourth and final year of school, when clinical rotations largely replace classwork.
Quoted: Some studies have shown more than 60% of the inflation Americans are feeling today can be directly attributed to the supply chain shortages of last year, said Mark Copelovitch, a political science and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Second is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is a major exporter of grain and Russia is a major supplier of oil, so wartime disruptions and U.S sanctions on Russia have contributed to rising food and gas prices.
Stimulus spending has also been a factor.
“The other part of the inflation is the demand side, especially when we were all sitting home, spending out stimulus checks when we could not go out (during the pandemic),” Copelovitch said.
