“It is a far cry from an in-vitro lab replication to helping humans,” Dr Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Hospital, told the Associated Press.
State law gives the Public Service Commission regulatory authority over electricity plants larger than 100 megawatts, leaving communities with very little say in what gets built and where, said Brian Ohm, a professor of planning and landscape architecture at UW-Madison. “Cities and villages do have limited extraterritorial authority, but in this case that’s not going to come into play,” Ohm said. “The village’s future plans can be a consideration, something that could be a consideration by the PSC, but again there’s nothing that’s going to lock the PSC into the village’s plans for growth.”
There is a “social component” of back-to-school shopping, said Hart Posen, a professor of management and a retail expert at UW-Madison. Children are excited to pick out personalized items that will make them look cool in front of their friends, Posen said.
Quoted: Because schools can’t be separated from their larger communities, some of those cases will spill into schools, as well, said University of Wisconsin-Madison pediatric disease researcher Dr. Greg DeMuri. Those are “primary cases,” or cases of COVID-19 that were picked up at home, at birthday parties and other places in the community. He said the more concerning question is whether there are “secondary cases,” or cases of COVID-19 that were transmitted between students and staff within the school.
“Those are the ones that we really worry about,” he said. “That’s the one that tells you, ‘Hey, it’s dangerous for kids to be in school.'”
Other election experts have previously torn into the Arizona review as unprofessionally run, including a report from former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, and Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“The Cyber Ninjas review suffers from a variety of maladies: uncompetitive contracting, a lack of impartiality and partisan balance, a faulty ballot review process, inconsistency in procedures, an unacceptably high level of error built into the process, and insufficient security,” Grayson and Burden wrote in their June report. “Because it lacks the essential elements of a bona fide post-election analysis, the review currently underway in Maricopa County will not produce findings that should be trusted.”
Quoted: Andrew Kydd, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while he was surprised by the speed of the takeover, the lack of commitment by Afghan forces and rampant corruption in the government made a long-term defense of Afghanistan impossible.
“The Afghan military simply wasn’t fighting for the Afghan government,” Kydd said. “There’s no way to overcome that with training.”
Mou Banerjee, an assistant professor in the UW-Madison history department, wondered what the human and emotional toll, both in Afghanistan and here in the U.S., would be.
Although Banerjee said it would likely be decades before the U.S. had a full understanding of the Afghanistan war, she said a key takeaway was the costs — whether of people, resources or foreign relations — that came with fighting a war of this magnitude for this long.
“It’s almost impossible to sustain a war against an idea, the ‘war against terror,’” Banerjee said.
“If you watch a daddy longlegs move, it will effectively walk on just three pairs of its legs,” said Guilherme Gainett, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The remaining pair of legs, he adds, wave around in the air, probing the arachnid’s surroundings.
And this was having a deleterious effect on rural spaces. University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross argued in 1922 that the “folk depletion” caused by talented rural youths departing the countryside left the farming areas of the Midwest “fished out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers.”
“It is basically an indicator of the success of the election,” said Barry Burden, the director of the elections research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Election administrators managed to pull it off and support a record number of voters.”
UW-Madison assistant professor of history Mou Banerje joined News 3 Now Live at Four to provide some perspective on what is happening with the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan and what may lie ahead.
Steven Howard Wright, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said the challenge for plaintiffs will be to prove an active conspiracy between the city, law enforcement and White militia members. “They are swinging for the entire community, which will make it a lot harder to sell,” he said. Because there is not a specific “smoking gun” to prove the conspiracy, he said he expects plaintiffs’ attorneys to ask the court “for the widest degree of discovery” to show that both departments had significant race problems long before the Blake incident.
“This is a sales tactic that some salespeople and finance people use at dealerships,” said Sarah Orr, Director at UW-Madison’s Consumer Law Clinic. The clinic provides legal services to those who can’t afford to hire an attorney.
Led by Prof. Xudong Wang, scientists at the University of Wisconsin have developed a patch-like tissue-stimulating implant that gets around such problems. It’s known as a piezoelectric wafer, and it contains crystals of the non-toxic amino acid lysine. Via a self-assembly process, those crystals form and align themselves between two sheets of a flexible, biocompatible, biodegradable polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA).
“What happens to him at CNN is less important to me than what happens to all the other journalists whose ethics will be questioned and whose bond of trust with the citizens they serve could be damaged by the choices he made,” wrote Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication in an opinion piece for USA TODAY published this week.
