A new report could guide literacy instruction in Madison schools and how education students learn to teach reading. … Some members of the task force, including co-chairs Lisa Kvistad of MMSD and John Diamond of the UW-Madison School of Education, spoke with reporters last week about the report ahead of its presentation to the School Board.
“It’s clear that vaccination will reduce infectiousness,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. And fully vaccinated folks who repeatedly test negative “are probably not a risk to anybody anymore,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told me.
Quoted: “It feels a lot like the criticism we heard five or six years ago of the GAB,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center director Barry Burden said in a recent interview.
Cash bail is used to ensure a defendant appears in court, but a judge can also consider danger to the community under Wisconsin law, said John Gross, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
“Omicron seems more infectious than delta and increases risks for both vaccine and natural immunity, but those with vaccine or natural immunity who are reinfected have far lower risks of severe infection and even lower risks of death,” Dr. Charles Hennekens of Florida Atlantic University and Dr. Dennis Maki of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health said via email.
Quoted: Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental health from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said those effects are to be expected when wildfires blow your way.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said
What is the fairest and most efficient way for citizens to pay for police and fire protection, safe streets, libraries, parks and other public services cities provide?
This is the real question University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Manuel Teodoro indirectly raised in his recent commentary urging elimination of the long-standing practice of municipal water utilities making payments in lieu of taxes — what are known as PILOTs — to municipalities. But Teodoro is mistaken in calling for an end to PILOTs in the absence of making any other changes to how municipalities are funded.
Dr. Ann O’Rourke, the Trauma Center Medical Director at UW Health, says 38 gun-shot victims have been treated through October of this year. “These injuries are devastating injuries,” said Dr. O’Rourke. “We should look at firearm-related injuries more like how we would look at a pandemic.”
In Madison, increasing COVID-19 hospitalizations could lead hospitals to again postpone some elective procedures like knee and hip surgeries if the situation continues to get worse, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health. “The next few weeks are going to be tough,” Safdar said. “If the hospitalizations continue to rise, I think that will put the health systems under enormous stress.”
With all the focus on a new COVID-19 variant, it’s easy to forget about the flu. But University of Wisconsin-Madison officials warn cases are picking up on campus and around the state.
It appears that something in the body, something biological associated with these disorders, may be at play. “That suggests there’s a physiologic vulnerability there in these folks,” said Charles Raison, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
OK, this can seem a little dramatic. But millennials have met economic woes as they’ve aged into life’s milestones — like when they entered the job market around the Great Recession, said Cliff Robb, who teaches consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Michele LaVigne, a former director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the preventive detention statute “is oddly not used in this state” but said Brooks’ earlier cases would not have met the threshold for using it.
“None of this guy’s cases would have qualified for preventive detention so bail had to be set,” she said.
On the other hand, the Supreme Court has ruled that failure to pay child support due to poverty can’t land the perpetrator in jail, John Gross, a defense attorney and clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, said Tuesday.
“When you talk about carbon cycles you really want to start thinking carefully about decomposers,” said Anne Pringle, a professor of botany and bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “A massive and coordinated effort to collect biodiversity data on a global scale is badly needed and will be very welcome”, she added, saying “there are good reasons to include all kinds of fungi in that effort.”
While people can relate to wanting to help a family member, his primary obligation as a journalist is to CNN’s viewers, said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. These revelations can damage CNN’s reputation, and all journalists, at a time people are already suspicious of the profession, she said.
Charcoal is difficult for many organisms to break down, said Thea Whitman, an associate professor of soil ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Fischer’s co-author. But, she said, “there are certain microbes that can decompose it.”
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, the director of infection control at UW Hospitals and Clinics, said she and other health care experts are wondering whether the omicron variant will be more contagious, how serious infections will be and how effective current vaccines will be in combating it. Safdar said it’s important to remember that even if existing vaccines are less effective on this new strain, they are still likely to offer some protection.
“Every decision that we make in this pandemic is going to be a trade-off between the risk and the benefit, and it’s what can one do to mitigate that risk,” said Safdar. “And of course, we don’t know how this is going to unfold fully yet. But it is a reminder that let’s do everything that we can on our end to mitigate things.”
Which is why Amaya Atucham, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, is conducting experiments on cranberry plants to see how to make them more adaptable to cold weather.
University of Wisconsin AIDS researcher David O’Connor noted: “We don’t have the sorts of interstate travel restrictions that would make it possible to contain the virus in any one place.”
University of Wisconsin AIDS researcher David O’Connor noted: “We don’t have the sorts of interstate travel restrictions that would make it possible to contain the virus in any one place.”
In just over a half-hour, a class of West High School students made a big dent in the warming climate.
“We all today found a menu of options that when we add them together we can reach our climate goals,” Wisconsin Energy Institute outreach and events coordinator Allison Bender told them.
Bender, through a partnership with the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs, had presented the students with the En-Roads Climate Change Solutions Simulator. About 100 Advanced Placement Environmental Science students at the high school saw the presentation and got to consider their own climate solutions throughout the day Tuesday in an event funded through the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviewed historical weather data at the UW Research Station in Arlington to see how dry 2021 was. The statistics date back to 1963.
