“People continue to ask for proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This attribution study directly answers that question using state-of-the-science epidemiological methods, and the amount of data the authors have amassed for analysis is impressive,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.
Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin scientist and longtime critic of Chinese birth policy, said the decades-long one-child policy entrenched attitudes.
“People continue to ask for proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This attribution study directly answers that question using state-of-the-science epidemiological methods, and the amount of data the authors have amassed for analysis is impressive,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.
The University of Wisconsin Department of Entomology conducted the survey, noting that not all ticks cause the disease. Susan Paskewitz, Director of the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vectorborne Disease, explained that an app will allow Wisconsinites to take a picture of the tick and have experts identify it for them.
“People are experiencing no-mask anxiety,” UW Health psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain says. “Many people are feeling a sense of unease with doing that. We want to approach this at a slow pace, give yourself permission to take it at your own time.”
Quoted: Howard Schweber, a professor in the political science department at the University of Wisconsin, said Catenacci “has what is potentially a strong argument,” comparing the matter to when a federal judge told former President Donald Trump he could not block negative comments on his Twitter feed because it constituted a “limited public forum.”
SHAPE: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else, by Jordan Ellenberg. (Penguin Press, $28.) In fine-grained detail, “Shape” reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning. It offers a critique of how math is taught, an appreciation of its peculiar place in the human imagination and biographical sections about beautiful minds and splendid eccentrics. Ellenberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is “rather spectacular at this sort of thing,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. His “preference for deploying all possible teaching strategies gives ‘Shape’ its hectic appeal; it’s stuffed with history, games, arguments, exercises.”
“There are many different pathways into mathematics,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There is the stereotype that interest in math displays itself early. That is definitely not true in general. It’s not the universal story — but it is my story.”
Quoted: Wisconsinites have bifurcated politics, said Mike Wagner, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rural and Republican Wisconsinites value independence, hard work and feeling respected, but tend to distrust urban centers and government institutions. They are also more likely to live in less information-rich environments, Wagner said, including cities without daily newspapers. This has spilled over into Wisconsinites’ response to the pandemic.
“The best predictor of skepticism about vaccines, from our early analyses, is a belief that the election was stolen from President Trump,” Wagner said.
“What was so unethical is that they targeted African American men,” Dr. Eva Vivian, a professor at the UW School of Pharmacy, said. “I feel that they felt that a Black man’s life didn’t matter, that their lives were less valuable than [those of] white men.”
Communities of color will have a hard time bouncing back post pandemic because of economic inequality gaps that worsened over time, according to a UW-Madison inequality expert. “There are racial disparities in almost any outcome that you can think of,” Denia Garcia, UW-Madison professor of public affairs said. “Racism exists in almost every institution.”
“Abandoning the desire for self-determination, something that has been the very raison d’etre of Palestinian nationalism since the 1960s and something that has actually been achieved by Zionists, is a steep demand to make of both,” Nadav Shelef, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies national identity and ethnic struggle, wrote in a recent essay applying academic research on how nationalist sentiment declines to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This was the “beginning of a 35-year period when Kerkorian would buy and sell MGM three times,” according to Tino Balio, professor emeritus of communication arts at UW-Madison, who also authored a book about MGM.
“The first recorded history of a Chinese woman in the United States tells the story of a ‘beautiful Chinese Lady’ transported into New York Harbor,” Leslie Bow Ph.D., professor in the Department of English and Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, tells Bustle. This was Afong Moy, a 19-year-old Chinese woman who was coerced into traveling to the U.S. In the 1830s and ‘40s, Moy would tour the U.S. as an act, displayed for up to eight hours a day in private homes, and later in P.T. Barnum’s circus. “The spectacle of Afong Moy produced by Barnum and white traders unfortunately sutured American associations between race and exoticism that cling to Asian American women today,” Bow says.
How to tell the racial history of America is something often debated by historians. As we reach the one year mark since George Floyd died at the hands of a former Minneapolis Police officer, UW-Madison expert Pam Oliver says how this moment in time shows up in the history books remains to be seen.
Quoted: While some estimates suggest communities can reach herd immunity when around 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, Dr. Matt Anderson, UW Health senior medical director of primary care, explains it isn’t an on-off switch.
“It’s really hard to say at what point we’ll reach it as though it’s a critical threshold,” Anderson said. “It’s more of a gradual decline in the case rates that we’ll see as we have more and more people being immune, and the best immunity is through vaccinations.”
