Jake Baggott, associate vice chancellor and executive director of University Health Services at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said there is at least a 20 percent increase in mental health visits this fall compared to last year, building on what was already a 6 percent increase in demand for mental health services from academic year 2019-20 to 2020-21.
“It is a disservice to fund individuals to come into environments that continue to drive them away,” said Angela Byars-Winston, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who led a 2019 National Academy of Science study on effective mentoring in STEM fields. “We know there are things institutions can do to change the environment instead of focusing on students who are not broken.”
“I do think it’s harmful,” Barry C. Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said of the review. “It’s obviously amateurish and uncoordinated and irresponsible and open-ended and partisan. The people who are leading the effort have already decided they think the election was fraudulent, or they’re distrustful of the outcome. It’s a violation of all the standards you’d use in a usual election audit or review the state might do.”
Damon Smith, a UW-Madison Plant Pathologist, has been closely studying the fungus in Wisconsin for the last five years. “Based on some of our work in 2018, we’re anticipating 30–50-bushel losses in corn this year,” Smith said.
“It’s an indicator of how prices have increased,” said Karen Holden, Professor emerita for consumer science and public affairs at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.
Quoted: Adjusting disease rates for age is a common practice in epidemiology. The practice is crucial for understanding the impacts that a disease like COVID-19 has on a large and varied population.
“We adjust for factors like age because we identify factors like age as being confounders,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: COVID-19 vaccination rates tend to be lower in rural communities, and the same goes for rural areas in Wisconsin. The difference between the most and least vaccinated counties in Wisconsin is as much as 40 percent said Dr. Jonathan Temte, an associate dean with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who studies vaccine and immunization policy.
“We can’t expect that medical systems who have earned the mistrust of many marginalized groups will now be trusted because of Covid. It doesn’t work that way,” said Tiffany Green, a population health scientist and economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Mike Wagner, professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the conflict between Vos, Gableman and Brandtjen is typical of recent dynamics within the Republican Party and shows a “crash to be as close to President Trump as possible.”
Former President Donald Trump has continued to push false claims of election fraud across the country in the year following the election.
“It’s really striking to see elected officials and appointed officials engaged in a back-and-forth about who can be more skeptical about an election that was clearly shown repeatedly to be extraordinarily fair and very well conducted,” Wagner said.
Still, Wisconsin, a state whose people enjoy a reputation for embodying the concept of “Midwestern nice,” stands out. Mark Copelovitch, (Ken) Mayer’s University of Wisconsin colleague, argued that everything that has become commonplace at the national level, including the transformation and radicalization of the Republican Party, has been part of Wisconsin’s political experience for the last 10 years. “Wisconsin has been the canary in the coal mine,” he said.
“I can see where this is going to end up going to people who were going to move to a community anyway,” said Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies economic development. “Or maybe you do manage to attract someone. Is that really the ideal resident, someone who was paid?”
Soon after that, these same scientists–Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–published a paper proving that they had done just that. I wrote another article, asking:
“When you have 51 percent of the vote, it had been generally [accepted] that you don’t govern like you’ve got 95 percent of the vote,” said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “In 2011, that norm was abandoned.”
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said she sees no immediate problem with the campaign but generally advocates for news organizations to take every opportunity to “pull back the curtain” and educate their audiences about the role ethics plays in their business decisions.
The first session included Pat Setji, general manager of screening at Exact Sciences; Betsy Nugent, chief clinical research officer at UW Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health; and Ayesha Ahmed, general counsel and vice president of human resources at Nexus Pharmaceuticals.
Quoted: Every decade, states have to draw new maps after the census to rebalance the population in each district. For more than 50 years, the courts had the final say in Wisconsin because Democrats and Republicans split control of state government.
Not in 2011, when the GOP controlled both the legislative and executive branches.
“That’s when we got these really gerrymandered districts,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon.
Canon believes federal courts may revisit the issue after the science becomes more established.
“If the state courts can get some consensus on a measure or a couple of measures that show a partisan gerrymander, then maybe 10 years from now, this comes up again, and federal courts will say, ‘The states did this pretty well, and we do have accepted measures,’” Canon said.
