“It’s a recognition of Chicana and Latina talent in acting and representation,” said Theresa Delgadillo, a Chicana and Latina studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and a woman innovator in music at the center of it.”
University of Wisconsin – Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer said Biden is starting out with a “challenging set of circumstances.””It’s historically difficult. The country is as polarized as it has ever been at any time in the last 140 years. We have serious economic distress…COVID-19 is not remotely under control,” Mayer said.
Allison Prasch, an assistant professor and expert on political speeches at UW-Madison, said Biden mentioned words like “we” or “us” roughly three times more than the word “I.” She compared his speech to the Gettysburg Address, in which Abraham Lincoln did not mention the North and the South as divided entities. He, instead, spoke about the Union and American unity.
“It is remarkable how little legislating the Legislature has done over the past year,” Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor, said in an email. “As Governor Evers points out, the Legislature has not actually passed any legislation and sent it to his desk since last April, despite the challenges of the pandemic, the economy and the election. Legislative leaders and their allies have instead been active in the courts, challenging many of the orders and actions coming out of the Evers administration.”
“We really need to come together to combat this,” said Dr. Jasmine Zapata, pediatrician and public health strategist with the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “And just like masks, social distancing and good handwashing are part of the solution, getting as many people vaccinated as possible is part of the solution.”
That’s partly because these tools are free, Rasband says. But it’s also because it’s easy for users to customize the tool to their needs, says Kevin Eliceiri, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, whose team has taken the lead on ImageJ development since Rasband’s retirement. ImageJ features a deceptively simple, minimalist user interface that has remained largely unchanged since the 1990s.
Trade policy is where the president wields the most economic power, as Congress has over the years delegated negotiating authority to the president’s office, according to Menzie Chinn, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Chinn documented the trade war saga on his macroeconomic policy blog Econbrowser.
Another key point? It doesn’t make sense to be happy all the time. “The goal isn’t to be happy 24/7,” Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center For Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told HuffPost.
Hallmark having its own PAC may come as a surprise to some, but these days, a major company not having a PAC is more of an anomaly, said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hallmark having its own PAC may come as a surprise to some, but these days, a major company not having a PAC is more of an anomaly, said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The financial aid office is your friend in this process,” explains Karla Weber, who works in the financial aid office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think sometimes we get made out to be the ones that are hiding or hoarding this money from students, where it’s really just the opposite.
Staying in separate rooms and using separate bathrooms, when possible, helps prevent household transmission, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director for infection prevention at UW Hospitals and Clinics in Madison.
Joy Kirkpatrick is an outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Profitability who meets with farmers to help them navigate farm succession planning.
Kirkpatrick said she thinks the opportunity for anonymity online could make some farmers feel more comfortable sharing tough realities.
In that test, the children correctly identified the emotional expression on uncovered faces about 66% of the time, well above the odds of just guessing, psychologist Ashley Ruba at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said. Looking at faces in surgical-type masks, however, the children were only able to correctly identify sadness about 28% of the time, anger 27% of the time, and fear 18% of the time.
“For very young children, I think it is still an open question as to how they’ll navigate these situations,” said Dr. Ruba, who studies how children learn to understand other people’s emotions. “Infants can use all these other cues, like tone of voice.”
Though the law allows employers to mandate vaccines, UW-Madison professor emerita of law and bioethics Alta Charo said requiring employees to get the shot could lead to pushback from employees who might get vaccinated on their own but bristle at the mandate. “In the history of public health, we have frequently seen that voluntary compliance winds up more successful at the end than mandates,” Charo said.
Quoted: Dr. David O’Connor is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UW-Madison’s school of Medicine and Public Health, where he runs a lab studying viral infections. Speaking with WORT, O’Connor said it’s common for viruses to mutate as they find new hosts.
“The genetic material for the coronavirus is called RNA, and when RNA makes copies of itself, sometimes those copies are sloppy, and a mistake gets made,” O’Connor said.
The Associated Press and other news outlets have focused on the fact the B.1.1.7 strain appears to transmit between people more quickly than other strains. Dr. Thomas Friedrich, who studies diseases and immune systems at UW-Madison, shares this same suspicion.
“This variant does appear to be more contagious, more transmissible between people, about one and half times as transmissible as previous strains. So, that’s concerning to us because it means that virus might spread a bit easier, and might be a little harder to control,” Friedrich said.
Quoted: Stanley Payne, a University of Wisconsin historian of Spain and author of A History of Fascism 1914-1945, agrees that Trump’s lack of coherent revolutionary fervor makes him fall short of fascism. “Never founded a new fascist party, never embraced a coherent new revolutionary ideology, never announced a radical new doctrine but introduced a noninterventionist foreign military policy,” Payne wrote to me in an email. “Not even a poor man’s fascist. Ever an incoherent nationalist-populist with sometimes destructive tendencies.”
Professor emeritus of dairy science and former dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Neal Jorgensen, passed away at 85 on Dec. 22.
