After a year fraught with unemployment payment delays, high rates of unemployment denials, call center headaches and other issues, a new University of Wisconsin report suggests the state should outsource at least a portion of its unemployment system.
The report by conservative UW economics professor Noah Williams detailed areas the state lagged behind most other states as the wave of unemployment claims swamped the state’s Department of Workforce Development last year.
Quoted: “I think it actually is the day we have been waiting for, the day we feel good and safe gathering indoors,” said Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the CDC.
“The pendulum has really swung back,” added Remington, who directs the preventive medicine residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Now the benefits of gathering in person for fully vaccinated people clearly outweigh the risks.”
Despite no immediate change in Dane County, the guidance is the “proof in the pudding” the vaccination effort is how the country returns to normalcy, said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health.
“I don’t know what research they are reading. But COVID-19 can clearly be transmitted via airborne spread,” said Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the CDC and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
“It might not be the predominant mode of transmission, but it is clearly able to be transmitted via small particles through the air,” Remington said.
Provisions that target heavily Democratic areas — like Georgia’s limits on drop boxes — are particularly blatant. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has told The Times. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”
Jeremy Stoddard, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, surveyed more than 1,000 middle and high school teachers in 2018 to find out how they approached teaching about Sept. 11 and the war on terror. About 130 history, government and social studies teachers said they had never taught students about Sept. 11.
Barry Burden, professor of American politics and political methodology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY the discrepancy is “not a sign of fraud,” just a result of sampling error.
Leslie Bow, English and Asian American Studies professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, “It’s important to expose children to racial diversity in children’s books because studies have shown that familiarity with children of color in stories reduces negative biases against racial groups.”
Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin, says that the key to discerning Long COVID is by paying attention to new symptoms that develop, or ones that never go away, after about 30 days post-infection.
Despite Fichera’s jokey post, Dylan told TODAY that her third pregnancy — like her second pregnancy — did not come easily. Secondary infertility, which is when women struggle to have another child after giving birth to one or more children, affects about 3 million women in the U.S., according to the University of Wisconsin Hospitals.
The Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, led by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams, released a report Monday that details just how bad things have been in the state.
“Only 3-in-10 Wisconsin workers who applied for unemployment insurance over the past year have been paid, and in recent months the rate has dropped to 1-in-8,” the report states. “Further, many of the unemployed workers who were paid endured long delays, with 30% waiting ten weeks or more for payment.”
Noah Williams, an economics professor at UW-Madison and director at the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, said unemployment benefits are not the only reason why there is a reduction in labor supply.
James Conway, associate director of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, explained many health systems in what he called “low-resource” countries are already strained, even at the best of times. They cannot handle the recent surges.
According to 2019 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, people younger than 18 account for about 22 percent of the American population. That’s why “it is really important for kids to be included” in vaccination efforts, says Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory. Their inclusion is “good news for herd immunity.”
Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the population started to fall in 2018. His book “Big Country With An Empty Nest” argued against the one-child limit.
Or put another way, there should be no mistake after those nearly 20 years in Afghanistan. Victory is no longer in the American bloodstream (a lesson that Vietnam somehow did not bring home), though drugs are. The loss of the ultimate drug war was a special kind of imperial disaster, giving withdrawal more than one meaning in 2021. So, it won’t be surprising if the departure from that country under such conditions is a signal to allies and enemies alike that Washington hasn’t a hope of ordering the world as it wishes anymore and that its once-formidable global hegemony is truly waning.
Alfred McCoyAlfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power and Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
Heather Kirkorian, a UW Associate Professor, says social media has evolved in the last decade and the research around its impact on children is complex. She says it’s all about the way it’s used. “While some young people may use social media to bully or end up being bullied, others may use it to connect when they’re feeling lonely,” said Kirkorian.
Diana Hess, dean of the UW-Madison School of Education and a professor of curriculum and instruction, said she wasn’t aware of any comprehensive surveying or research on the issue. “Generally, I am hearing that there was a lot of flexibility throughout the year — not necessarily standards lowering, but more options for students to meet standards in various ways,” she said. Michael Apple, also a UW-Madison professor of curriculum and instruction, agreed with that assessment, adding that “even with some districts having supposedly moved to ‘loosen standards,’ the reasons for doing this are often quite diverse depending on the political pressures from conservative and or progressive movements.”
Jeremy Stoddard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, has studied since 2003 how 9/11 and its aftermath are taught in middle and high schools around the country.“There hasn’t been a lot of good data on that, it’s very anecdotal,” Stoddard said.
UW-Madison assistant professor Jirs Meuris said clear policies and communication with staff will help employees transition from traditionally in-person work environments to flexible and remote work. Because working from the office is still an ingrained habit, employees might not be open to a change they don’t fully understand.
This was new information for the microbiology community, which prior to his discovery believed only spore-forming bacteria would be able to survive in those hot springs. Brock, who had a long career in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s bacteriology department, proved there were all kinds of bacteria living there.
While the northern half has seen a smaller increase, Dane County has seen a 20% increase and Milwaukee County has seen a 15% increase, according to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists started keeping records of precipitation levels in the 1890s, said Steve Vavrus, a climate professor at UW, and since then, all records for the state have been broken.
