But Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, was confident Biden was playing his strongest hand since his campaign was “a pitch for national unity and a return to normalcy.”
David Rothamer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has experimented with masks on mannequins in classrooms while studying the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus in college classes. He told the Post that he is not a proponent of double masking because it consumes more masks and can lead to more air leakage.
“This policy really mattered to union density in the state,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associated director of the COWS research institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The goal is to go to these one shot approaches,” Dr. William Hartman, UW-Health Astrazeneca covid vaccine trial principal investigator said.
“It’s like your friend in the bar,” said Lewis A. Friedland, a professor who studies talk radio and politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where stations serve up six or more hours of right-wing talk a day. “He’s your buddy, and he’s kind of like you and he likes the same kind of people that you like and doesn’t like the same kind of people that you don’t like.”
David Rothamer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, has experimented with masks on mannequins in classrooms while studying the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus in college classes. He said he is not a proponent of double masking because it consumes more masks, and can also lead to more air leakage.
“Ikea is fairly unique in its ability to tell a potential supplier, ‘If you can’t meet our terms, we’ll find someone else who will,’” said Tom Eggert, a senior lecturer on business sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Whether it’s a wood alternative or plant-based plastics or something else entirely, they have the buying power to create a market where one may not yet exist.”
“We needed to scuff all the tumors up a little bit so we enhance their recognition by the immune cells,” said Dr. Jamey Weichert, a lead researcher and assistant professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who designs molecules to target tumors.
Lewis Friedland, the UW-Madison professor, said research he was involved in following Act 10’s passage showed an “extraordinary level of contention” developing among Wisconsinites, particularly in recent years.
Madison’s longest string of consecutive days with a daytime high temperature of 10 degrees or less is 10, which occurred in January 1963, followed by seven in January 1994, according to Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, UW-Madison professors.
“Both fundraising and endorsements are signs of a candidate’s potential, but in different ways,” Barry Burden, political scientist and professor at UW-Madison said.
“We can have a fair degree of confidence that if there was a significant number of the variants that first caused concern in the United Kingdom or in South Africa, we would have seen it by now,” UW School of Medicine and Public Health Professor David O’Connor said in a UW report posted Monday. “And the fact that we haven’t means that if these viruses are here, they’re here in low enough levels that we don’t have to worry too much — yet.”
They’re also useful. “Júlio [Bicca-Marques] likes to say that monkeys are like the canary in the coal mine,” says Karen Strier, anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a career-long researcher of primates in Brazil. “They’re a good warning that you have to worry about yellow fever” – and other diseases, too.
UW-Madison professor emeritus of public affairs and applied economics Andrew Reschovsky said data show a growing gap in student achievement between white and Black students in Wisconsin, which already ranks among the worst states in the nation on the racial achievement gap. “If you reduce compensation for teachers and you reduce the power of teacher unions, it’s not as if you can say, ‘Ah, that’s a tool. Everybody can cut spending,’ as if there’s no consequences to that,” Reschovsky said.
Holloway, a professor of atmospheric science at UW-Madison, is one of half a dozen leading climate scientists (and mothers) who’ve banded together to motivate other moms to take action on the threat of climate change.
After years of wage freezes, a union representing 225 UW System trade employees negotiated a 1.81% raise for this year, which ended up being less than the 2% raise their non-union colleagues received … “There’s been a range of responses to Act 10,” David Nack, a professor in the UW-Madison Department of Labor Education said. “Workers often want to or need to find a way to effectively represent their interests with their employer. Act 10 doesn’t change any of that.”
Quoted: Solo parents aren’t the only travelers noticing increased scrutiny. “All border crossings have become more difficult over the past few years,” says Erin Barbato, a clinical professor and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. From political unrest to the global pandemic, different forces have added complexity to international travel. In this environment, we need to expect that agents may ask more questions, Barbato says.
Quoted: “While the majority of people have debt loads we wouldn’t consider to be outrageous, there are a lot of people exiting higher education and carrying pretty significant burdens into the workforce,” said Cliff Robb, a consumer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Eleanor Powell, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s unclear whether corporations will prolong their political donation boycotts, though she doesn’t expect contribution halts to be permanent. But continued individual contributions would help minimize the harm that a drought of corporate PAC contributions could cause to Trump’s allies, she said.
Removal from committees is usually reserved for lawmakers who are facing indictments or criminal investigations or who have otherwise broken with their party in a particularly egregious way, according to Eleanor Neff Powell, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The possibility of such a scenario is one reason that epidemiologists like Patrick Remington, a professor emeritus of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, urge caution when comparing local COVID-19 rates. The amount of testing is just one source of potential inaccuracies in official figures, he said.
Ajay Sethi, associate professor, population health sciences, and faculty director, Master of Public Health Program at UW focuses his educational mission on addressing public health misinformation and has been tracking vaccine myths.