Quoted: “In meat systems, permeate can be used to reduce the amount of sodium, enhance browning, protect color, mask bitter flavors and improve structure formation,” said Susan Larson, associate researcher, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for the US Dairy Export Council, Arlington, Va. “The lactose in permeate also provides a carbohydrate that could replace a portion of the sugar in a fermented sausage.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, professor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Johnson’s strong allegiance to President Donald Trump, as well as his position within the Senate majority and chairmanship of a powerful committee, positioned him squarely in the national spotlight.
“That combination has been really effective for him for the last several years and has given him a national platform,” Burden said. “And now he’s essentially losing all of that.”
Quoted: Laura Dresser, an economist with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said prior economic declines were led by male-dominated fields, such as construction and manufacturing. The pandemic-driven decline, she said, has strongly affected areas – such as the restaurant and education industries – with a high number of women workers.
“And those jobs are low-wage jobs,” Dresser said. “They’re held disproportionately by women. They’re held disproportionately by people of color.”
Quoted: The motivation for the crackdown is “a combination of corporate pressure through fear of losing advertisers, and some sense of responsibility that this (insurrection) was a bridge too far,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The question is how sustained the corporate response will be,” Culver said. Currently, companies including AT&T, JPMorgan and Coca-Cola have paused their political contributions to the 147 Republicans who objected to certifying the election results, for instance. “Is it performative in the moment or will it last? It feels unlike any moment I’ve seen before.”
Quoted: But fellow co-chairman Dr. Jonathan Temte, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said politics shouldn’t play a role in public health decision-making.
“It is our purview to make whatever we think is the best recommendation,” he said. “I don’t think it’s ethically acceptable to say we’re going to do congregate living but exclude the incarcerated, because by definition, that’s congregate living.”
University of Wisconsin professor and political science expert Mike Wagner answered your questions on News 3 Now This Morning.
The 2010 map, as UW-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer explained, was widely criticized after being created by the Assembly’s top Republicans and their lawyers. According to the rulings of federal courts, the party claimed attorney-client privilege and did not release the details of its map.
Quoted: In Florida, for example, a nursing home offered vaccines to members of its board and major donors, the Washington Post reported.
But that doesn’t seem to be the norm, said Ajay Sethi, an infectious disease expert with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said the top concern should be that no doses go to waste.
“It’s far better to get a shot in somebody’s arm than throw it out. Throwing it out is a complete tragedy,” Sethi said.
“If it’s happening to the point where the original plans are being abandoned, then I think that would be an issue,” Sethi added. “But I don’t think we’re at that stage right now.”
Quoted: “What we’ve heard more and more is that there are organizations that end up with unfilled slots in their immunization schedules who would like to reach out to members that would technically be in that next (rollout) group,” said Dr. Jim Conway, a professor of pediatrics at UW-Madison.
“A more transmissible variant is something to take seriously and may alter the way we think about schools reopening or other thing we are doing in the community,” said Dr. Thomas Friedrich, a professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
President Trump is now the only president in American history to be impeached twice. But with only a week left in his presidency, what exactly does that mean? Barry Burden weighs in.
“There’s nothing the president can do to get out of the legal mess that he’s in,” Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at UW-Madison, told NBC15.
“The fact that gorillas are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 should come as no surprise,” says disease ecologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Fortunately, gorillas at zoos have excellent medical care, and most will likely pull through due to the efforts of dedicated veterinarians. That’s not the case for gorillas in the wild, though.”
Thomas Friedrich, professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says a new, more transmissible variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 could have big implications for the pandemic in the U.S. if its starts spreading widely in the country.
“People often wonder whether an officer’s actions complied with local policy. But as to an officer’s civil or criminal liability, this question does not matter. When a department asserts an officer acted reasonably, the department looks to constitutional law. And constitutional law is very forgiving of officer decision-making,” said Ion Meyn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has extensively studied the issue.
“The choice is ours,” said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “It’s ours as a population, as a country, as a community … Navsaria was joined on the Wisconsin Health News panel by UW-Madison epidemiologist Malia Jones, La Crosse School district superintendent Aaron Engel and Eau Claire City-County Health Department director Lieske Giese.
“Whatever we do is going to be far from perfect, and that’s OK,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, co-chair of the subcommittee and associate dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “The important thing is to get as much vaccine into as many people as possible.”
“New variants will continue to emerge and circulate,” Thomas Friedrich, a UW-Madison professor of pathobiological sciences, said during a recent state Department of Health Services webinar. “We should expect these or other ones to appear in Wisconsin and spread here.”
“This is a climate we want to change,” said Erika Marin-Spiotta, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the American Meteorological Society’s 100th annual meeting, held last January in Boston.
“Parents and children can do well in any state. But doing your best will indeed be easier in some states than in others, and child development is better on average in some states than in others,” says Dave Riley, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology who took part in the report.
“Not surprisingly, the circuits that they’re looking at are remarkably similar to some of these processes in humans,” says Jules Panksepp, a social neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not part of the study. Both mice and humans share a connectedness with their compatriots in emotional situations, he says, and research points to a shared evolutionary basis for empathy.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated 6 hectares are required for monarchs to stay afloat in the long run. “Current monarch numbers are not sustainable,” says ecologist Karen Oberhauser of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“The era of landslide elections appears to be behind us,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. “The strengthening of partisanship in the electorate has dampened the magnitude of swings from one party to the other.”
