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Category: UW Experts in the News

Disney Adds Warnings for Racist Stereotypes to Some Older Films

The New York Times

Hemant Shah, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies portrayals of race and ethnicity in film and media, said that if white children consumed content with racist portrayals that went unchecked, it could “normalize the stereotype” for them and make it “normal for them not to call out stereotypes or racist behaviors they see in their lives.”

Comedian Shane Mauss gets seriously funny at Wisconsin Science Festival

Cap Times

Mauss’ guests will include Heather Kirkorian, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cognitive Development and Media Lab, UW-Madison professor of communication science Catalina Toma, and comedian Ken Reid, host of the “TV Guidance Counselor” podcast. The session will be held via Crowdcast, where audience members can comment and ask questions throughout the event.

Why New Dads Struggle With Depression – Male Postpartum Depression

Men's Health

There have been some appeals by experts over the years to take paternal PPD seriously, but those calls have been largely ignored. In January, three leading researchers, Tova Walsh, Ph.D., Neal Davis, M.D., and Craig Garfield, M.D., published a piece in Pediatrics—the influential journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics—urging pediatricians to screen for paternal PPD, just as they do for maternal postpartum depression. “It is now critical to recognize paternal depression as a community of pediatric providers and ensure consistent screening, referral, and follow-up,” they wrote.

Covid-19 Cases Are Rising in More Than 40 States

WSJ

“This just makes me feel that the winter will be more ominous. I don’t think it’s going to go down. It could, we have the time for it to go down,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “But you really need to have a sudden and complete change in behavior across the state, and it’s hard to believe it will occur.”

Wisconsin Judge Temporarily Blocks State Order on Taverns as New Covid-19 Cases Hit Record

WSJ

Howard Schweber, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the conflicts in all three states reflect the intense partisan divide, with Democratic governors and one or both houses of the legislative branch controlled by Republicans.

“What we have is just a sort of state-level version of what is sometimes called constitutional hardball,” he said. “Parties pushing the rules of the game and their interests to the extreme that the system will allow, which would be unfortunate if we were talking about, say, fiscal policy, but in the case of a genuine public-health crisis, is truly disastrous.”

Voter turnout: Will sports stadiums as voting sites boost the vote?

Slate

“I think it’s a combination of widespread national interest in racial justice and the pandemic happening simultaneously [driving engagement]—and the fact that these arenas aren’t actually being used for sports [that] makes them available,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founding director of its Elections Research Center. “So it’s sort of a perfect storm of all these things coming together that’s made it sort of a natural extension for teams to make.”

Trump and Biden in competing town halls with president facing uphill battle

The Japan Times

David Canon, chair of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed.But he said Trump may have committed a “tactical error” by backing out of a virtual debate with Biden.“He needed the debates more than Biden did,” Canon said. “He’s the one that needs to change the momentum in the election.”

How coronavirus’s genetic code can help control outbreaks

Washington Post

“It’s still kind of like a volunteer fire department,” said Tom Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the consortium. “Labs that already have the interest and capacity are sequencing, but that leaves other places lacking in coverage.”

Some of the biggest gaps are in places where outbreaks are most out of control, noted Friedrich’s University of Wisconsin colleague Dave O’Connor. “It is sort of like a street only being illuminated where there happen to be streetlights,” he said. “You can’t know anything about the areas that are dark.”

Wisconsin Could Be 2020 Election ‘Tipping Point’

Journal Sentinel

The president’s path to victory in Wisconsin begins with trying to replicate that feat this November.”I think that’s probably (Trump’s) biggest challenge,” said political scientist Katherine Cramer, who wrote an influential book about the shifting rural vote in Wisconsin called “The Politics of Resentment.”

Trump and Biden need to win Wisconsin. The swing state could be 2020 election ‘tipping point’

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“I think that’s probably (Trump’s) biggest challenge,” said political scientist Katherine Cramer, who wrote an influential book about the shifting rural vote in Wisconsin called “The Politics of Resentment.” “Hillary Clinton was so unpopular with these voters … They just could not stand her,” said Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “(Joe) Biden is not as unpopular.”

Is It Possible to Party Safely at Dance Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic?

Billboard

According to Dr. Ajay K. Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, the testing protocol at In My Elements was solid, though not entirely fail-safe. “Multiple rounds are better than a one-time test at the time of admission,” Sethi says. “The PCR test result indicates that virus was not detected on the day that testing was performed. If someone was exposed and infected the day before PCR testing, then the test may miss detection of the virus.”