He found this summer was similar to some of the driest years the station had on record, including 1988 when the station saw some of its worst corn yields.
“In the southern two tiers of counties in Wisconsin, we had some pretty dramatic drought conditions that farmers were experiencing. And it really didn’t let up until probably the end of September,” Lauer said. “We were dry most of that time. But having said that, we seemed to get a little bit of rain … that allowed the crop to keep going.”
“He was 17 at the time of the offense,” said Steven Wright, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “Having someone who looks like a child there might make some jurors see their younger selves in him or their children in him, and they might think, ‘What would my younger self have done or my son or daughter have done in his position?’”
John Gross, a defense attorney and clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said the Christmas parade attack seemed inexplicable.
“I would almost think the person would be mentally ill to do this,” he said. “But who knows about that?”
The NFL announced a partnership last week with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and three other research universities to study head impacts during football games and practices using mouthguards fitted with sensors.
The holiday weekend hasn’t started yet, but one UW-Madison researcher says he can already see more movement among Americans in 2021 than he did in 2020. Assistant Geography Prof. Song Gao says visits to transportation hubs like airports, train stations and bus stops have significantly increased since last year, according to anonymous cell phone motion tracking data.
The hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping season is here, or is it? “The production rate is down and even when they do get finished, you encounter the shipping problem,” says Nancy Wong, professor of consumer science at UW-Madison.
To assess how missed screenings might affect cancer mortality rates, the National Cancer Institute turned to Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research involves modeling both cancer epidemiology and infectious diseases.
“The question is really interesting because it’s a combination of the two areas I work in,” Alagoz says. His first estimates, unveiled in a widely read editorial published in Science in June by NCI director Normal E. Sharpless, showed that missed screenings might result in 5,000 additional deaths in breast cancer alone over the next decade. A separate group, looking at missed colon cancer screenings, predicted another 5,000 deaths.
When Alagoz produced his breast cancer estimates early in the pandemic, he thought the numbers might not be truly representative. So he worked to refine them, using better data with three powerful cancer models that incorporated numerous factors related to breast cancer—such as delayed screening, treatment effectiveness and long-term survival rates—and the nuanced ways they intersect to affect mortality over time. “Everyone can tell you what will happen immediately, but it’s hard to say what’s going to happen in five or 10 years,” Alagoz says. “If there’s a huge increase in smoking, you’re not going to see more lung cancer right away. You’re going to see that 10 or 15 years down the road.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the people Gableman is meeting with “are all election skeptics who have bought into the big lie.”
Gableman, who last year without evidence claimed the election was stolen, has insisted he has no preconceived ideas about his review and hopes to find that the election was run properly.
“It’s hard to see how he could ever reach such a conclusion given this set of oddballs who he’s working with,” Burden said.
Noted: “College campuses are just ideal habitat,” said David Drake, a professor and extension wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin, where a sizable flock likes to hang out near apartments for graduate students. “You’ve got that intermixing of forested patches with open grassy areas and things like that. Nobody’s hunting.”
Coexisting with collegiate poultry is not always easy. At California Polytechnic State University, the campus Police Department is occasionally called about turkeys chasing people. At the University of Michigan, a state wildlife officer killed a well-known turkey two years ago that was said to be harassing bikers and joggers. And at Wisconsin, Dr. Drake said at least a couple of aggressive toms were culled after repeatedly frightening students.
Even for fans of the turkeys, getting chased can be fearsome.
“There’s an element of humor, because, oh, it’s a turkey,” said Audrey Evans, a doctoral student at Wisconsin who runs @turkeys_of_uw_madison on Instagram. “But your fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.”
“This time of year, there is a lot of pressure to consume happiness — to show your love through products,” says Christine Whelan, a clinical professor in the department of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the end, it’s useful to remember that it’s simply not possible for everyone to be correct in believing that products work better for others, yet our studies show that people reach this conclusion. We buy books for the pleasure or knowledge we expect them to impart, creams for the lines they will hopefully erase, and cooking classes to acquire new skills. Do these products work? When we buy them for ourselves, we hope so. When we buy them on behalf of others, we know so. If this sounds discouraging, take comfort in the abiding truth that when you believe others will benefit more from these products, everyone else feels exactly as you do.
-Dr. Polman is an associate professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We don’t want to have a kneejerk reaction here and say ‘Let’s lock up a lot of people pretrial,’” said John Gross, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and also the director of its Public Defender Project.
Quoted: If the child may not be aware of the incident, adults can start with a general question, like, “Were kids at school talking about anything in the news today?” suggested Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If the answer is no, Wright said an adult may end the conversation with an open invitation, like: “Great. Lots of times there are things we hear about in the news that can be scary. If you ever hear anything that makes you feel upset, please know you can always talk to me.”
In some cases, especially if it’s expected that a child will find out about the incident, adults may want to introduce the subject. Wright suggested sharing something like: “There was a parade and someone injured some people at the parade. If you hear about it, I want you to know you can talk to me about it.”
Joseph Austerweil, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tested the technology using a few simple scenarios. When he asked if he should kill one person to save another, Delphi said he shouldn’t. When he asked if it was right to kill one person to save 100 others, it said he should. Then he asked if he should kill one person to save 101 others. This time, Delphi said he should not.