“It’s really complicated to go from zero to 100 mph and be writing the rules as you go,”— Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, on vaccine rollout, Jan. 25, 2021
“The vaccine’s on the horizon, there’s going to be an end date to this pandemic. It’s really easy to start thinking it’s over, let’s celebrate. It’s just not, quite yet.”— Dr. Jeff Pothof, UW Health Chief Quality and Safety Officer, Jan. 27, 2021
But as some experts put it, defining doggie ancestry can be tricky. “To a large degree, the accuracy of breed composition tests very likely depends on the degree to which a dog is ‘mixed,’” Lauren Baker and Susannah Sample, both of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email to PopSci. “From a veterinarian’s standpoint, we find these ‘breed identification’ tests are fun for many owners. But having not been evaluated by the scientific community, they shouldn’t be used to alter medical decisions.”
Testing positive means missing work, and for those without paid leave that means missing paychecks, too. It’s a strong disincentive to get tests, said Kathleen Murphy-Ende, a clinical psychologist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics’ Department of Psychiatry. Patients have brought this up in her practice.
Feb. 8, 9 a.m. Eastern: IFCN Talks #1 – “Is deplatforming a solution for misinformation?”. Come chat on Zoom with Francisco Britto Cruz, director at InternetLab (Brazil) and Lucas Graves, professor and researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s free!
The lesson was taught on the first day of Black History Month. “I thought it was profoundly thoughtless, hurtful, lacking in empathy or any kind of wisdom or forethought,” said UW-Madison professor Christy Clark-Pujara, an expert on African American history. “There is no excuse for it.”
Bjorn Eraker, a finance professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said those high numbers point to a bubble, not long-term stability of the stock.
“It’s a speculative bubble more than it is a safe investment,” Eraker said. “There’s no way of knowing what they might do because the stock is trading way, way above its fundamentals. It is a game more than it is an investment.”
A new and always fatal disease that has been killing chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Sierra Leone for years has been reported for the first time by an international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Raison believes depression isn’t a single thing but a cloud of related mental and physical states unique to each person; there is no one symptom that every depressed person experiences. “It’s all kind of hunt-and-peck,” he says. “We have an array of treatment options that we just start throwing at people because we don’t know why, biologically, they’re depressed.” Meanwhile depression is growing to epidemic proportions in the United States, with few truly novel treatments approved over the last three decades.
UW Professor Bjorn Eraker talks with 27 News Anchor George Smith about what this all means.
“People are calling like, ‘Should I be wearing two masks?’” he described. Pothof said the short answer to that question is no.
Quoted: Committee co-chairman Jonathan Temte of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said the committee will break because it will take months to distribute vaccine shots to everyone eligible in phases underway.
Jim Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute who is a member of the panel, said during the meeting he was concerned about the effect of the break on the subcommittee members’ ability to provide information to the health care community and others about the status of the rollout.
“Now that we’re on this committee (many of us) are sort of viewed as sources of information for a lot of the people around the state and a lot of organizations and it’s been incredibly beneficial to be part of these conversations to be able to help shed some light on these things,” Conway said. “I’m a little concerned if we’re going to take a long pause that we won’t continue to be able to be those resources for others, so I do wonder where things are, what we know about how the distribution is going and if there is anything that we can offer.”
Temte agreed, saying, “At the end of the day we serve at the pleasure of the Secretary or Acting Secretary so if our efforts, skills, knowledge and opinions are of value, I think we stand ready to come back.”
Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic from the beginning. Crucial to managing the pandemic is mitigating the effects of misinformation, which the World Health Organization dubbed an “infodemic.”
Feature billing goes to researchers like Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations; Natalie Batalha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a leader of the Kepler mission who is now planning Webb observations; Margaret (Maggie) Turnbull, an expert on habitable planets at the University of Wisconsin, and a former candidate for governor of that state, whom Mr. Kahn interviewed as she tended her backyard beehives; and Amy Lo, a Northrop engineer who works on racecars when she is not working on making all the Webb pieces fit together.
“A lot of what he has done has been unwinding what Trump had done,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and expert on presidential powers and executive actions. “Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of executive authority.”
Christina Koch, a research computing facilitator at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, works at a computing centre that provides remote access to some 14,000 nodes and terabytes of memory. Suppose, Koch says, that a bioinformatician has a computational workflow for analysing gene-expression data sets. Each data set takes a day to process on their computer, and the researcher has 60 such data sets. “That’s two months of non-stop running,” she says. But, by sending the job to a computer cluster using the ‘secure shell’ command, ‘ssh’, which opens an encrypted portal to the remote system, the researcher can parallelize the computations across 60 computers. “Instead of two months, it takes one day.”
The purchaser or purchasers of these stations could affect the media landscape of Wisconsin because the stations cover such a broad swath of Wisconsin, UW-Madison professor emeritus Barry Orton said.
“The regulations have not been updated for quite a while to reflect modern contemporary ways of communication,” said Sarah Orr, director of the Consumer Law Clinic at UW-Madison Law School.
Quoted: “Think about it — our hospitals and clinics are near capacity because we have a heavy caseload of COVID right now,” said Mary Hayney, a pharmacy professor at UW-Madison.
“We need to find other people to … administer vaccines to the public. So students are a resource that can be tapped to do that because they have the skills and are ready to go,” she said.