Ajay Sethi is a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is faculty director of Master of Public Health Program. He said it will be clear that communities have reached herd immunity when there are no longer outbreaks of COVID-19 despite people returning to pre-pandemic daily activities like going maskless to concerts, sporting events, movie theaters, or restaurants without social distancing.
“In order for this to happen, most everyone will need to have protective immunity from either vaccination or past infection, but immunity from the latter may not be as long-lasting or durable,” he said.
Quoted: Health experts highlight that incarcerated individuals are at higher risk for COVID-19 outbreaks due to a limited ability to social distance and other societal factors, said Dipesh Navsaria, a physician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“People who typically are in carceral settings like jails and prisons (that) are disproportionately people of color, people with lower educational attainment and people who come from backgrounds of poverty, trauma, stress, and are often subject to racial bias and discrimination,” said Navsaria. “And all of these elements tend to play into just being at higher risk.”
Quoted: Evers’ bid to bolster Medicaid is less an “expansion” and more of a “restoration,” according to Donna Friedsam, a researcher with UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
Friedsam says that, prior to the Affordable Care Act, Wisconsin’s medicaid program covered parents and caretaker adults at up to double the federal poverty level.
“So, when the ACA came along, it said all states should cover everybody, no matter who they are, up to a certain level of 138% of the federal poverty level,” she told WORT. In 2021, 138% of the federal poverty level is about $17,700 for a single person.
Noted: A supermoon occurs when these two cycles match up and the full moon coincides with its perigee, making it appear slightly larger and brighter in the sky. This occurs about one in every 14 full moons, Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, notes.
Scientists have long speculated about why the 1918 pandemic’s second wave was deadlier than the first. Patterns of human behavior and seasonality could explain some of the difference—but the virus itself might have changed too. “And this starts to put some meat on the bone” of that hypothesis, Andrew Mehle, an influenza researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, told me.
Pamela Oliver, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied protest movements for 40-plus years, said the generations-old struggle for Black rights had gained significant momentum until the events of 9/11 diverted national attention. Activists have been trying to make up lost ground ever since, she said – including the additional loss of some white allies in 2016 after the fatal ambush of five police officers in Dallas by Micah Johnson, a Black man.
The high-pitched buzzing of the Cicada’s mating call is one of the most familiar sounds of summer. We see, or mostly hear, small amounts of these large and noisy insects every year, but this year they are coming in the billions if not trillions. Having been underground for 17 years the phenomenon known as Brood X have been emerging from the ground on the East Coast and the Midwest shedding their exoskeletons, and performing their mating call.
Director of UW-Madison’s Insect Diagnostic Lab and insect identification and biology expert Patrick Liesch joins Friday Buzz host Jonathan Zarov to talk about this phenomenon.
Noted: The Wisconsin Latinx history collective is an organization created in partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) and the UW–Madison Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program and will spend the next five years documenting the history of Latinx people in the state of Wisconsin.
Officially created in January of last year, the collective began with the meeting between Arenas and four other academics, including historian and UW–Madison assistant professor Dr. Marla Ramírez Tahuado; UW–Madison Associate Professor with the School for Workers Dr. Armando Ibarra; cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of geography and Chican@ & Latin@ studies Dr. Almita Miranda; and assistant professor of Latinx Studies at Marquette University Sergio González.
Quoted: “Cows in cities were milked every day, and people would bring milk in carts back to their neighbourhoods to sell it,” says John Lucey, food science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“As cities got bigger, milk got further away and took longer to get to the consumer, which meant pathogens could multiply.”
Noted: A 2018 study lead by University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of pediatrics Dr. Megan Moreno found that some companies were flouting regulations on marketing, with social media posts that appeal to teens and promote therapeutic benefits.
The study noted around 1% of social media posts appeared to directly target teens, with one post explicitly showing a young person in the promotion, with several others using well-known cartoon characters, Reuters reported.
Hart Posen, UW-Madison professor of management, the biggest pandemic impact has been the shift to pick up and delivery orders.
The driving question that launched my career in psychology nearly four decades ago feels especially salient in this moment: Why are some people more resilient to life’s slings and arrows than others?
Written by Dr. Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.
Social work professor Tova Walsh interviewed dozens of mothers who gave birth early in the pandemic. She herself had a baby in March 2020, just as Wisconsin’s stay-at-home orders went into effect. What she learned is that it’s been an unusual time for new parents, to say the least.
