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Category: UW Experts in the News

Primer on Trump’s Visit to Georgia

FactCheck.org

Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us it is not possible to know how many Georgians voted for Biden and no other candidate. That “would require individual-level information from ballots, not aggregation information about ballots cast in each race,” he said.

No, that’s not a mountain behind Madison…

NBC-15

Researcher Tim Wagner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space, Science, & Engineering Center (SSEC) knew exactly what it was. All he had to utter was “Superior Mirage” and his wife grabbed his camera for him. He snapped a photo shortly before 8:30 Wednesday morning – showing what appeared to be a mountain behind the capitol city.

Black residents built Halyard Park. Now they fear being taxed out their homes as downtown development moves northward.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Revel Sims, a gentrification expert and urban planning professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the question he hears the most often is this: Can development occur without displacement?

“I don’t have a silver bullet answer,” he said. “For a long time, the strategy has been you can’t stop it, you just have to get benefits (through) community benefit agreements.”

Wisconsin’s not so white anymore – and in some rapidly diversifying cities like Kenosha there’s fear and unrest

The Conversation

Kenosha, Wisconsin, became a national byword for racial unrest when protests in August erupted in violence.After local police shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back, leaving him paralyzed, furious residents took to the streets expressing years of pent-up anger. During nighttime hours, fires were set.

Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Trump’s ‘Most Important’ Speech Was Mostly False

FactCheck.org

Election experts also attribute some of the disparity to “ballot roll-off,” which is when voters skip certain races. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us it’s not unusual for voters to “choose a candidate at the top of the ballot and then ‘roll off’ as they move down the ballot. There is nothing suspicious about lower participation in lower level races.”

Pricey mini campus promises students maskless, safe spring term

Inside Higher Ed

Craig Roberts, epidemiologist emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that “bubbles sound good in concept but are difficult to pull off, especially at this scale.”

“The key, he said, “is the degree to which the community stays in the bubble, of course, and nobody violates the rules” — sneaking into town, for example. But staff members could be potential problems if they’re coming and going from the community. That makes it more like a long-term care facility, he said, where only residents are on lockdown.

For First Time In Months, Wisconsin’s COVID-19 Cases Are Declining. Experts Say It May Not Last.

Wisconsin Public Radio

Before Thanksgiving, Wisconsin was “at least leveling out, maybe trending down a little bit on some of the measures we look at,” said Dr. Jeffrey Pothof, the chief quality officer for UW Health. It would have been too soon to know if the state’s outbreak had begun to recede, but there was data suggesting that was possible.

Trump Repeats Baseless, False Claims About the Election

FactCheck.org

When asked to comment on similar claims about “Biden-only” voting in Georgia, Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us it is not possible to know how many Georgians voted for Biden and no other candidate. That “would require individual-level information from ballots, not aggregation information about ballots cast in each race,” he said.

Fears of coronavirus jump intensify in Thanksgiving’s aftermath

The Washington Post

Days after millions of Americans ignored health guidance to avoid travel and large Thanksgiving gatherings, it’s still too soon to tell how many people became infected with the coronavirus over the course of the holiday weekend. But as travelers head home to communities already hit hard by the disease, hospitals and health officials across the country are bracing for what scientist Dave O’Connor called “a surge on top of a surge.”

“It is painful to watch,” said O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Like seeing two trains in the distance and knowing they’re about to crash, but you can’t do anything to stop it.”

Health Experts Ask People To Avoid In-Person Black Friday Shopping As Spread Of COVID-19 Remains High

Wisconsin Public Radio

Malia Jones researches how our social environment affects our health as a social epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory. She also serves as the editor in chief of Dear Pandemic, an interdisciplinary group of all-female researchers and clinicians who create fact-based social media content about COVID-19.

Could lawmakers ‘mess’ with Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes? Possibly

Wisconsin State Journal

As established under Wisconsin law, officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties convene at the state Capitol and nominate one slate of electors per party, according to UW-Madison Law School professor Rob Yablon. Each slate contains 10 electors, one from each of the state’s eight congressional districts and two at large.