Deaths caused by COVID-19 in Wisconsin surpassed 8,000 a year-and-a-half after the pandemic reached the state. As vaccination levels remain plateued, new medical developments to combat the virus and its deadly disease progress. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Nasia Safdar with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health explains.
Noted: In 2000, Dr. List and Dr. MacMillan — working independently of each other — developed a new type of catalysis that used organic molecules called asymmetric organocatalysis.
Organic molecules, such as carbohydrates, are called that because they build all living things. The researchers discovered “cheaper, smaller and safer” catalysts that used organic molecules had the same rich chemistry as metal compounds, according to Tehshik Yoon, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their technique was also simpler and more environmentally friendly.
Video: Dairy is a top industry in the Badger State, where more than a million cows produce some of the nation’s best cheese, milk and ice cream products.
Quoted: Megan Moreno, principal investigator of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says Haugen’s interpretation of the internal research squares perfectly with other work done on social media, especially Instagram.
“For a certain population of youth, exposure to this content can be associated with diminished body image, or body image concerns,” Moreno says. “I didn’t feel like it was tremendously surprising.”
Quoted: Simone Schweber, a professor of education and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s a common misconception that it’s better to avoid talking about painful subjects in history and current events.
“One of the easy pitfalls is that you think sometimes by teaching this stuff that it necessarily replicates,” Schweber said. “That if you teach about the history of racism that you’re necessarily replicating the institutions that are racist. And I understand where that fear comes from, but I think it’s a real disservice to what it means to teach.”
Quoted: “Natural infection does produce an immune response, but not all immune responses will be durable enough and heightened enough to ward off reinfection at some point,” said Ajay Sethi, faculty director for the Master of Public Health program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine & Public Health. “So the question becomes, which source of immunity will provide more reliable protection — and vaccines afford that.”
Quoted: Power plant and industry emissions didn’t see a steep drop or any decline during stay-at-home orders. The findings are consistent with what one would expect to see from people traveling less during the pandemic, said Tracey Holloway, professor with the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“They did not see that much of a change in pollution from power plants and some industries, and that also is consistent because we’re still using electricity,” said Holloway. “We’re still running our air conditioners and the kind of things that drive a lot of demand for electricity were still happening.”
UW Health’s Chief Quality Officer Dr. Pothof commented on two-thirds of adults in the U.S. now being fully vaccinated, nearly 2.8 million people receiving their booster dose and the CDC’s guidelines for holiday travel.
In an earlier conversation with CNET about long COVID, Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin, said, “Vaccination serves two purposes One, of course you want to get it before you have COVID so it protects you from it, but even in the people who have had the infection, anecdotally, it seems that vaccination helps with the symptoms of long COVID.”
Many businesses are adopting sustainable principles and practices, which is changing the way business and economics are taught in higher education. We talk about how the UW-Madison School of Business is integrating concepts of environmental sustainability into its curriculum, and we learn how this fits within the new framework of capitalism.
Quoted: Steve Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he thinks the new technology makes the plant a worthwhile investment for state tax credits and will hopefully help the state’s dairy industry move into the future.
“This is a pretty good shot in the arm for the Wisconsin dairy industry,” Deller said. “Any time we see new investment like this is a positive sign because a lot of the growth in the dairy industry has really not been occurring in Wisconsin.”
Nasia Safdar, the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin Hospital: It really shouldn’t. Quadrivalent vaccines have been available and most of us have been getting those for years. There is a high dose flu vaccine that is recommended for people who are older, and the arm tenderness might be a little bit more and it takes a little bit longer to recover.
Tenayuca’s drive to lead and organize union workers stemmed from her personal understanding of their plight. “It wasn’t by coincidence,” Marla Ramírez, assistant professor in the Department of History and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells Teen Vogue. “She knew the people she was organizing. She grew up with them. She had similar experiences of discrimination, inequality, hunger, and poverty,” Ramírez explains. “She was fighting for herself when she was fighting for others too.”