Quoted: “For over six decades, the UW Law School has been privileged to publish and provide a home for the Wisconsin Jury Instructions. This has been a labor of love, grounded in our deep commitment to the Wisconsin Idea,” wrote UW Law School Dean Dan Tokaji.
“We are delighted that the jury instructions will be digitized and made free to the public from this point forward, thanks to the diligent efforts of the state courts and many people working with them.”
Quoted: “There is always a chance that in the future another new variant might emerge, and we would have to check again whether the vaccine can be effective against that new variant,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“A lot of what he has done has been unwinding what Trump had done,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and expert on presidential powers and executive actions. “Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of executive authority.”
“When COVID started, among parents and teachers there was a lot of speculation about what mask wearing was going to mean for everyday social interactions and people started being concerned, reasonably, about how all of this was going to impact children,” says Dr. Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral fellow at UW-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab.
Quoted: The idea of removing names — let alone an entire article — from a newspaper’s digital archive is traditionally anathema for many journalists. “For a long time the instinct was, ‘Nope, we’re not even going to think about this. We are about seeking the truth and reporting it and we don’t go back and unreport it,’ ” said Kathleen Culver, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: “Now is not the time to loosen restrictions but rather double-down on our mitigation efforts and ramp up vaccine rollout,” Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Other new variants will inevitably emerge if we allow the coronavirus to spread uncontrollably.”
Quoted: As customers make their way through shelves, they may move or pick up items in ways that can make the location and quantity of inventory difficult to to gauge, said Hart Posen, professor at the University of Wisconsin school of business.
“It leads to lots of mistakes and errors because what the computer system says is on the shelf might not be there, because a customer has it in their cart, or…picked it up and moved it someplace else,” he said. “So mostly using store shelves for e-commerce fulfillment is not a scalable and efficient way to do it.”
Noted: One way to appeal to youth on Covid-19 is by placing the wellbeing of their social group on their shoulders, said Dominique Brossard, a professor specializing in science communication at University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She pointed to the decades-old “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive” slogan in the U.S. as one successful campaign that helped lower incidence of youth drunk-driving. Simply relaying information about the virus may have limited effectiveness with the younger generation, who are accustomed to being bombarded with a constant stream of content.
Noted: Lewis, an assistant professor of mathematics at George Washington University, decided to hire Rai before he had any idea that the pandemic would push the course online. He had gotten the idea from Harry Brighouse, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has written about having a student worker critique his teaching. The move online meant Lewis’s discussions with Rai covered different ground than the professor had initially imagined — he thought they’d talk more about issues like how much class time he should spend on particular topics. But it ended up being an especially good semester in which to have a thoughtful observer.
When public servants face a challenge, AAAS Member and newly elected 2020 AAAS Fellow Dr. Laura Albert finds solutions. Whether helping police tackle the opioid crisis, or assisting election officials in protecting voters during a deadly pandemic — which was one of her most recent feats — the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor uses mathematical models and analytics to recommend safe, economical and often innovative remedies.
Quoted: Melissa Kono is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works in community development and is raising a family on a farm. “Work-life balance,” she said, is not a farming staple.
Noah Williams, an economist at UW-Madison, said he is against an increase in the minimum wage. Williams points to 2019 projections from the Congressional Budget Office. With $15/hr officials estimate 1.3 million people would be pulled out of poverty. Another 1.3 million people, however, would lose jobs.
“I don’t think that any of us really anticipated the extent to which asymptomatic transmission would play a role,” Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Hospital, said Wednesday during an online panel discussion reflecting on the pandemic a year after it began.
Coming after such a severe sentence, it is hard to judge the significance of Bundit’s acquittal. Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Thai protest movements, said it was unusual for a lese-majeste case to be acquitted. “They are rarely, but sometimes, dismissed,” she noted on Twitter of Bundit’s case. “What makes it particularly significant is the 43.5 year sentence (down from 87 years) handed down to Anchan, a 65-year-old former civil servant last week, and the over 50 Article 112 cases filed against democracy activists recently.”
“It told mapmakers you can do whatever you want,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All of the guardrails are off.”
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers, like many people, faced a lot of stress in 2020. He said the pandemic brought both emotional stress, as COVID-19 spread in rural areas, and stress for their profession, due to disruptions to supply chains and consumer eating habits.
Food packaging films that contain several layers of different plastic are particularly tricky to take apart. Every year, 100 million tons of these multilayer films are produced worldwide. When thrown away, those plastics go to landfills, says chemical engineer George Huber of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“The drug performs quite well in mice and the authors hint at it having potential against other viruses too,” said David H. O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It is premature to say if it will have clinical benefit, but it definitely merits clinical trials.”
Dr. Ajay Sethi, an infectious diseases expert at UW, joined the Wake Up Wisconsin team to talk about the discussion.
But do these vast differences play a role in forming the politics of future citizens? That’s something political scientists and education experts have debated for decades. “High quality civic education is essential to ensure that this generation of young people is fully prepared to participate wisely and well in the political and civic realms,” said Diana Hess, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of education and an expert in civic and political education. “That said, the crisis of epic proportions facing our democracy was caused by a confluence of factors and certainly should not be blamed solely or even primarily on what did or did not happen in our schools.”
