Both television and social media had the strongest positive relationships with emotional suffering. Danielle Lawry

Anxiety and fear went hand in hand for Americans trying to learn more about COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic — and the most distressed people were turning on the television and scrolling through social media, according to UW–Madison research.

“Higher media consumption — seeking out the news — was associated with more emotional distress,” according to UW psychology professor Markus Brauer.

Brauer and collaborators in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication surveyed more than 2,200 people throughout the United States in March and April of 2020.

They asked respondents if they felt “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” or “afraid about what might happen,” as well as how often they were seeking out pandemic information via different types of news media.

Younger respondents and women were more likely to be emotionally distressed, as were people with liberal political views and, naturally, people who felt they were likely to catch the virus. But the findings held even when controlling for age and gender.

“We sort of expected that with social media consumers,” says Brauer, who partnered with journalism professor Dhavan Shah ’89 on the study. “Negative news gets more clicks and is shared more often, so people who get their news from social media are disproportionately exposed to distressing content.”

However, the negative impact wasn’t limited to consumers of social media.

“What really surprised us was the association between emotional distress on the one hand and frequency of getting news from print media and television on the other hand,” says Brauer.

Both television and social media had the strongest positive relationships with emotional suffering. The association was smaller for print media consumption, but still significant.

The study doesn’t allow for causal conclusions. While it is likely that seeking out news updates about the pandemic led to emotional distress, according to Brauer, it is also possible that people who are distressed try to manage their emotions by checking the news more often.

“So many of us are connected what feels like constantly throughout the day, and there’s certainly a point where continued attention isn’t a benefit,” Brauer says. “Would nine hours a day checking the news for COVID information make you more informed than five hours a day? Probably not. Our results tell us you’re just more likely to feel worse.”

“I only got one small grant,” recalls Kim, a UW–Madison journalism professor. But she made good use of it, developing an innovative digital tool that tracks ads on social media.

With this new software in hand, Kim landed a second, larger grant from UW–Madison’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education. She used the funding to launch her study of the 2016 election, and her alarming findings made headlines.

As outlined in her 2018 paper, “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook,” Kim and her research team confirmed that the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency and other suspicious groups had been spreading disinformation and running divisive issue campaigns on social media to influence the election. And the malfeasance hit close to home: “Divisive issue campaigns clearly targeted battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where traditional Democratic strongholds supported Donald Trump by a razor-thin margin.”

Since that report, Kim has emerged as a leading expert in digital disinformation campaigns. Her findings were reported by hundreds of national and international media outlets, and her paper received the Kaid-Sanders Award for the best political communication article of the year by the International Communication Association. She was invited to present her research at congressional briefings, and she testified at a Federal Election Commission (FEC) hearing.

For her landmark study, Kim recruited about 9,500 volunteers — a representative sample of the United States voting population — to install her ad-tracking app on their computers. The software would capture ads posted to Facebook and send them to the research team’s servers. Between September 28 and November 8, 2016, the volunteers saw $5 million in paid ads on Facebook.

Her study, says Kim, was the “first large-scale, systematic empirical analysis” that investigated who operated political campaigns on Facebook and who was targeted by these campaigns.

It was a stressful investigation, with Kim hitting dead ends along the way. But she stuck with it, using an impressive set of detective skills to follow a trail of confusing data — until a lucky break helped her expose a threat to the very heart of our democracy.

“Did I Mess Up?”

Kim had for years been studying what she calls “passionate publics,” people who care strongly about an issue based on their identity or values. Think gun rights activists and abortion opponents. She hypothesized that these groups would be the ones running targeted ads on social media during the 2016 election, but she was not seeing many ads from the usual suspects. “There must be something wrong,” she recalls thinking. “This is a half-a-million-dollar project. Did I mess up?”

At the same time, Facebook was full of ads from groups she had never heard of. “I was having a heart attack,” she says. “I’d been studying advocacy groups and grassroots groups, but I didn’t recognize any of these.”

Adding to the stress was the content of the ads, which Kim found very depressing.

“I’m a first-generation immigrant, and there were a lot of anti-immigrant groups,” says Kim, who was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea.

Once the researchers were able to identify a name associated with a digital ad, they tried to match it with data from the Federal Election Commission, but they found few filings for these political actors. The same was true when they tried to cross-match through the Internal Revenue Service database; more than half of the sponsors of ads they identified were not in either database.

“There was no public footprint, and they existed solely on Facebook,” Kim says. “We didn’t know what to do with these groups. … It was almost like forensic research to find out who these people were.” But Kim and her team would soon get the break they needed.

