Tag: featured

Quoted: David O’Connor, who studies viral disease at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “If a substantial amount of transmission occurs before people feel sick, how do you stop that? By the time people feel sick and seek care, all the testing and isolation in the world would be too little, too late.”

But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said these are not ordinary circumstances.

Quoted: Existing research on best practices in online learning will only get educators so far. “When you are being asked to implement online learning in the way our research suggests you should, but you are being asked to do that in a 12-day period, that’s nearly impossible,” said Annalee Good, co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Poverty represents a level of deprivation that many middle- or upper-income Americans can’t even wrap their head around,” said Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who has conducted extensive interviews with poor parents. “The first thing that come to mind is a mother I met who was trying to manage her son’s asthma while living in an apartment that had rodents, insects and mold no matter how much she cleaned. Rising poverty rates means more families living like that.”

Quoted: Most pheromones are single chemicals, says Charles Snowdon, an emeritus psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved with the work. “But what this paper is saying is that it’s a mixture of chemicals that seem to be more important,” he says.

Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided, according to previous Wisconsin Public Radio reporting.

Quoted: “We can practice relaxing as we are walking, cleaning our house, doing the laundry,” says neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We can also practice a little self-compassion at these times, recognizing that no one is perfect and not being too hard on ourselves for failing to accomplish something in the time we had originally planned, for example.”

Quoted: It’s more likely that Democratic turnout benefited from the party’s presidential primary being on the ballot. And at a time when Americans are spending more time consuming news at home, the controversy over whether to hold the election may have actually wound up encouraging voters, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Amber Wichowsky of Marquette, co-authored “Economic discontent as a mobilizer: unemployment and voter turnout.” Burden described by email the complexity of political mobilization during an economic crisis:“Historically, unemployed individuals have voted at much lower rates than working people,” Burden said, but when unemployment “becomes widespread enough to be perceived as a communal concern rather than an individual predicament” it raises turnout.

Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided.

Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided.

Quoted: Action games are associated with improvements on a pretty broad range of perceptual and cognitive skills,” says C. Shawn Green, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in cognitive neuroscience.

Quoted: And for this generation of teens, there is little precedent for this kind of threat. Most were born after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and haven’t experienced the type of disruption that would make them fearful of going about their regular lives, said Bradford Brown, a professor of human development at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who specializes in adolescents.

Quoted: In the 2016 presidential election, voters there cast some 145,000 absentee votes by mail; in Tuesday’s election, there were over a million. The state’s election officials regularly process high volumes of absentee ballots, but the last-minute cascade left them swamped, said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: Sigan Hartley is a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of human development and family studies and the 100 Women Chair for the School of Human Ecology. She’s also a Waisman Center investigator, whose research focuses on positive well-being in individuals with developmental disabilities and their family members.

Quoted: Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called tampering a minor concern for clerks who already had processes for securing absentee ballots before election day.

Quote: As governments around the world try to predict the toll and duration of the coronavirus, they’re turning increasingly to a handful of forecasting models for answers. But many of the leading models differ drastically in their approach and methods. What do we need to know about these forecasts? And what are their limitations?Guest: Jordan Ellenberg, mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madiso

Quoted: Dr. Norman Fost, a professor emeritus of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, leads the Ventilator Allocation Advisory Workgroup. He said there was general agreement on having uniform guidelines within the state.

Quoted: “The virus, people say sometimes, is a piece of bad news wrapped in protein. It is a vector for getting genetic information into a cell and that genetic information just contains a blueprint to make more viruses. They were able to tell that although this virus was new, it was closely related to the original SARS virus,” explained Professor Thomas Friedrich from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Except for the part where he had actually endorsed said judge in January. “And there were no polls,” added Barry Burden, the director of the University of Wisconsin Elections Research Center.

If you’ve found yourself unsure whether a soundbite or headline you saw or shared was true, know that you’re not alone, says Dietram Scheufele, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies science and political communication.

“As the weeks wore on, the legislature dug into that position, allowing no accommodations, no flexibility for voters, and the governor slowly moved to the opposite side,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden told Vox.

Quoted: “There will be lingering concerns no matter how the election is run,” says Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s just not possible to run an ideal election in a public health pandemic. Who’s complaining about it will vary depending on what is done.”

Quoted: Tim Osswald, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the technology, told The Hill that 3D printing speeds up manufacturing much more than traditional production methods.

On Tuesday, April 7, Wisconsin is scheduled to vote. With the coronavirus still raging, state lawmakers of both parties have for weeks been urging voters to cast ballots early or absentee to help contain the pandemic.

-Michael Wagner, Katerine Cramer, Dhavan Shah, Lewis Friedland

“Build in cues to remind yourself to be intentional about practicing mindfulness,” said Richard Davidson, director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Examples include glancing at a photo of loved ones on your desk or sticking an inspiring phrase (“I’ve got this!”) on your computer monitor.

Quoted: Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, says that in this time of unusual challenges, we have also been cut off from many of our usual coping techniques.

Quoted: Despite the declines, child poverty in the United States remains higher than in most similar countries. About 17.2 percent of American children live on less than half the median income, said Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, citing data from Luxembourg Income Study.

Quoted: Dr. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said shifting to crisis standards allowed states or healthcare providers to relax or change certain rules, such as using medical devices in ways they were not originally approved for, if they offer a “better-than-nothing option.”

Quoted: Vaccinations are a crucial form of preventive medicine in an animal’s development, said Dr. Ruthanne Chun, associate dean for clinical affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and director of UW Veterinary Care.

Quoted: What kinds of communication can actually push people to take action—to, among other things, socially distance, wash their hands, and not freak out? I recently posed this question to risk communications expert Dominique Brossard, a professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Quoted: The COVID-19 shutdowns have taken away cornerstones of newspapers’ already-struggling revenue: business ads and events, said Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Climate scientists have a whole suite of tools by which they’re able to look at things like variability and changes over space and time, and now we can take those same approaches and think about how we can capture those dynamics for ecological responses,” said Benjamin Zuckerberg, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and lead author on the new study. “It’s basically treating the biological observations of, say, birds and plants in the same way that climatologists treat observations of temperature and rainfall.”

Quoted: “Garnishment is a really important issue, especially for low-income, economically vulnerable families, the exact workers being laid off in the US right now,” said J Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world,” William M. Denevan, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written. This disaster changed the course of history not just in Europe and the Americas but also in Africa: faced with a labor shortage, the Spanish increasingly turned to the slave trade.

“It’s Sanders’ last stand in electoral politics,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Quoted: Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “He’s old enough that I don’t think anyone expects him to make another run for the presidency. He may be in his last term in the Senate or near it. Right now, he still has something of a national stage. Once he leaves the campaign, that will be gone.”

Quoted: “What we’re facing is unprecedented, and I don’t want to downplay its seriousness, but it’s not the worst-case scenario,” said Malia Jones, a researcher who studies infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Quoted: Trump’s insistence on referring to the illness as the “Chinese virus” plays into a central theme of his presidency, experts say, with the president demonizing foreigners. “I think that approach to this whole catastrophe just feeds the culture wars,” says Katherine Cramer, an American Politics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Environmental degradation has already been identified as a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s wildlife markets—where both live and dead animals are bought and sold in tight quarters—likely allowed viruses to mix across species, creating conditions “ripe for new emerging agents of disease, like Covid-19,” said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.