Wisconsin Corn Growers Expected To Bring In Record Yields

Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Joe Lauer, an agronomy professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were grateful for more normal weather patterns this year after an extremely wet season in 2019.

“There’s a little more peace of mind, if you will, in kind of going through what I just call an average normal production season,” Lauer said. “We’re going to end up with record yields but it’s just kind of easier psychologically to take.”

Shawn Conley, soybean and wheat specialist for UW-Madison’s Division of Extension, said a lack of precipitation throughout the state at the end of summer caused the USDA to lower their forecasted yields to 53 bushels per acre. That’s six bushels, or almost 13 percent, higher than last year.

But Conley said most farmers were happy to have the dry weather.

“That allowed farmers to have a lot of days in the field that they can push through and get their crops out of the field in a timely manner,” Conley said.

Retailers adjust and public health experts urge caution looking ahead to Black Friday in the pandemic

Wisconsin Examiner

Quoted: “It will be unlike any other Thanksgiving week shopping that we’ve had, I imagine,” says retailing expert Jerry O’Brien.

Perhaps this year’s biggest Black Friday change is that retailers effectively started Black Friday weeks ago.

“They’re pretty much all coming out openly saying, ‘We’re going to spread Black Friday out through November,’” says O’Brien, who is executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

UW-Madison epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi is hoping that foot traffic will be modest and safe.

“I anticipate there’ll be less Black Friday shopping this year compared to last year, because a sizable proportion of people are well aware of our pandemic,” says Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences and faculty director of the UW-Madison master of public health degree program. “It obviously needs to be minimal, because we want to have really no crowding anywhere, for at least the next several weeks or months, so we can stop the spread of COVID in the state.”

‘To beat this virus, we have to be united’: Chaos and resistance to COVID-19 measures hinder Wisconsin’s response

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: 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, said the best approach to tackling the massive outbreak is working together.

“To beat this virus, we have to be united in response,” he said.

Report: Wisconsinites follow national trend in cutting cable subscriptions

Wisconsin State Journal

Many customers are either canceling subscriptions or never signing up in the first place if they are able to instead subscribe to streaming services, which may be cheaper or more tailored to their interests, UW-Madison professor emeritus Barry Orton said. “They’re all focusing on exclusive content,” Orton said of streaming services. “Something you can’t watch anywhere else.”

Are Cuban-American Voters Really a ‘Special’ Case?

The Nation

The other, media, is taking on new forms in a digital age, but if recent statements by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke are anything to go by, this is a national problem for Democrats that a growing chorus within the party are already well aware of. Grenier tells me that Democrats in Florida are already well aware that the GOP’s hold over the Cuban-American community was not built overnight. We can’t expect Democratic inroads to be either.

Andrés S. Pertierra (@ASPertierra) is a PhD student in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Washington, DC, he previously received his undergraduate degree from the University of Havana, Cuba.

Did Viruses Create the Nucleus? The Answer May Be Near.

Quanta Magazine

Quoted: Just this year, researchers spotted pores in the double-membrane-bound viral factories of coronaviruses, which are eerily reminiscent of the pores found in cell nuclei. “If this result holds up, and assuming that the pore-forming protein was not derived from a eukaryotic genome, then it does blunt one argument against the virus model,” wrote David A. Baum, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in an email.

Leaf-cutter ants have rocky crystal armor, never before seen in insects

National Geographic

Quoted: The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We were really excited to find [this in] one of the most well-studied insects in nature,” he says.

 

Who would benefit from canceling $10,000 in student debt?

Marketplace

Biden’s platform states that “student debt both exacerbates and results from the racial wealth gap.” Of the 1 in 5 Americans with student loan debt, a disproportionate number are Black. Nick Hillman, associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that data shows in communities of color, 17% of borrowers are in default and their median loan is $9,067.