Interest in academic integrity as a topic of concern within higher ed over the past decade has ebbed and flowed, at least in the experience of Renee Pfeifer-Luckett, director of learning technology development in the University of Wisconsin system’s Office of Learning and Information Technology Services. “I see it as kind of a wave. Over the last 11 years, I’ve seen this topic come up, crescendo and come back down, come up, crescendo and come back down,” says Pfeifer-Luckett, who has presented on learning tech tools used to ensure academic honesty. “The students’ response has been stirred up due to COVID,” she adds. “Students who never had to be proctored remotely because they never took an online class—those are the students you’re hearing from now.”
“What the Chinese government is doing has already been done by the Japanese government, and the former is not as rich as the latter,” said Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Japan can provide free healthcare and education, but China can’t.”
Michele LaVigne, a former director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Post that setting Brooks’s cash bail at $1,000 is not necessarily unusual and that bail amounts can vary between jurisdictions and courtrooms. When Brooks was arrested earlier this month, she said, officials weighing what bail to request probably considered the seriousness of the charges and the fact that he was already out on bail in the earlier case and had continued showing up for court appearances.
“This time of year, there is a lot of pressure to consume happiness — to show your love through products,” says Christine Whelan, a clinical professor in the department of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We don’t want to have a kneejerk reaction here and say ’Let’s lock up a lot of people pretrial,” said John Gross, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and also director of its Public Defender Project.
Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor at UW-Madison Law School, says this case has also put the Wisconsin self-defense law in the spotlight. “Everyone has really been looking hard at the way Wisconsin self-defense law works,” said Klingele.
“There’s the recognition that driving these highways through the communities in the first place was wrong,” said Chris McCahill, managing director of State Smart Transportation Initiative, a transportation think tank based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And so now the question becomes, what to do about it now?”
Andrea Bill, associate director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said roundabouts sometimes led to more fender-benders and sideswipes, but saved people from paying a greater price.
“Like the Chauvin and Zimmerman cases, this case raises tough issues of self-defense,” Ion Meyn, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, told Newsweek. “Unlike those cases, this case involves four separate incidents, each requiring a complex set of considerations. Given how many people were shot or shot at, I think this case is even more complicated.”
“There is a significant risk that there is going to be unrest regardless of the outcome. Simply because the case is so politicized and whichever side prevails, the folks who support the other side are going to feel a grave injustice has occurred,” Keith A. Findley, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Daily Beast ahead of the verdict.
“While the heart rate may slow down, the heart continues beating and does not really stop,” Dr. Nizar Jarjour, a professor of medicine and radiology at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health, said in an email. “Right after the sneeze is over, the heart rate goes back to normal. You really do not die for a second when you sneeze!”
The flood of more gun owners could prove a dangerous mix in certain situations and furthermore, Rittenhouse’s acquittal can be taken as a win for gun owners and advocates, said Ion Meyn, an assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madiso
The defense had a “very disciplined message” throughout the trial, said Steven Wright, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. They consistently emphasized Rittenhouse’s stated intentions that night — acting as a medic and protecting private property — and the threats to his safety, Wright said.
“He’s a public figure now, and money might come in,” said Ion Meyn, who teaches law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I’m not convinced there’s nothing there.”
“There’s no way to get around … the intimidating factor of white men dressed in paramilitary garb with automatic weapons,” said Steven Wright, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To win their claim of self-defense, Rittenhouse’s lawyers had to convince jurors only that the teen had a reasonable fear that he might be killed or seriously injured, said Keith Findley, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin.
With Young Adult Literature: Outcomes and Processes,” by University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Gay Ivey looked at the impact reading had…
David O’Connor, a virology expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likens infections to “lottery tickets that we’re giving the virus.” The jackpot? A variant even more dangerous than the contagious delta currently circulating.
“From the defense point of view, to get a mistrial is generally considered a favorable thing,” said Ion Meyn, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “If you’re the defense, you’re definitely going to be doing this.”
Still, the defense must explain to the judge why what happened hurt Rittenhouse, said Ion Meyn, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.“You can’t just say the state gave me a lower-quality video and therefore I get a mistrial,” Meyn said. “That’s a losing argument for sure.”
“You can’t read anything into it in terms of the length of the deliberations other than it’s so intensely stressful for the parties,” said Ion Meyn, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“Like the Chauvin and Zimmerman cases, this case raises tough issues of self-defense,” Ion Meyn, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, told Newsweek. “Unlike those cases, this case involves four separate incidents, each requiring a complex set of considerations. Given how many people were shot or shot at, I think this case is even more complicated.”
Column by John, Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at the Wisconsin Law School at UW–Madison.
Quoted: “Wolves are moving south, and they have been for a while,” says Tim Van Deelen, a professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison with a focus on large mammals in the Great Lakes region. “We’ve seen wolves go through Chicago. We know one wolf was killed in a cornfield in Indiana. And if you think about the most direct route, they would walk right through Milwaukee. That is part of how wolves disperse. Is it common? No. But is it out of the realm of possibility? No.”