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released a group of ads generated by Russian actors along with the account names that they had used on social media. “We matched that information with our data,” she says. “We found that 17 percent of suspicious groups turned out to be Russian actors. They posed as American grassroots groups.”

Kim says it’s scary to consider how these groups are able to disguise themselves and evade detection. “I’m an expert, and I was not sure who they were. … For regular people, the names are generic or very similar to well-known groups.

“People are exposed to thousands of ads and think they are legitimate domestic groups,” she adds. “That is very problematic.”

The fact that some of the ads were Russian-linked sparked a childhood memory, something she had not thought about for a long time. Kim was five or six when she found a flyer on the street that turned out to be propaganda from North Korea, likely dropped from a balloon. The flyer claimed North Koreans were better off than their southern neighbors.

Kim developed a love of democracy as a child in South Korea. Courtesy of Young Mie Kim

Kim says the groups planting deceptive ads on social media have similar goals to those that dropped propaganda pieces on the streets of Seoul: “They use hatred and social divisions and then target the most vulnerable people and push their buttons.”

Big Questions

After a brief welcome to the 19 UW students attending her Zoom class on April 21, Kim laid down the rules for debate. Three teams would argue for and three against resolutions related to disinformation on the internet. Then there would be a five-minute evaluation period, at which time the debaters themselves would leave the class. The students were instructed to evaluate their classmates on how strong their arguments were, how they used evidence to back up their arguments, and how well they performed.

Anna Elizabeth Aversa x’22 was up first, charged with making the argument that the government, rather than tech companies, should regulate disinformation on the internet.

Drawing on sources included in the course, Dis/misinformation in the Age of Digital Media, Aversa argued that the internet is often used to manipulate audiences and that disinformation is a threat to our democracy.

“Without a doubt, disinformation online is out of control,” she said. Tech companies, she added, “don’t have the resources or the desire to regulate this.”

Next, Rielle Schwartz ’21 performed the cross-examination.

“Although misinformation is a key issue right now, I don’t believe government surveillance would be the best option,” she countered. “How would government regulation change behaviors that are inherent in human behavior? Shouldn’t [the government] be putting more money and effort into media-literacy programs?”

The students also debated whether tech platforms should take down election disinformation or be required to make the methods they use for targeting users publicly accessible.

Aversa appreciates that Kim wants her students to be part of the solution to the evolving issue of digital disinformation. “Professor Kim encourages all her students to think creatively about future steps,” says Aversa. Kim is the type of professor, she adds, who “doesn’t just lecture or put up slides, but rather engages with her students and values the input they bring to class.”

None of the questions debated by the students has an easy answer, but Kim’s research deeply informs her recommendations for reform.

She believes that government officials should play a role in regulating the internet and enact policies relating to disinformation. But, she adds, “Those policies should not be about censorship. They should be about transparency and accountability.”

Kim also believes that ad disclaimers — statements appearing on communications that identify who paid for them and whether they were authorized by a candidate — are key.

While broadcast ads require identification, digital platforms have been exempt from these rules since 2011. But since evidence emerged of foreign interference on these platforms, the Federal Election Commission has been reconsidering the issue. Kim testified before the commission in July 2018 as it was considering rule changes that would require disclaimers on some online political ads.

In comments to the FEC prior to her appearance, Kim argued that a healthy democracy depends on the ability of voters to make informed decisions. Political ads, she said, provide voters “substantive information” on issues and candidates, and campaigns use these ads to persuade voters, raise support, and mobilize voter turnout.

“Disclaimers hence provide voters necessary information about who is behind the political advertising and who is trying to influence their voting decision,” she said.

The FEC still has not taken action on the issue of disclaimers. But there has been some progress on individual platforms. Both Facebook and Google started to require “paid for by” information on ads they accepted in the summer of 2018.

And both platforms now have libraries that collect their ads. Facebook touts theirs as providing “advertising transparency by offering a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads” running across Facebook apps and services. And for ads that are about issues, elections, or politics, the Facebook ad library also provides information on “who funded the ad, a range of how much they spent, and the reach of the ad across multiple demographics.”

Kim acknowledges that Facebook is better than it was in 2016 in dealing with disinformation, but she is not entirely satisfied with its regulatory policies. One problem is that there is no consistency across tech platforms on the definition of a political ad.

The federal government needs to step up, says Kim, and establish guidelines “so we can see clear definitions across platforms of political advertising, disinformation, and voter suppression.”

The Essence of Democracy

Kim says a love of democracy drives much of her research.

As a child, she heard stories from her parents about the Korean War and lived through political turmoil herself, including pro-democracy protests while she was a student in the 1990s at Seoul National University. Growing up, she thought of the United States as the essence of democracy and transparency.