University of Wisconsin-Madison public affairs and economics professor Timothy Smeeding noted the rise in wages for low-income workers means it’s a good time for workers to reassess their jobs and find a better one.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Timothy Smeeding said the rise in wages for low-income workers means it’s a good time to reassess their jobs and find a better one.
“For those reasons, the job market is in favor of workers right now and turnover is good,” Smeeding said. “When people voluntarily leave jobs, economists think that’s good, because that meant they found something better.”
Quoted: “It’s sort of like a race, where you’re only seeing people at the starting line and people at the finishing line but you’re not seeing how they go around the track,” David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said of the data released every 10 years.
Noted: Stephen Young is a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor who studies basic income programs in the United States and worldwide. Young said universal basic income is not a “magic bullet solution” but an idea that has gained traction in the past decade to “address structural unemployment and poverty.”
Dr. Marcia Slattery is a UW-Madison Professor of Psychiatry & Pediatrics. She specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry and anxiety disorders in kids, adolescents, and adults. Dr. Slattery expressed concern that some teens may feel they are behind the curve after a year of virtual learning. She said getting a consistent sleep routine in check will help them balance out these emotions and get their brain and body back in sync.
David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the UW-Madison Applied Population Laboratory, said the state’s population growth of 3.5 percent over the last decade is the smallest leap Wisconsin has had since the 1980s.
One of the major factors that has contributed to this polarized political climate — where false claims can gain momentum — is enhancements in technology and communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael Wagner said.
“If we can make these things less and less invasive while making sure we are engaging the nerves, we can start to move beyond just doing this for people who have injury or ailments,” says Justin Williams, a Darpa-funded neuro-engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is studying how nerve stimulation can impact learning.
“I am shocked it’s gotten this far without him even receiving a suspension,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“Climate scientists were predicting exactly these kinds of things, that there would be an enhanced threat of these types of extreme events brought on by increased warming,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s very distressing. These are not encouraging signs for our immediate future.
James Crall, assistant professor of entymology at the University of Wisconsin, told the Harvard Gazette last year: “If they do become established, then the honeybees will experience strong evolutionary pressures over the next years as they adapt to this new ecological interaction.”
Sami Schalk, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Cornell’s protocols are “great safety measures that will protect probably the vast majority of their campus. But there are many disabled folks or immunocompromised people who have been pretty hyper-isolated over the past year and a half. To force them out, it’s just unconscionable.”
Noted: David Egan-Robertson, a demographer in the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one of the key points he would be looking at is changes in the state’s race and ethnicity data.
Much of the state’s growth in recent decades has been attributable to an increase in the Hispanic population, he said.
Quoted: “With Kind out of the picture, Republicans have a really good shot at winning that seat and having a bigger majority in (Wisconsin’s) congressional delegation,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the population is at risk of dropping below 350 wolves. A recent study by Treves and other researchers concluded that hunters and poachers might have killed a third of the wolf’s population since the animal’s delisting.
In a statement following the vote, conservation group Wisconsin’s Green Fire said the quota is likely to cut the state’s wolf population in half.
“Removing 300 wolves in another hunt would likely have a destabilizing effect on almost every wolf pack in the state,” said Adrian Wydeven, a former DNR wolf biologist. “There is no other wildlife species where that level of reduction would be acceptable. And it’s highly likely it would trigger a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review of state management.”
Quoted: “I think that there was some concern that inflation would continue to accelerate,” said Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Producers haven’t been able to respond with supply as enthusiastically as consumers have responded with demand as the economy has sort of opened back up.”
Conroy said the new numbers indicate the current accelerated inflation is a temporary trend brought on by supply shortages.
“I think that’s hopeful for a lot of consumers in particular, that as some of the short-term problems resolve themselves, prices will stabilize,” said Conroy.
Gregory Nemet, a University of Wisconsin professor who has written a book about recent innovation in solar power, said the policy shift will put pressure on government officials who will have to sort through complex market dynamics while managing demands from companies seeking profits and lawmakers pushing for home-state handouts.
“There are sensitive periods in early childhood development in which language development and emotional development are really rapidly developing for the first few years of life,” said Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab.
Vaccinating children as young as 6 months of age against COVID-19 may become the new front in the global pandemic fight, if the vaccines prove to be safe and effective.
One such trial by the American pharmaceutical company Moderna will begin enrolling children 6 months through 11 years old on Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. UW will be one of 75 to 100 sites in the U.S. and Canada for the trial, which has been named the KidCOVE study.
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.
“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history.”