That subduction process operates like a “conveyor belt,” recycling and exchanging material and volatile chemicals between the surface of Earth and deep within it, says Ann Bauer, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Christopher Olsen at the School of Medicine and Public Health at UW-Madison said, “The virus SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 disease is only distantly related to common bovine coronaviruses. While not impossible for there to be some level of cross-recognition of this new virus by antibodies to bovine coronavirus (they are in the same overall subsection of the coronavirus family), I would expect it to be very limited.”
Mothers have suffered most. Ben Etheridge and Lisa Spantig of the University of Essex found that in the first months of Britain’s lockdown women’s well-being dropped twice as much as men’s. That some friendships have withered and others have never bloomed could have a lasting impact on new mothers in particular, predicts Margaret Kerr of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who oversees vaccination programs there, said vaccines will likely be available for 5- to 11-year-olds in late 2021, and for babies over 6 months, toddlers and preschoolers in early 2022.
“Police officers are trained that if somebody’s in a vehicle, you’re trying to stop them, and they’re noncompliant, the car is a weapon, and therefore this makes the person armed,” says John P. Gross, a clinical associate law professor at the University of Wisconsin who has written on police and vehicles.
“Allowing different properties operated by the same person or group to follow different rules opens a loophole that farmers can use to circumvent the soy moratorium,” Lisa Rausch, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, told TBIJ.
So far, the actual growth in the price level has been temporary. Expectations of inflation remain muted because either the anticipated output gap or the responsiveness of inflation to the output gap are thought to be small, inflation expectations remain well-anchored, or all three.
Menzie Chinn is a professor of public affairs and economics at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research examines the empirical and policy aspects of macroeconomic interactions between countries.
“Some tend to follow the honor system, while others don’t,” Dominique Brossard, UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences Communications Chair and Professor said.
Ellenberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is rather spectacular at this sort of thing. A seam in his narrative is a critique of how math, and especially geometry, has been taught. (His strategy for success in teaching is to employ more strategies; multiply approaches so students might find one that works for them.) He also takes a few well-aimed swipes at current depictions of the campus culture wars. The “cosseted” American college student might have launched a thousand Substacks, but have you heard of the “Conic Sections Rebellion”? Some 44 students, including the son of Vice President John C. Calhoun, were expelled from Yale in 1830, for refusing to take a geometry exam.
“Allowing different properties operated by the same person or group to follow different rules opens a loophole that farmers can use to circumvent the soy moratorium,” said Lisa Rausch, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin.
While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet.
Quoted: Dr. Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the Department of Consumer Science at UW-Madison, says it’s often not that the two are fighting, it’s just that they are ready for a new phase of life.
“When we say ‘til death do us part,’ back in the day that was somewhere in your 50s. Now, if you’re living until your 90s or even further than that, that can be decades more with the same person.”
Interview with Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology.
Quoted: Christine Whelan, a clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison, said that returning to everyday life is going to look different for each person.
“If you’re an introvert, perhaps the last 15 months or so has actually been a source of relief to you because you haven’t had to do a lot of the things that stress you out or that actually deplete your energy,” she said. “If that is you, then now’s a really good time to pick and choose what kind of in-person social events you’re going to want to add back into your life.”
Quoted: The inclination toward self-help is strong in this country. As Christine Whelan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who wrote her dissertation on the self-help industry, told me, “The NXIVM cult started out as a traditionally leadership self-help model of empowerment and behavior modification. …. the lessons that were being taught to the broad introductory group were fairly simple strategies for accomplishing goals in your life.”
But then, she notes, NXIVM faced the same problem that all personal-improvement workshops seem to face: “How do you continue to ‘transform’ people after they’ve completed the entry-level experiences?” she asks, adding: “You up the ante.”
Quoted: There’s recently been controversy surrounding 2021 Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit’s credibility after traces of an illegal drug was found in the horse’s system during a postrace drug test.
The commonly used drug is called betamethasone.
Director of the Wisconsin Veterinarian Diagnostic laboratory at U-W Madison Dr. Keith Poulsen
says that drug is frequently used as an anti-inflammatory.
“When I was in practice, I would use it to inject a joint to calm down inflammation or arthritis,” said Poulsen.
Paulsen explains that the frequently used drug only recently became illegal on race day.
“In August the race commission had changed the ruling to no allowable levels in urine post tests in any horse that’s in a race. So, I think that’s where the conflict is now, is that the rule changed to no detectable levels and they did find some in the horse.”
Interview with Christine Whelan, clinical professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology.
Quoted: UW professor Christine Whelan has shared her expertise as part of Dear Pandemic, helping people understand how to talk with others about their COVID-19 fears.