University of Wisconsin oncologist Noelle LoConte has long felt that the link doesn’t get enough attention—even among oncologists. She is the lead author of a 2017 statement on alcohol and cancer from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which calls on these specialists to take the lead in addressing “excessive exposure to alcohol” through education, advocating for policy changes, and research.
Nicholas Smith, instructor of wine science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also said he is not aware of anyone else in this state who is making low-intervention wines on the scale that Rasmussen is.
“I’m happy to see what Erin is doing, drawing customers into the local industry, while being introspective into how we produce products and being transparent about it,” Smith said. “It’s a benefit to everybody.”
Stanley Temple is hopeful and nowhere near ready to give up his fight for science-based conservation practices and advocacy.
Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden is the director of a non-partisan elections research center. He’s been following the election investigations closely.
“It’s really unclear what’s happening in each investigation because these things are mostly not being done in a public way,” Burden said.
Burden believes it’s unlikely that the probes will uncover anything problematic or new due to a lack of evidence to support claims of fraud.
“The motivation for what they’re doing is sort of hard to figure out,” he said. “It may be that they’re looking for reasons or justification to make some changes to state law. It might also be a way just to keep this issue on the front burner going into the next election cycle just to keep their voters energized.”
Quoted: Still, kids’ risk of severe disease is much lower than that of adults, and doesn’t seem to be any higher with delta than it was with earlier iterations of the virus, said Dr. Greg DeMuri, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s just that there are more cases, so a small percentage of a large number is still a significant number,” he said.
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said leaning on the Wisconsin Emergency Response Plan is important to coordinate different entities but ideally, state officials would adopt an additional statewide plan that focuses on preventing and controlling the spread of the virus to combat the outbreak.
“That’s appropriate in the middle of an emergency, you need to have command and control and have top-down response. … It’s only part of the approach. You need to have a prevention and control plan that accompanies an emergency response plan,” Remington said.
Professor Erin Barbato, director of the clinic, and her law students will help the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with volunteer legal aid, helping refugees with information about their legal status in the country, possible visa applications, and what pathways to citizenship might be open to them.
Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education, says that while cases specifically related to face masks in school are uncharted territory, courts have historically decided that parental rights do not trump a school’s ability to take steps to keep kids safe.
“Heading into the winter months, we can significantly delay the next grim milestone if more people, especially those at high risk for severe illness, choose to get vaccinated,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nancy Wong, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of consumer research and marketing, said the imbalance is magnified when employees are female because anger about mask mandates can trigger sexist bullying and harassment.
Matthew Lazzara, an expert on the meteorology of Antarctica and scientist at the University of Wisconsin, monitored the South Pole temperatures in recent months from his office in Madison with awe. In an interview, he said it was around minus-100 degrees on numerous occasions. Over the years, he’s traveled to Antarctica many times to support his research.
Quoted: Heidi Johnson is the advising and training manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Office of Student Financial Aid and president of the statewide Wisconsin Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. She told WPR the coronavirus pandemic and the year of online classes it brought to the state meant in-person meetings about FAFSA applications between students and high school counselors were halted.
As a result, Johnson said it wasn’t as easy for counselors to offer “friendly nudges” to encourage students to fill out the applications when mulling whether to attend college.
“So, I think certainly the timing of it, especially for that particular senior class, played a part,” said Johnson. “And just the fact that things stayed virtual, I think much longer than any of us planned for in the beginning.”
Quoted: Although Congress has come to this precipice many times before, the perception is that the two parties are more “locked-in” than before, and that has people worried, said Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and expert on fiscal and monetary policy.
“This is the first time where it may not just be [political theater] but it is actually a case where they very well may not [pass an increase to the debt ceiling], and the consequences are big,” Chinn said. “When you shut down the government, essential services still continue, but if you hit the debt limit, you have to stop payments.”
Quoted: Amaya Atucha, fruit crop specialist for UW-Madison, said she and other researchers are grateful to the cranberry growers that let them host projects on their marshes. She said worrying about the crops was a common issue that held back progress.