Kim says she developed a more nuanced view of the U.S. once she moved here for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She received her doctorate in communications in 2004, with a specialization in political communication and new communication technology.

There came a moment in her graduate school career when Kim and her Korean female friends were debating whether they would enter the job market in the States or return to Korea. “We were joking that it was a decision between ‘Are you going to stay and deal with racism or go back to Korea and deal with discrimination as a woman?’ ”

By fall 2004, she was an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Four years later, UW–Madison came calling. The timing was right for her suitors to show off the campus and the lakes.

“It was April,” she says, laughing. “I immediately fell in love with the city.”

Prescription for Change

After her groundbreaking study of the 2016 election, Kim continued researching digital political ads placed in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. She found that Russian trolls were up to their old tricks and getting “even more brazen in their tactics,” as she wrote in a March 2020 report for the Brennan Center for Justice, where she is an affiliated scholar. Posing as Americans, including as political groups and candidates, these Russian-linked actors tried to sow division by targeting people on both sides of the political divide with posts intended to stir outrage, fear, and hostility. And they had another goal, Kim wrote. “Much of their activity seemed designed to discourage certain people from voting. And they focused on swing states.”

She found the trolls had gotten more sophisticated, closely mimicking logos of official campaigns. And instead of creating their own fake advocacy groups, now they were appropriating the names of actual American groups. The issues raised in the ads, however, remained largely the same: race, patriotism, immigration, gun control, and LGBTQ+ rights.

Kim ends her analysis with a prescription for change. She says tech platforms need to do better at detecting shell groups and fake accounts; federal lobbying legislation needs to be amended to apply to foreign influences working in the digital area; and the FEC must establish a clear and consistent definition of political advertising so that individuals, law enforcement, and researchers understand what is happening in the world of digital political advertising.

Without safeguards like these, she warns, “Russia and other foreign governments will continue their efforts to manipulate American elections and undermine our democracy.”

Charting New Territory

Kim has continued to mine the data she collected from the 2016 and 2020 elections, moving beyond identifying ads and their targets to what impact they had.

In one analysis, she looked at whether ads aimed at keeping people away from the polls in 2016 achieved their intended effect. She matched the ads with the people exposed to them and then looked at whether they voted in the presidential election.

Turnout among all individuals who saw these ads, regardless of demographics, “significantly decreased,” says Kim. More importantly, voter suppression ads clearly targeted nonwhite voters in battleground states. Consequently, turnout among these voters decreased even more.

The report, which has not yet been published, is once again charting new territory. “This is going to be the first study that demonstrates the impact of this targeted voter suppression,” Kim says.

And it could be important for moving the needle. Causation is difficult to pin down in social science, notes Kim, and without a clear link, regulatory changes tend not to happen.

In May, Kim received a notification that someone from Saint Petersburg, Russia, had tried to access her personal Instagram account. She reached out to Instagram’s cybersecurity area, and the issue is under investigation.

It’s not the first suspicious activity to involve her circle. The Twitter account of her research team, Project DATA, was hacked right after publication of “Stealth Media,” though it’s unclear whether it was by a Russian actor. The personal Facebook page of Kim’s former research assistant was hacked at the same time.

Kim does wonder whether her focus on disinformation and foreign interference puts her at any personal risk. She says her parents would like her to change focus.

But she gets much satisfaction out of knowing that she is increasing public awareness of a crucial issue. She has received lots of emails and notes from strangers thanking her for her work.

While Kim spends a lot of time immersed in the world of social media for her research, she has little interest in these tech platforms for personal use.

“I don’t understand why people reveal everything on social media,” she says. “And I know the dangers.”

Kim says colleagues at conferences ask for her Twitter account, which, especially for younger academics, is today’s business card. They don’t know what to say when she tells them she doesn’t have one.

“They are frozen,” she says, laughing. •

For all their computer wizardry, the undergrads who created Spacebar got the word out through low-tech means. Courtesy of Spacebar

You’re a UW–Madison student who can’t go to clubs or parties during the pandemic. Is there any option besides staying home alone?

Now there is: you can stay home and join a virtual meetup. A group of enterprising UW students has created a free app called Spacebar, which brings the party to you through an ingenious concept.

At a set time, called “happy hour,” students can hop on Spacebar alone or with a friend. The app randomly connects them with one or two others from the UW campus for a short video call. The participants can press a button to continue talking or move on to another random conversation.

“It’s kind of like speed dating,” says cofounder Matthew Kruepke x’22, “but just to make friends.”