‘Not sure how long we can hold the line’: With hospitals full, doctors and scientists beg Wisconsinites to stay home for Thanksgiving

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The scale of the pandemic is straining health care systems in Wisconsin so badly that even large hospitals like UW Health University Hospital in Madison are nearly full, said Jeff Pothof, a physician and chief quality officer at UW Health … “Early on, we managed the surge, we had contingency plans, we were keeping up,” said Pothof. “But now we’re getting towards the end of that book. If we get there, we don’t have anything magic. We don’t have anything else left up our sleeve.”

The Facts on Trump’s Post-Election Legal Challenges

FactCheck.org

It said the clerks did so following “illegal guidance” from the Wisconsin Election Commission, but the campaign has presented no evidence of wrongdoing. David Canon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said such charges sounded more like something that belonged in a lawsuit rather than a request for a recount.

“In a recount, all you are doing is recounting the ballots to make sure they were recorded properly,” Canon told WMTV, an NBC affiliate in Madison.

Gen Z’s Next Victim: The Lawn

Sierra Club

Landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed the lush meadows of Central Park, brought the status symbol to the masses by designing sweeping, pastoral parks for public use, says Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.

‘Checks and balances’: Inside the life cycle of a Wisconsin absentee ballot

Wisconsin State Journal

“The result of the election was not terribly different from four years ago; it went to the Democrats rather than the Republicans, but Wisconsin remains a narrowly divided state,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison. “I think election officials managed to operate in that highly partisan environment quite well.”

What Trump Showed Us About America

POLITICO

Katherine J. Cramer is professor of political science and chair of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

The past few years have taught me just how removed the cultural elite in the United States is from many of the other people in this nation. By cultural elite, I mean those of us who create the knowledge and the media content people consume, as well those of us in positions of political and other decision-making power. There is a deep well of people in this country who are sure the system is not working for them, and we seem to be only coming around to recognizing how deep it goes.

President Trump is seeking a recount in two Wisconsin counties, but what he’s really doing is preparing for a lawsuit.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the recount effort is clearly not actually about changing the election result given the margin. Instead, he said, Trump’s goals could be to put a cloud over the election results, raise suspicions, and to lay groundwork for the future.

Movie Theaters Get State Boost

WORT-FM

According to Tino Balio, a Professor Emeritus of Communication Arts at UW-Madison and an expert on the history of American cinema, the 1918 pandemic ultimately didn’t leave a lasting impact on the industry.  “Throughout the 1920s, the film industry grew exponentially and it became well-entrenched and, during that period, there was a tremendous theater construction boom,” he says. But, Balio makes that caveat that things are different this time around.

Alzheimer’s Research Looks at Hot Spots Across the U.S.

Wall Street Journal

In another of the studies released earlier this year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that, based on autopsies, people who lived in the poorest neighborhoods at the time of their death were about twice as likely to have brain changes typical of Alzheimer’s disease as people who lived in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Researchers used the Neighborhood Atlas, a map developed by the University of Wisconsin that charts neighborhoods by socioeconomic status.

“We are in the baby steps of trying to understand what is driving this,” says Ryan Powell, a scientist who helped lead the study.

COVID-19 tied to mental illness diagnoses

WKOW

“For some people, for any number of reasons, the immune system kick that the virus causes then sets in motion long-lasting changes in how the brain works,” Dr. Charles Raison said Saturday. “It diminishes the brain’s ability to work effectively, and so you get all these symptoms.”

Video Games to Relax

The New York Times

Although the neuroscience of video gaming is not conclusive, there may be evidence that the benefits are not (pardon the phrase) just in your head. Recently, a group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine developed Tenacity, a game with the goal of increasing mindfulness.

The Cities Central to Fraud Conspiracy Theories Didn’t Cost Trump the Election

New York Times

“From a partisan perspective, Trump’s vilification of cities makes no sense,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email. “It has little to do with his loss in Wisconsin, which resulted mostly from small shifts in the white vote outside of the city, particularly the suburbs, Dane County, and other parts of Milwaukee County.”