Climate change explains the rising amount of rain falling from the sky, Vavrus said. As temperatures rise, warmer air can hold more droplets of water.
“More moisture can be wrung out of the air than 100 years ago or so,” he said. “And climate models have been projecting that for a long time that as the climate warms, we’ll get more heavy rains.”
Steven Deller, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on rural economies, says one factor contributing to Wisconsin’s rural housing crisis is the sharp decrease in construction of new affordable housing since the Great Recession. He says developers are focused instead on building luxury homes because they produce higher profits.
Andrea Dutton, an expert in sea level rise at University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was a co-author, said the paper “addresses an important and pressing question” of what the Paris climate targets will mean for future sea level rise.
What they’re saying: “This study is a stark reminder that the fuse is short for deep and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions,” study coauthor Andrea Dutton of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said via email.
“Once you hit this threshold, you can’t go back,” says study co-author Andrea Dutton, a sea level researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You’re committed. That’s the big takeaway.”
UW-Health’s Dr. Nasia Safdar says we shouldn’t be in a rush to make that happen as the risk of transmitting viruses is still there. “In general…a lot of things get transferred from person to person via the hands,” she said.
There are two general types of cicadas, said PJ Liesch, an entomologist at UW-Madison: regular “dog day” cicadas and the more vibrant periodical variety, which are classified into “broods.”
Written by Tim Smeeding, the Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “If it’s going to be dry at any point during the growing season, this is a good time of year for it to be dry,” said Mike Ballweg, Sheboygan County crops and soils agriculture agent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
The Amynthas species we have in the US (most commonly Amynthas agrestis and Amynthas tokioensis) are primarily from Japan and the Korean peninsula. In their home habitats, they evolved along with the local ecosystems — and the ecosystems along with them. But here, “just like any other invasive species that are displaced into a brand new habitat that might not have controls, they’re able to take advantage of that and go gangbusters,” says Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
“We’re not going to have the loud, raucous dining hall filled with incomprehensible yelling,” says Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who is helping create coronavirus protocols for camps. [The New York Times]
“Herd immunity is really when you have a high enough percentage of the population who are immune to a particular infectious disease such that the unvaccinated people are protected as well. Meaning that in this case the virus has a dead end. It doesn’t have the ability to go on and continue propagating itself and so basically the infection rate dies out at that point,” said Dr. Matt Anderson, UW Health’s Senior Medical Director of Primary Care.
Quoted: The new maps are supposed to be in place for the 2022 elections. But the delays could be so severe that Wisconsin’s existing, Republican-friendly maps will have to be used for those elections, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It seems unlikely I think that the litigation would be resolved in time for elections to happen in new districts in 2022,” he said.
Keeping the old maps for another cycle “doesn’t feel right,” he said. “But I think courts often view it as the least bad option, as opposed to forcing candidates to make very quick decisions or changing the dates of primaries or something else.”
Having 80 percent of residents in a community vaccinated is an accomplishment and means virus transmission is less likely to occur there, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and director of the Master of Public Health Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But it does not mean Madeline Island has eliminated the threat of COVID-19
“I am a full extrovert,” said Whelan, a professor of consumer science in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I love socializing. I used to love throwing parties.”
The key, experts say, will be weighing the risk of new variants against economic benefits and the need to resume normal life. Laura Albert, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said the United States has reached a point where it can start to contemplate how it might reopen more widely, including to more travelers from abroad.
“We’re in a different place than we were a year ago,” said Albert, whose work focuses on analyzing risk in public spaces. “Last year, it was, ‘No, don’t do it.’ It wasn’t clear it was safe to be on a plane. This year, it’s how and where you go, not whether.”
Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at Wisconsin, said travel always has been linked with the spread of viruses, but as more people are vaccinated, the risk is reduced. The wild card, however, is the possibility of new variants.
“The finding that growth and carbon uptake are higher in bacteria that may have predatory lifestyles than in other bacteria is interesting, and supports the idea that bacterial predators can play meaningful roles in the soil food web,” wrote Thea Whitman, a soil ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study, in an email to Popular Science
Alhaji N’Jai left Sierra Leone to pursue a scholarship in the US, which also served to get him out of the country during its civil war, but in recent years he has been able to return, both to study Ebola and help educate the next generation of STEM talent there.
The show also looks at Faye Emerson (right), widely considered to be the first-lady of late-night television, who paved the way for the likes of Chelsea Handler, Samantha Bee and Lilly Singh. Ealer said that Syracuse professor Robert Thompson led them to Wisconsin to talk to Maureen Mauk, a former Fox exec now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped preserve and digitize her archive. “Our eyes exploded because none of us had heard of her,” said Ealer. “In an era where we’re constantly and appropriately looking to evaluate ourselves and do better with representation, we took very seriously the obligation to do that in late night history. Maybe the first late night imprint on the moon was a woman and that’s pretty amazing.”
Dr. William Hartman, principal investigator for the AstraZeneca vaccine trial site at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the delays are frustrating to clinical trial teams in the U.S. who “put in a tremendous effort” to study the vaccine.
