Noted: Professors Rhodes and Max Besbris from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found several disparities after examining recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey.
Includes interview with Dr. Laura Jacques who teaches obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: “After every election, especially a presidential election, there is some sense among the people who voted for the losing candidate that the election was not quite fair,” Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ABC News. “But 2020 is different,” Burden continued. “Republican voters have been stuck with very low levels of support.”
Quoted: “We are here fighting for what Detroiters clearly said they wanted, which is property tax credits and cash compensation for the theft that happened through these illegally inflated property tax foreclosures,” said Bernadette Atuahene, a professor and property law scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
Dr. Katherine Gast had become accustomed to the odd social media comment or email from someone who does not support or understand gender affirmation procedures she provides to her transgender patients.
But Gast, a co-director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s UW Health gender services program, was blindsided by what happened when the social media outrage machine that has developed around transgender issues came for her.
On the afternoon of Sept. 23, a two-minute video of Gast describing gender-affirming operations was posted by the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, a self-described news service that acts as an outrage content factory for conservatives.
Quoted: “This is sort of a perfect storm for all the bad things that can happen,” said Keith Findley, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“She now has to deal with this person who is being disruptive,” Findley continued. “She has to somehow respect his ability to represent himself, while still maintaining control of the courtroom and making sure the proceedings can move forward.”
Michels is in his first campaign since an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate 18 years ago. Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, said such candidates “make mistakes sometimes.”
Michels is in his first campaign since an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate 18 years ago. Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison, said such candidates “make mistakes sometimes.”
“They say things that commit them to a position or a path that they eventually don’t want to be on so that creates inconsistencies with their positions as they try to walk back earlier views,” he said.
Quoted: Dr. Ajay Sethi, professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the shift is needed after the federal government ended its free, at-home COVID-19 testing program at the end of August.
“With the rapid at-home test, you can start taking precautions, and that was the beauty of the federal at-home test distribution program,” Sethi said. “But the funding dried out, and I’m glad to see that the state is going to make rapid tests more accessible.”
“A lot of these beliefs (Vallow and Daybell) had are classic psychotic beliefs,” said Ari Brouwer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin who studies the overlap of spirituality, psychosis and psychedelics. “Like the idea that someone you know is an imposter and some other spirit or person is in their body.”
In particular, as rocks erode, they disintegrate into sands and eventually muds made from clays. Clays tend to incorporate more heavy oxygen, explained Annie Bauer, an assistant professor and geochronologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was also not involved in this study. Subducting mud and mixing it into the mantle would result in melt—and likely zircon—featuring heavier oxygen than a melt that incorporates no crustal material or crust that experienced less weathering.
Mike Wagner, a professor and political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, said it’s important to remember that “the facts don’t matter” for many people who share misinformation. They often don’t trust mainstream news sources or political institutions. Find the shared experiences that bring you together and demonstrate you’re not on the attack or calling them stupid.
“Aim for the heart, not the head,” he said. “If facts worked, there would be no need to have the conversation.
University of Wisconsin Director of Community Relations Brenda González has been chosen by voters as the 2022 Woman of Excellence in the Wisconsin Leadership Community Choice Awards.
As director of community relations, González serves as UW-Madison’s primary point of contact with local community and nonprofit organizations. She is responsible for developing strategies to ensure the university is engaged with these organizations and the broader community.
Recent studies have been raising medical questions surrounding COVID-19. As an example: many are wondering if the vaccine is safe for women and their menstrual cycle, and can COVID-19 cause diabetes in children.
There is also still controversy surrounding masking and when it is recommended.
To answer some of the questions that have begun popping up recently, we were joined by Dr. Bill Hartman from University of Wisconsin Health in Madison on Tuesday, Oct. 4.
Minutes after he posted a tweet accusing the Republican running in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District of manufacturing outrage and failing to offer solutions, Eric Buxton received a reply from the candidate.
“Is that really your picture?” Derrick Van Orden publicly responded three minutes later. “So your real name is Eric Buxton?”
Van Orden then reshared the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy professor’s July 13th post, asking Buxton for his home address, who he works for, who he’s contributed to and who he’s voted for. He threatened to publish the man’s public information unless he stopped his “Stalinist practices.”
Less than an hour later, Van Orden tweeted four screenshots of Buxton’s LinkedIn profile. “This you, hero?” Van Orden wrote for his thousands of Twitter followers to see.