“When we want to study things related to an invasive insect or a disease in which you really have to let that disease take over your marsh or your production bed, you’re not going to do that in a grower’s commercial marsh, because the grower makes their living out of the fruit,” Atucha said.
Public safety precautions put in place last year to help stem the spread of COVID-19 also caused influenza cases to nosedive.
But that could backfire during this year’s flu season, said Dr. James Conway, associate director for health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
“Obviously, we don’t have a lot to go on because the social lockdown and mitigation programs on both sides of the globe have really shut down influenza across the board,” Conway said. “And so, it’s really been sort of an educated guess.”
Noted: Keith Findley, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that person will then review all the evidence in the case. They could ask the police for more reports or issue subpoenas, as well.
They’ll then evaluate the evidence and determine whether they want to prosecute Mensah.
Yamahiro found probable cause that Mensah committed homicide by the negligent handling of a dangerous weapon. The special prosecutor will not be required to file that specific charge, but they could, Findley said. They could also file additional charges, different charges or no charges at all.
Four episodes of a podcast hosted by Ryan Owens — some of them featuring critics of former President Donald Trump — have disappeared from the internet as the Republican candidate for attorney general ramps up his campaign.
Owens on Wednesday offered evolving accounts regarding the removal of the episodes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison podcast.
“There’s worker shortages in a number of fields so a lot of college grads have their pick in certain areas,” said Matthew Hora, Associate Professor of Adult and Higher Education at UW-Madison.
Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin, said last week that if vaccine-hesitant people “start to get the idea that this is only going to last for six or eight or 10 months,” they may be further soured on the whole idea.
Defamation suits can be difficult to win in the United States, which has more robust freedom-of-speech protections than many other countries. Non-public figures can recover damages if they can prove defamers printed something “without adequately checking on its truth,” according to UW-Madison political science and legal studies professor Howard Schweber.
Shilagh Mirgain, distinguished psychologist at UW Health, said there are a few tips that can help people cope with rising anxieties.
UW Dietician Michelle Swader joins News 3 Now to talk about the relationship between a good diet and bone health.
Interview with Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the Department of Consumer Science
at the School of Human Ecology, about new docuseries from Amazon Prime, detailing the rise and fall of LulaRoe, a multi-level marketing company.
Quoted: “I was surprised at the level of the drop,” said Steve Deller, a UW-Madison professor of applied economics. “I would have thought that the second quarter of this year, we would have seen modest growth.”
Deller noted there was “modest growth” in terms of earnings from work, but that was offset by a drop off in “transfer receipts,” a category of income encompassing earnings from non-work sources.
Noted: For instance, lawmakers needed to make virtually no changes to the 60th Assembly District in Ozaukee County because it was underpopulated by just 10 people. Republican legislators instead decided to move about 17,600 people out of the district and about 18,000 people into the district. The shift moved 719 times as many people as what was needed, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer noted in court testimony at the time.
Mayer described similar changes to districts on Milwaukee’s south side. One district was underpopulated by about 2,800 people, but Republican lawmakers moved about 23,000 people out of the district and about 25,600 into it.
Quoted: “Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin’s teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real,” said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor, at an August hearing in the state Capitol.
“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history,” he said then.
Americans love meat. In 2017, the average American ate 274 pounds of meat on average, placing it only behind Hong Kong for highest meat consumption in the world. So how did America become the meat eating nation we know today? In this episode, Cheddar goes back in time to explore how meat took over America — and why Americans probably won’t give up their cheeseburgers anytime soon. Featuring: Andrew Stevens
In a blog post published today, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said that kids under 13 were already online, misrepresenting their ages and downloading apps meant for older teens and adults. Megan Moreno, a pediatrician who studies social media’s impact on adolescent health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isn’t buying it.
“I talk to hundreds of school districts and probably never bring up the term, ‘critical race theory,’” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus Gloria Ladson-Billings said in June. “It is a red herring, I will say that over and over again. It has almost nothing to do with what actually is happening in schools.”