Stepped-Up Recruitment of Poll Watchers Adds to Election Tensions

Wall Street Journal

Noted: Some election scholars, however, cite the charged atmosphere. “We’ve got a perfect storm of open challenges from the president to the integrity of the election process, and the termination of the consent decree,” said Kenneth Mayer, an election law expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s not too hard to envision circumstances in which this really gets out of hand.”

GOP lawmakers stand still as virus rages in Wisconsin

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“I think, unfortunately, more people are going to have to die before our policymakers accept we need laws and policies that improve the health and safety of our state” — when lawmakers are personally tied to a person who has died or has been hospitalized, 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.

‘Frustrated and heartbroken’: Health care workers say Wisconsin’s COVID-19 spike is the result of people ignoring preventive steps

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said that colleagues who went to cottages during the summer began reporting that they’d seen towns where no one appeared to be wearing a mask.

With COVID-19 hospitalizations up in Dane County, officials urge masks, staying home

Wisconsin State Journal

“We are perilously close” to the county’s peak of COVID-19 hospitalizations in April, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health. “It is vital at this point to preserve the capacity of the health care systems and, equally importantly, to protect the health care workforce.”

Wisconsin Struggles to Explain Sudden Covid-19 Spike

The Wall Street Journal

“When it’s not enforced, you’re seeing very low mask-wearing rates,” said Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer with UW Health, a health system that serves more than 600,000 patients each year. “When we do contact tracing, it’s not the people who have been wearing their mask and doing social distancing that we’re talking to.”

Cap Times Idea Fest: Scientists always on the lookout for the next pandemic

The Capital Times

“It’s hard to know what’s going to be the next pandemic,” said Kristen Bernard, a UW virologist who studies animal-borne viruses, like the one that turned the world on its head this year. Bernard spoke with Kelly Tyrrell, an award-winning science writer and director of UW-Madison’s research communications, in a one-on-one session for the Cap Times Ideafest on preparing for the next pandemic.

The State Of Race: Education — COVID In The Classroom

WGBH-TV, Boston

In this segment of “The State of Race: Education” presented by WGBH and The Boston Globe, host Dan Lothian talks to Founder & Director, The NET Mentoring Group, Jamal Grant; Professor of Urban Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Gloria Ladson-Billings and Boston Globe Education Reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness about how COVID has widened the opportunity gap in the classroom.

At-Home Learning, When Home Is in Ashes

The New York Times

Noted: Schools can step in and provide support when parents themselves are traumatized. Familiar adults at school can also provide a buffering effect against trauma, said Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rapid Coronavirus Spit Tests Aren’t Coming Soon

The New York Times

Noted: Another saliva LAMP test is being tested by David O’Connor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their technique bears many similarities to the Columbia test, including a color-based readout, but takes slightly longer and involves a couple of extra steps. Early trials of the test on volunteers in Wisconsin have gone well, Dr. O’Connor said, and one school district in Illinois is using the test to screen about 1,400 students and teachers on a weekly basis.

Deaths, hospitalizations and infections are surging, but some GOP lawmakers tell constituents not to worry about COVID-19

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“If these legislators were practicing medicine, they would be sued for malpractice,” Patrick Remington, a former Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said after reviewing the lawmakers’ statements.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Has Evidence for Life on Venus Been in Our Grasp for 40 Years?

Scientific American

Other archived data could prove useful, too. Sousa-Silva is currently looking through old infrared telescope observations of Venus, hunting for additional overlooked evidence of phosphine. And Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who is a co-author of Mogul’s preprint paper, says old data from the Soviet Venera probes—while unlikely to have been sensitive enough to detect phosphine—may contain evidence for atomic phosphorus, which could hint at the presence of molecular phosphine, too. He notes, however, that the whereabouts of much of those data is unknown. Still, Limaye says, “somebody probably has some records.”

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest

New York Times

“Reading these papers gives me the sense that they’re going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about,” said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. “But if I were to estimate where they’re going to be, I’d give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take.”

At-Home Learning, When Home Is in Ashes

New York Times

Schools can step in and provide support when parents themselves are traumatized. Familiar adults at school can also provide a buffering effect against trauma, said Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

NBC15 Investigates: Chaos in Kenosha, the questions that remain

NBC-15

Quoted: “When you’re being unlawfully interfered with by another person, you have a right under the law to defend yourself against that unlawful interference,” says Cecelia Klingele, associate professor of law at University of Wisconsin Law School. “But we also require that when you do so, you’re using force reasonably. So you’re making a reasonable judgement about whether or not you’re in danger, how much danger you’re in, and how much force you need to use in order to protect yourself.”

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest

The New York Times

“Reading these papers gives me the sense that they’re going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about,” said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. “But if I were to estimate where they’re going to be, I’d give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take.”