At the time, the ancient DNA field was “kind of a joke,” full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“That’s the origin story,” says Nicholas Hillman, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There became this general acknowledgment that individuals benefit a lot from college, so it justified a shift toward individuals paying.”
Classified documents, such as those containing nuclear weapons information, have restrictions on who can access them based on the calculation that the information’s release could pose a danger to national security, according to Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
“Flood insurance is not equally distributed in risky areas — homeowners who are more wealthy and in Whiter areas are more likely to have coverage,” said Max Besbris, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and coauthor of a recent book on the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
Alber is a farmer and the director of the Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She says farmers can capitalize on the global market brought to their doorstep.
“Some courts may give a little bit more leeway to pro se individuals, folks representing themselves,” said Adam Stevenson, a UW legal expert in federal and state criminal law.
At the time, the ancient DNA field was “kind of a joke,” full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It was Svante who came along and made this into a science,” Hawks said.
Quoted: In her research on multilingual and English learners, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Mariana Pacheco said children as young as 6 or 7 can pick up on the double standard that white, English-dominant students can be placed in a bilingual classroom and be celebrated for their bilingualism, while the same isn’t true for their Spanish-dominant counterparts.
As someone who studies language, Pacheco has always been fascinated with how people who are bilingual learn social knowledge by living in the margins between cultures. Having to code-switch can teach them how society and power function.
“We shouldn’t forget that that consciousness is a resource for them,” she said.
She hopes it serves them in the careers they pursue someday and the policies they support, but perhaps what she admires most is the way they keep trying in the face of resistance.
“They’re not paralyzed by it,” she said.
Noted: Patty Cisneros Prevo is Diversity & Inclusion Manager at the University of Wisconsin School of Business Undergraduate Program. She previously served as Assistant Director of Inclusion & Engagement with Wisconsin Athletics, where she assisted in the development and execution of the DEI Strategic Plan and created programs and initiatives to support a more diverse and inclusive Athletics Department. She’s also won five National Wheelchair Basketball Association Championships, and became the first female head coach of a collegiate wheelchair basketball team with the University of Illinois, winning the national championship that same year.
Friendswood, Texas, is the type of community that one might think of as a “best case scenario” when it comes to recovering from a disaster.
–Max Besbris, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, tells VoteBeat that he is not surprised that officials are being asked loaded questions about letting dead people vote, as both Byrne and Flynn “don’t have a good record of being fact-based and practical.”
The ramifications of the old laws are “huge, enormous,” said Jenny Higgins, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and director of the school’s Collaborative for Reproductive Equity (CORE).In Wisconsin, “health care systems are putting their services on ice because they can’t risk having their providers or patients commit felonies,” Higgins told USA TODAY. “It’s amazing that these laws that are this old are suddenly coming back to have an effect.”
MARTIN: And Chris Borland is a former linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers whose decision to retire in 2015 over concerns about brain injuries sent shockwaves through the sports world at the time. He’s now a mental health advocate who, among other things, consults with the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Chris Borland, welcome to you as well. Thank you for joining us.
CHRIS BORLAND: Pleasure to be with you.
In the series, UW researcher in the Department of Psychology William Cox investigated why stereotypes are so difficult to overcome. Stereotypes are perpetuated through self-reinforcement. The brain uses them to fill in information about unfamiliar people.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is wary of the state’s estimate.
Treves has questioned the DNR’s use of the model and fears the agency is overestimating the number of wolves. He noted the agency used data from surveys within 100-square-kilometer blocks to estimate the total area occupied by wolves. But, Treves said the state estimated average pack sizes based on their home range within 171-square-kilometer blocks.
“That means their grid cells are almost half of what a wolf pack territory is,” Treves said. “So, there’s a real risk that when they say two neighboring cells are occupied that they’re counting two packs where there’s only one.”
Some of the top research and analysis in the country on hurricanes isn’t happening by an ocean, but instead in Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison.
The Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is helping predict what will happen with Hurricane Ian.
In order to track the path and intensity of a hurricane, it takes some of the country’s top minds in science working together. Research scientist Sarah Griffin at the Institute says they do not need to be near a hurricane to analyze it. They can use satellites to provide the National Hurricane Centers forecasters with the data and predictions on Hurricane Ian.