“We can see people who say, absolutely I will never get the vaccine, and a couple of weeks later, they change their mind. So, interestingly enough the research has found that it is much easier to change your opinion, than it is to change your behavior,” she said.
Typically the Great Lakes follow a specific seasonal cycle, said Adam Bechle, a coastal engineering specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute. The lakes bottom out in the winter when there’s more evaporation occurring as cold air moves in over the warmer water. Lake levels are highest during the summer, after snow melts and runs into them and rain falls.
“We are seeing a trend that is really occurring over a 50 to 100-year span, where women are having babies later in life,” said Dr. Christine Whelan, a consumer science specialist and clinical professor in the school of human ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With the end of the school year weeks away, UW Health Pediatric Infectious Disease Doctor Gregory Demuri says there’s no way enough kids will be fully vaccinated to ensure full protection for schools. “We’ve done a great job in schools, particularly in Wisconsin keeping COVID under control and we don’t wanna mess with a good thing,” said Dr. Demuri.
Noah Williams, an economics professor at UW-Madison and director at the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, told NBC15 News’ Michelle Baik at that time unemployment benefits are not the only reason why there is a reduction in labor supply.
“I think everything seems to be aligning both in terms of the national interest in prison reform and prison education, changing rules about Pell Grants, increased awareness of racial discrimination, and I guess just a widespread understanding that change needs to happen,” said Emily Auerbach, founder and co-director of the Odyssey Project, which houses the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s prison education initiative, Odyssey Beyond Bars.
Typically the Great Lakes follow a specific seasonal cycle, said Adam Bechle, a coastal engineering specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute. The lakes bottom out in the winter when there’s more evaporation occurring as cold air moves in over the warmer water. Lake levels are highest during the summer, after snow melts and runs into them and rain falls.
But there wasn’t as much snow this winter, and this spring has seen most of the state enter drought-like conditions.
Water levels have been climbing steadily in the Great Lakes since 2013. Before that, historic low levels going back to the 1990s caused issues, too, forcing some cities to dredge out harbors and ports so boats could gain access. Fluctuating water levels also impact beaches, and recreation is impacted, too.
“So even those who aren’t directly impacted by the lakes, they still have an impact on their lives,” Bechle said.
Quoted: “The goal in all decisions is to minimize risk,” said Patrick Remington, an epidemiologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who formerly worked for the CDC.
“Assuming that the person who is immunocompromised is not able to be vaccinated, then it would be prudent for you to reduce your risk as much as possible, by continuing to wear a mask in public.”
Wisconsin reached its pandemic tipping point on Nov. 18.
That was the day the state recorded its highest number of confirmed new COVID-19 cases — 7,989 — and the virus began to flip from exponential growth to its opposite, exponential decay, according to Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“The more you’ve allowed your grassland to invest in its roots, the better off it is going to be during a drought,” said Randy Jackson, a grassland ecologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Perennial plants—which stay in the ground year in and year out—continue to “photosynthesize and put their carbon and nutrients below ground, which is really their savings account.” In times of drought, it will draw more on the savings in the ground.
Dr. Patrick Remington, professor emeritus at UW-Madison’s Department of Population Health Sciences, said it’s reasonable for local governments to carefully assess new guidance before acting on it. “That’s the reason we have local health departments, to consider the local context,” he said.
What do Wisconsin gerrymandering, the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, the migratory patterns of ants and the debate over whether a straw has two holes or one have in common?
They have all occupied Jordan Ellenberg’s brain at some time, and they all make appearances in his new book, “Shape,” which comes out May 25 and is available for pre-order. Ellenberg, a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, even drew a convoluted flow chart that appears at the front of the book connecting all of the book’s disparate topics. It was his homage to the intricate maps that often appear at the front of epic fantasy novels.
With nearly 63% of Dane County residents receiving at least one dose of the vaccine and new cases down, “we’ve temporarily reached a point where there’s adequate immunity and not a ton of new disease being reintroduced … but it’s a moving target,” said Dr. James Conway, a UW health pediatrician and vaccine expert.
“We’re getting really close” to herd immunity, said UW-Madison infectious disease epidemiologist Malia Jones, but “there’s no way to figure out exactly what it is until after the fact.”
Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a UW-Madison liberal think tank, agreed, adding that limited access to child care has kept many individuals, largely women, from returning to work. “The pandemic exposed and exacerbated every underlying inequality that this labor market generated and this is especially true for leisure and hospitality workers,” Dresser said. “These workers work at the bottom of the labor market, with the lowest wages around, and they have the weakest benefit packages.
Includes interview with Greg Nemet, a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