But he supports FDA’s extra efforts. “They are looking under every stone, making sure that this is the safest product that can be put out there,” Hartman said.
“We know that individuals do have different tolerance for the kind of risks-and-benefits trade-off,” said Nancy Wong, a consumer psychology professor at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. “Some people are just naturally risk-takers and some are not.” Evan Polman, an associate professor at the university’s School of Business who researches decision-making and moral psychology, said risk aversion is “probably the most important dimension” for someone deciding when to resume activities outside the home. The community they live in factors into that decision, Wong and Polman said.
Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan saw all this coming years ago. In a New York Times op-ed just before Trump took office, Moynihan — then at the University of Wisconsin — focused attention on what was really happening where he worked.
UW-Madison business professor Justin Sydnor, who specializes in risk and insurance, said insuring more school districts through ETF could be beneficial but questioned the need for a separate pool. “The high-level idea of leveraging ETF’s expertise at creating a big pooled plan and getting some competition among insurers makes some sense,” he said. “But why propose an entirely new program? Why not just work on whatever the issues are that are preventing more school districts from taking advantage of it?”
The upshot is the “market price for licensed child care is wildly high,” said Katherine Magnuson, who studies economically disadvantaged children and their families as a professor of social work at UW-Madison. “How many families can afford to spend between $8,000 and $10,000 a year to pay someone to watch their young child so that they can work outside the home?”
Quoted: Republicans in Wisconsin first took their stance when Scott Walker was governor, contending that the federal government eventually could stop paying as much as promised for the expansion.
“There might be a little bit of Scott Walker legacy in all of this,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Dietram Scheufele is an award-winning and nationally recognized expert on science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and someone I’ve written about for years. He recently shared with me five thoughts about what could have been done differently to mitigate this stark divide over vaccine attitudes.
Since the early days of e-commerce, many big-box retailers saw their brick-and-mortar stores as almost separate businesses from their online operations, said Hart Posen, a professor of management and retail expert at UW-Madison. The pandemic gave them an opportunity to experiment, and they discovered that one is not a substitute for the other. Rather, they complement each other. “Sometimes a customer wants to order online, drive there and pick it up,” Posen said. “Other times that customer wants to come to the store and look around.”
The specific mechanism by which sleep timing affects overall mental health is still not completely understood, said Fang, the researcher who studied the medical residents. But the link between inconsistent sleep schedules and mental health outcomes may have to do with sleep quality, said David T. Plante, a psychiatrist and medical director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you change the timing of when you’re sleeping, you can really affect the quality of your sleep,” he explained. Over time, “it can have a downstream effect on your overall well-being and mental health as well.”
Noted: The prime injury culprits are specialization — which the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health defines as participation in a single sport for more than 8 months of the year — and overtraining.
A groundbreaking 2017 University of Wisconsin study of 1,544 Wisconsin high school athletes found that those who specialized were 70% more likely to sustain a lower extremity injury than athletes who played multiple sports.
“Should we really be asking our young kids to do what we’re asking our collegiate athletes?” asked David Bell, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory.
The experience taught camps “what you don’t want to do,” said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who has been working to develop Covid-19 protocols for camps, including one in Wisconsin.
Yi Fuxian, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote last year that China had “seriously overestimated the country’s actual birth rate and population size” as of 2019. He also cast some doubt on the “quality” of the census data set to be released in the coming months by Chinese Communist Party officials.
While more fresh air and daylight may improve employee health and morale, Malia Jones, an infectious disease researcher at UW-Madison, said employers need to normalize having employees stay home when they’re not feeling well.
Dr. James Conway, a UW Health pediatrician and vaccine expert, called the very low rates of breakthrough cases “reassuring” and proof the vaccines are working as well or better than expected. But the cases also serve as a reminder that people should keep taking coronavirus precautions for now even if fully vaccinated, especially given that more contagious variants are circulating, health officials say.
Quoted: “People who wear masks in close settings have a lower risk of being infected than people who don’t,” said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program.
But it may not be necessary to eradicate it to save forests. “In many ways its presence is more of a symptom of a disease rather than the cause,” says Richard Lankau, a researcher at University of Wisconsin. “Things like disturbance, overabundance of white-tailed deer, exotic earthworms—those things often seem to set the stage for bad garlic mustard invasions.”
“It’s especially used among people who are basically all on the same basic side, but they still have different specific interests and so it’s helpful to be in a smaller group, where you can articulate and share your own experiences,” explained University of Wisconsin- Madison professor emerita of sociology Pamela Oliver.
Still, the relatively low tally of reported infections among those fully immunized should be taken as encouraging news, said Dr. James Conway, a UW Health pediatrician and vaccine expert. “I think this is reassuring. Four months into this, these vaccines are working as good, if not better, than we hoped they would,” Conway said. “It should be more incentive for those who are on the fence or wondering whether they should get these vaccines. … These things work.”
Noted: Clinical trials included the same number of participants as are required for any vaccine trial, said Dr. James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
The Healthy Minds Program is free and offers meditation practices aimed at enhancing awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, says Cortland Dahl, chief contemplative officer at Healthy Minds Innovations and a research scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