“We give current analysis to the forecasters to help them make their forecast,” said Griffin.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said the spending dynamics are, in part, a result of Evers and Johnson being free from real primary challengers. For Michels and Barnes, Wisconsin’s August primary meant a later start to get their general election campaigns off the ground.
“The spending between incumbents and challengers might level out as election day approaches,” Burden said.
“It is striking that outside groups are spending more than the candidates themselves. Only Wisconsin residents get to decide who wins, but there is clearly tremendous interest from donors and party leaders across the country in what happens here.”
’We discovered that if we included a corona in the simulations of the Magellanic Clouds falling onto the Milky Way, we could explain the mass of extracted gas for the first time,’ said Elena D’Onghia, a co-investigator at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: But mobile markets can struggle to stay financially afloat. One researcher who has studied mobile markets for over a decade likens them to “revolving doors” because of how frequently mobile market projects start up and then stall.
“There’s often funding to start them,” said Lydia Zepeda, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor. “The question is trying to find a model that is financially sustainable — because they’re expensive.”
Noted: Even before the pandemic, nearly 20% of adults in Wisconsin had mental health needs, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. That percentage translated to about 830,000 people.
At about the same time — again, before the pandemic — a report by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute found significant coverage gaps across the state. The report said 55 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had “significant shortages” of psychiatrists and 31 counties need more than two additional full-time psychiatrists to make up for the shortage.
On the other hand, some worry the mental health care workforce just isn’t there to support the spate of new patients who’ll test positive for anxiety disorders.
“I support it,” said Dr. Marcia Slattery, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of UW Anxiety Disorders Program. “Anxiety is the most prevalent psychiatric disorder and impacts life globally. The fact that it’s so widespread and there’s really been no coordinated effort to address it, I’m in support of what they’re proposing.”
Quoted: The phone number shakeup coincides with a regional population boom, said David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab.
Demographers don’t typically focus on telephone area codes as units of study — they tend to be more interested in subdivisions used by the U.S. Census Bureau like political districts, Egan-Robertson said. Still, he noted, when an area grows, more residents and more businesses will probably need more phone numbers.
“When there’s a lot of population growth, there’s also a whole layer of commercial growth that may be going on,” he said.
In other words, when a region booms, the birth of a new area code could be one side effect.
Rosh Hashanah is often treated as a time to reflect on the previous year and focus on hopes for the coming year, according to Jordan Rosenblum, the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have probably 11 million Canada geese in the Eastern half of the United States,” said David Drake, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“It’s a double whammy. You have a hurricane with strong gusts and then a tail of intense rain that remained stationary over the south dropping two to three feet of water,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Ángel Adames-Corraliza, a native of Puerto Rico. “That’s a nightmare scenario.”
A new exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art explores stories of racism and resistance on the campus of UW-Madison. Kacie Lucchini Butcher, the curator of the exhibit joins the show to talk about the years-long effort.
For the second time in a year, a team of divers emerged on Thursday from Lake Mendota toting a remarkable piece of history.
Nestled in a corrugated plastic bed and floating on two rafts was a 3,000-year-old canoe — the oldest canoe to be discovered in the entire Great Lakes region by 1,000 years, Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists said.
Quoted: Rosh Hashanah is often treated as a time to reflect on the previous year and focus on hopes for the coming year, according to Jordan Rosenblum, the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
“It’s the beginning of the Jewish calendar, and like all new years there are, it’s a time for sort of taking stock, right? … What do I want to improve? You know, the equivalent of joining the gym in January,” he said.
Rosh Hashanah is often treated as a time to reflect on the previous year and focus on hopes for the coming year, according to Jordan Rosenblum, the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
That contrasts with other states and the federal government, which allow for both the listing of hazardous compounds individually and the designation of hazardous substances through other criteria, said Steph Tai, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor.
Microplastics are ubiquitous. The tiny plastic particles have been found in the air, oceans and food — they’ve even made it to our gut.
But for all the research on microplastics, there’s been little study on nano- and microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professors Haoran Wei and Mohan Qin are pioneering that effort.
Quoted: “I don’t think it’s definitely a bad thing, because we need to have avenues for people to get access to credit,” said Cliff Robb, a consumer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But some borrowers may struggle with BNPL “because they may have over-projected their ability to manage it.”
Quoted: Dr. Patricia Tellez-Giron, family medicine physician at UW Health, associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and Latino Health Council chair, has been practicing family medicine for 25 years. In that time, she’s been able to uniquely observe intergenerational care as her patients grow from infancy into new family systems as adults.