Many journals have teams that check images for mistakes in image manipulation, notes Kevin Eliceiri, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dr. Jonathan Temte, co-chair of the subcommittee and former chair of the CDC advisory committee, said that if disabled people who live in group homes are prioritized, inmates should be too because both live in congregate settings. “I think we should be unwilling to decouple those,” said Temte, associate dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
UW-Madison professor Mike Wagner explained this would require the vice president and a majority of cabinet members to agree the president can no longer carry out his duties.“The vice president would become acting president if that took place,” Wagner said.
“White people can get away with more stuff than black people and that happens a lot. There’s a lot, a lot, a lot of that. That white people are given a pass,” said UW-Madison emeritus sociology professor Pam Oliver.
The gradual and very public rollout of the new vaccines provides the opportunity to make vaccination for COVID a new norm—something that everyone will be doing. Studies show people make choices such as buying flood insurance or solar panels for their home because their neighbors have done so, “and the exact same thing is true for vaccinations,” observes Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He and Milkman think it might be a good idea to hand out stickers that say, “I got vaccinated,” much like the “I voted” stickers used to propel people to the polls, or to do the digital equivalent with a Facebook profile filter. If celebrities and sports stars join the trend, so much the better.
“It’s relatively easy for folks to rally behind species with a cute appearance, a charismatic name or a compelling story,” says Patrick “PJ” Liesch, entomologist and director of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “However, for every cute or charismatic species in existence, there are many more species threatened with extinction that don’t get their moment in the spotlight. We should be concerned about all of those species as well — not just the ones catching the most headlines.”
“The clinical trials were designed to determine whether the vaccines can prevent symptoms and hospitalization in people. They did not test whether or not somebody can still carry the virus despite being immunized and potentially pass that virus to others,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Population Health Sciences.
Richard J. Davidson, director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that optimism practitioners are more active on the left side of the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain, among other circuits, is responsible for our cognitive control and emotional response. Davidson proved that by consciously directing attention, we can influence our emotional reactions.
For months politicians made baseless claims against a democratic process, and Ken Mayer, a professor of American politics, said hearing that from President Donald Trump and other Republican politicians led to this result.
Quoted: “The rollout has not gone real smoothly, and for as many doses out there, we’re not vaccinating very quickly,” vaccine committee co-chairman Jonathan Temte, the Associate Dean for Public Health and Community Engagement for UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said Tuesday about deciding who is included in the next phase.
“And the larger we make any particular group, the much longer it’s going to take,” he said. “One of the questions is how long do we put off some of those high-risk individuals.”
Recent studies have shown symptomatic, pregnant patients with COVID-19 are at increased risk for more severe disease, ICU admission, mechanical ventilation and death than nonpregnant patients, according to William Hartman, MD, PhD, a principal investigator for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine trial at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus and an assistant professor of anesthesiology.
Parents also saw a benefit, engaging in more responsive feeding practices and showing more skill in sensitively scaffolding their child’s learning and development, said Dr. Robert L. Nix of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who coauthored the study with colleagues there and at Pennsylvania State University.
Over time, Corona cameras and film improved in quality. With an archive of almost one million images, the program detected Soviet missile sites, warships, naval bases and other military targets. “They counted every rocket in the Soviet Union,” said Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin — Madison whose lab has used the images in its studies. “These images kept the Cold War cold.”
Those expected objections to the final tally has University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Director of the Election Research Center, Barry Burden, thinking it could be a long night for Congress and Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday.
When it comes to the coronavirus, there’s some risk every time you leave your house, said Nasia Safdar of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. But golf is a relatively safe activity, especially if players take precautions, like only riding in carts with members of their household, she said.
“In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been an explosion of research linking well-being in its many forms to numerous indicators of health. When that work [began], we didn’t know that purpose in life would emerge as such an important predictor of numerous health outcomes,” says Carol Ryff, psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) national study of Americans. Research has shown that people who have high levels of purpose in life spend fewer nights in hospitals, have lower odds of developing diabetes, and over two times lower risk of dying from heart conditions than do others.
British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which has enrolled at least 23,000 so far in its ongoing U.S. study, recently decided to offer individual participants the opportunity to be unmasked as they become eligible for the approved vaccines.
“You never really want to unblind,” said Dr. William Hartman, a researcher for AstraZeneca’s trial at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
These changes in social interactions have real effects on our mental health, said Shilagh Mirgain, a psychologist at UW Health. “When we are not able to be together for long periods of time, it can impact our mood, motivation and outlook and make us more vulnerable to engage in negative health habits,” Mirgain said.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Wisconsin Public Radio that the forecast is slightly higher than last quarter’s estimate, partly because of a price rally for corn and soybeans seen around harvest time.
Children can still read the emotional expressions of people wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers say.
“We now have this situation where adults and kids have to interact all the time with people whose faces are partly covered, and a lot of adults are wondering if that’s going to be a problem for children’s emotional development,” said study co-author Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