The gestalt and palette of the American prairie show up repeatedly in his work, from the design for the University of Wisconsin Arboretum Native Plant Garden, in Madison, to the stretch of cedar planter boxes on his apartment terrace, which he calls his “compressed prairie” — where he can feel at home among the little bluestem grasses and a succession of forbs, “my old friends from the Iowa roadside.”
“Keshel is promoting a bizarre and unfounded conspiracy about the 2020 election,” Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email.
To illustrate this point, Black, Latino and American Indians were more likely than whites to volunteer for a clinical trial if invited by a member of the same race, according to the “Voices Heard Survey” of more than 400 Wisconsin residents. This shows how tailored messaging can help, says Dorothy Farrar Edwards, faculty director of the University of Wisconsin Collaborative Center for Health Equity, which conducted the survey.
“We know very little if (trainings) are effective at all. We don’t even know how long they last if they are effective, but we don’t even know if they’re effective,” said Markus Brauer, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a social psychologist, Brauer studies the social aspects of human behavior with a focus on diversity-related issues. Brauer’s research has centered on developing and testing interventions aimed at changing people’s behaviors in a variety of domains, including diversity, and his work has led him to a simple conclusion: many pro-diversity initiatives don’t work. Poorly done diversity training can do more harm than good.
Truly stopping transmission would require about 90% vaccination, impossible to achieve, because children under 12 aren’t eligible for a shot, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin.
Health experts maintain that even if there is lower transmission in an area, students should be masked.”Six or seven or eight hours is a big chunk of the day,” said Dr. Ellen Wald, chair of pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine. “It’s a time when they’re in close proximity with 20 to 30 other children in a single room. That doesn’t happen in the rest of the day.”
Noted: Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has developed something called the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). IIT holds that consciousness is actually a kind of information and can be measured mathematically, though doing so is not very straightforward and has caused some to discount the theory.
Quoted: According to Noah Williams, director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, the state’s labor force participation has been declining for decades as the state’s demographics shift over time.
“The way I think about it is there’s long term trends and then on top of that there’s been the shorter term issues,” Williams said, “The population is aging; it’s aging more rapidly in Wisconsin than in the rest of the country.”
“Delta is much, much more contagious, and children are susceptible of that,” Dr. Gregory DeMuri, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at UW Health, said. “That’s resulting in more hospitalizations and more disease in children.”
Quoted: The overall job numbers showed “a strong contribution from education hiring, as more schools than normal retained teachers through the summer and ramped up hiring for a planned return to instruction in the fall,” said Noah Williams, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
The upward trend, however, is threatened by the virus spread, Williams added.
“Certification in stroke care is something that is helpful in terms of making sure that we have good protocols in place and that we have the high speed response to take care of these specific patients,” said Natalie Wheeler. Wheeler is the Medical Director for Telestroke at UW Health and Assistant Professor for the School of Medicine and Public Health. She says Outside of larger Wisconsin cities, expert stroke care is not readily available.
A new study out of Madison, Wisconsin shows that building dense, amenity-rich market-rate housing in vulnerable neighborhoods leads to higher evictions.
While there are significant differences between Madison and San Francisco, the data has implications for new local attempts to encourage more dense housing into existing residential areas that may be threatened by gentrification and displacement.
The author, University of Wisconsin Professor Revel Sims, looked at areas where five-unit or larger buildings were constructed in areas with older buildings and lower-income residents.
As restrictions return to the most vaccinated county in Wisconsin, NBC 15 talked with Population Health Sciences expert and Associate Professor Ajay Sethi, asking if more restrictions would slow the rollout of the shot.
Noted: The team, led by Sebastian Heinz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, took a look at several telescopes’ data from the 2015 outburst to probe the dust clouds, finding that most of the grains are likely graphite and silica. More importantly, the observations found that the dust cloud is not the same density in all directions, contradicting the theory suggested in previous studies.
Quoted: Epidemiologist Ajay Sethi teaches a class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison called conspiracies in public health. He says misinformation can have serious consequences and if people see or hear something that’s wrong, they should try and counter it, similar to rejecting racist remarks or actions.
“I don’t tell my students to do this, but I tell them maybe we should draw on the principles of calling out racism,” said Sethi. “If you see something, say something, recognizing you may be talking to a Russian bot online. So, we have to decide when our efforts are worth it.”
Quoted: Climate change is driving the extreme heat and record-breaking drought that have set the stage for wildfires to burn more than 3 million acres so far this year, according to Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Patz has served as a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned in its 2018 report that drastic shifts are needed to reduce global warming to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“These extreme events of drought and heat waves are definitely linked to climate change,” said Patz. “They don’t only affect those states that are burning in the West, but the wildfire smoke travels across the country. We’ve seen very high levels in northern Wisconsin and across the state.”