Tellez-Giron said it’s common, especially for Hispanic or Latino children, to be split between two cultures, which can feel like navigating two worlds simultaneously. This speaks to an absence in diverse counselors, Tellez-Giron said, and specifically, culturally competent counselors — that is, health care providers who understand and can uplift a client’s cultural identity.
“Often, the therapist does not understand our culture, why we are protective, how we all raise the kids together,” Tellez-Giron said. “And then (the therapists) tell the kids, ‘You have to be independent. You have to demand your independence.’ That creates, definitely, tension in the family.”
Quoted: Alexia Kulwiec, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers, said she would like to see the federal government return to providing tax incentives for employers who provide paid sick leave for people with long COVID.
Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, employers providing paid leave for up to two weeks to employees for COVID-19 could receive reimbursements in the form of tax credits, but the program ended in March 2021.
“It’s very disheartening to see that the policies that came out during COVID have essentially been reversed and undone, so they’re not there to protect employees today,” Kulwiec said.
“If [we] drink from the same water source, even if [we] don’t like one another, we’re sort of handcuffed, whether we like each other or not, we’re drinking from the same water, so we both have an interest in making sure that it’s good,” Manny Teodoro, an associate professor at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ABC News.
“Freedom of expression under the First Amendment is much different in a college classroom than it is in a K-through-12 classroom,” said Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. While pronouns are a new and “gray area,” she said, “there are plenty of cases that just show that First Amendment rights of teachers are strictly limited.”
Wisconsin Watch is joining a nationwide project led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers that aims to protect democracy by limiting the spread and impact of misinformation.
With a newly announced $5 million award from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, researchers will continue development of Course Correct, a tool designed at the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication to help journalists identify and combat misinformation online.
Quoted: “There’s a really diminishing number of people who are eligible for parole,” said Walter Dickey, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the state’s corrections department from 1983 until 1987. “And most of them have been in prison for a very long time.”
Danielle Yancey will moderate a panel titled “Lasting Impacts: How the Pandemic has Amplified our Health Inequities” on Tuesday, October 11, the second day of the 2022 Wisconsin Leadership Summit.
Danielle Yancey (Menominee/Santee) has worked in public service for nearly twenty years focusing on programs that promote social justice, education access, and equity. Currently, she serves as the director for the Native American Center for Health Professions at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Danielle grew up on the Menominee Indian reservation in north central Wisconsin. She is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with undergraduate degrees in women’s studies and social welfare, Master of Science in urban and regional planning, and holds a sustainability leadership graduate certificate from Edgewood College.
Quoted: Warmer air can hold more moisture, and when the conditions are right — like they were last week — the atmosphere will “wring out that moisture,” said Steve Vavrus, a climate and atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For those of us in the diaspora, his music is a way to connect to home. It’s comforting to listen to him refer to places I used to go to when I was living on the island,” said Aurora Santiago Ortiz, assistant professor of Latinx studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scholars and teenage TikTokers alike express a sense of intimacy with the music, which speaks to us as only a local can.
“There is simply too much uncertainty about what happens next,” David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, told The Daily Beast. “Will future variants outrun existing vaccines and therapeutics? What will be the impact of long COVID years, and potentially decades, from now? What other challenges can we not foresee three years into COVID-19 that will challenge us collectively in 2025, 2030, 2040 and beyond?”
UW-Madison School for Workers professor Don Taylor explains an agreement between UW Health and nurses to halt a planned strike and communicate amid disputes over the legal status of a union campaign.
Noted: The Canada goose population was so low that when the Endangered Species Act was passed in the U.S. in 1973, “honkers” were given serious consideration of being placed on the inaugural protection list, said Stan Temple, Beers-Bascom professor emeritus in conservation in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
In a diplomatic context, using a non-native language is an asset, not a handicap. Negotiations conducted in a non-native language display more rationality and are facilitated by greater empathy. But can this be extrapolated to European politics? In The Language(s) of Politics. Multilingual policy-making in the European Union (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022), University of Wisconsin political scientist Nils Ringe presents the results of several years of research on the linguistic dimension of EU-level politics. What are his main findings?
There are rules governing how credit card companies vet borrowers’ creditworthiness and disclose terms. In the buy now, pay later space, “it’s a little bit more Wild West in style,” said Cliff Robb, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin.