Written by Kathleen Bartzen Culver, James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communications and director for the Center for Journalism Ethics.
The first sequenced genome of a daddy-long-legs has revealed the genetic tricks that these creatures use to make their lengthy, grasping legs.
Most of these leggy invertebrates are not spiders but belong instead to a group called harvestmen (order Opiliones). Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vanessa González at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and their colleagues sequenced the genome of the long-legged harvestman Phalangium opilio and found that the creature has a single cluster of Hox genes, a type of master gene that influences the body plan of all animals.
“No one wants to work anymore.” This is a common refrain from business owners around the country as the economy opens back up. Conservative commentators claim that unemployment insurance is keeping people from going back to work and fueling widescale laziness—but is that really what’s going on?
Today on the show, labor economist Laura Dresser joins Thursday host Allen Ruff to challenge these myths of the “labor shortage” narrative. They talk about the working class in Wisconsin, the pandemic economy, the importance of worker power, and the real reason employers are struggling to hire.
Laura Dresser is associate director of the Center On Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) and assistant clinical professor in the School Of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is co-editor of The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market(Cornell University Press, 2008) and co-author of the annual State of Working Wisconsin report from COWS.
Quoted: Thomas Friedrich is a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and another study author. He said vaccination, while extremely effective, is not necessarily a magic shield.
“This does not indicate that the vaccine is not effective,” said Friedrich. “What it does mean is that in some people who are vaccinated — at least for a certain amount of time after infection — there’s enough virus around in their systems that they could pass the virus on to others.”
Dave O’Connor, also a UW-Madison professor of virology and the third co-author of the study, said it’s important to continue to recalibrate expectations as circumstances change.
“The vaccines are imperfect, but they’re still going to help keep me out of the hospital right now, and we should be really thankful for that,” said O’Connor. “But we also need to be on guard, because just because we might be done with the virus doesn’t mean the virus is done with us.”
Noted: Some scientists have wondered whether such duplications might help explain some of the wild variety of the animal kingdom, said Prashant Sharma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and also an author of the study. Complex genomes and more varied organisms might seem to go together.
But despite harvestmen’s variety — there are more than 6,000 species in the group — there is no sign of duplication in the harvestman genome, the researchers report. And horseshoe crabs, arachnids that had at least one genome duplication in their evolution, have only a handful of species.
“Arachnids really challenge this idea,” Dr. Sharma said. Having more genes might help organisms diversify, but only if environmental conditions and other factors line up correctly as well, he speculates.
Much of southern and western Wisconsin has continued to experience abnormally dry conditions this year, with far southeastern Wisconsin seeing severe drought earlier this summer.
But agronomist Chris Kucharik from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said lower precipitation hasn’t had as much of an impact on the state’s crops as he was anticipating.
“I’m a bit surprised at how well the crops have been doing,” Kucharik said. “Honestly, once the crop is in the ground, (farmers) are kind of at the mercy of what happens during the growing season with the weather.”
After Rhinelander Mayor Chris Frederickson found out in 2019 that at least one of his city’s municipal water wells was contaminated with a dangerous compound, he got in touch with Jim Tinjum.
Tinjum is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also heads the geological engineering program, which is how Frederickson found him.
“I was contacted to help them figure out where the PFAS was coming from and what to do about it,” Tinjum said.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers warned in a new study that Wisconsin’s plans for another hunt “raise questions about sustainability.”
The state’s stated goal is maintaining a stable population of wolves, a top predator that helps sustain ecosystem health, study co-author and Madison environmental studies professor Adrian Treves told The National Geographic.
Treves called plans for a November hunt unwise, particularly since officials have no clear understanding of the impact of the February killings. Hunters often seek out the largest animals, for example, which are frequently pack leaders whose loss could leave entire groups to starve to death. The killing of fertile females would further reduce the population.
Quoted: Even though the situation in the industry remains tough, Mark Stephenson, head of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “2020 was not as bad a year for dairy farmers.”
Milk prices had been low since 2015 — “for a longer period of time than we’ve seen in quite a while,” according to Stephenson. Farmers did their best to cut costs, and waited for demand to increase and boost prices with it.
Quoted: “It’s [the delta variant] able to bind to the cells in our nasal passages and our lungs more tightly and as a result someone who gets infected is more capable of pumping out a lot more virus,” said Dr. Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