A 10-person team of undergraduates launched Spacebar during the 2021 spring semester after an intense period of brainstorming and development. For all their computer wizardry, they got the word out through low-tech means, including chalked messages on campus sidewalks.

The strong response suggests that their new product has touched a nerve.

“We just want to help students during the pandemic, when it’s so hard to meet people on campus,” says Kruepke. “It’s a way to get the college experience that so many people don’t have right now because of COVID-19.”

Nurse Amber Statz ’16, who helps save COVID-19 patients at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, was featured in an “It’s What Badgers Do” video. Courtesy of Amber Statz

In April, the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (WFAA) solicited photos of Badgers around the world who are doing their part to help during the pandemic. The result, “#ItsWhatBadgersDo,” was featured on social media, in the weekly Flamingle, and in other newsletters. You can continue to find shout-outs on social media that recognize other Badger helpers, as well as short videos about individual alumni and pandemic initiatives.

It’s just one of the ways that WFAA is reaching Badgers remotely as traditional in-person events are canceled due to the pandemic.

You can also share alumni photos and stories for a “Wish You Were Here” scrapbook that celebrates Badger nostalgia. So far, the scrapbooks have highlighted commencement photos and stories; favorite Terrace photos and memories; Homecoming; and top nature spots on campus.

Week in Review, an overview of some of the UW’s top stories that are highlighted on the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Instagram and Facebook pages each Friday, directs viewers to uwalumni.com for more in-depth coverage. It’s a way to help alumni and friends stay informed about the UW at a time when they may be feeling both isolated and busier than ever before.

If you’re nostalgic for the Terrace — or you’re missing the sight of Bascom Hill — WFAA has the next best thing: Badger backgrounds that bring the campus to you. Download a UW screensaver or video-call background. So far, the site has logged nearly 22,500 downloads.

And The UW Now livestream panels with university experts have continued to update viewers on topics related to the coronavirus, the UW Marching Band, campus traditions, and other issues.

Even during quarantine, the opportunity to reconnect with some of the best times of your life — and to stay informed, inspired, and involved — is just a few clicks away.

@odiethefluffycorgi

Who let the dogs out? It must’ve been Bucky. This past fall, pooches were spotted on social media sporting their Badger red and were featured on the UW–Madison News web page, coupled with the hashtag #OnWoofsconsin. These pups, such as Odie (pictured here), epitomize the Wisconsin spirit (and look mighty cute doing so). U-Ruff-Ruff!

Anders Holm returned to campus to speak at commencement in spring 2013. Bryce Richter

Anders Holm ’03

@ders8

Actor, cocreator, writer, and executive producer of Workaholics

Dan Katz ’07

@BarstoolBigCat

Cohost, Pardon My Take podcast

Jacquelyn Gill MS’08, PhD’12

@JacquelynGill

Cohost, Warm Regards podcast; ice age ecologist, University of Maine

Andy Katz ’90

@TheAndyKatz

Former ESPN college basketball reporter; named to the Sports Illustrated “Twitter 100” list

Gwen Jorgensen ’08, MAcc’09

@gwenjorgensen

Olympic triathlete

JJ Watt x’12

@JJWatt

NFL player

Tammy Baldwin JD’89

@SenatorBaldwin

U.S. senator

Greta Van Susteren ’76

@greta

Political analyst; former TV host of On the Record

Manu Raju ’02

@mkraju

Senior congressional reporter, CNN

Lynsey Addario ’95

@lynseyaddario

Photojournalist; author

Alex Wehrley ’09

@AlexWehrley

Former Miss Wisconsin USA; cohost, 2015 Miss USA pageant; advocate for empowering women’s career advancement

Bill Cronon ’76

@wcronon

UW professor of history; environmental historian; writer

Jon Mattrisch

DIY Career

Jenni Radosevich ’05 (above, center) was crafting long before it was cool — before Pinterest and the do-it-yourself (DIY) deluge in pop culture.

She has many fond memories of visiting the craft store with her mom, dipping her hands in tie-dye, and giving thrift-shop clothes new life. In the last decade, she’s turned her hands-on approach and eye for design into a personal brand that includes a blog, a publishing deal, and now, a television pilot.

After graduating, Radosevich worked as a graphic designer for InStyle magazine. Noticed for fabricating her own fashion inspired by high-end designs, she developed a DIY column for the publication that morphed into her I Spy DIY website and book.

Missing Wisconsin, Radosevich returned to the Midwest three years ago and turned her focus from food and fashion to something bigger: houses.

She had always had an interest in home décor, blogging about wine racks, wall art, and workspaces. So the transition to home renovation seemed natural. Radosevich was weighing the viability of flipping houses when a friend suggested she share her talents with a television audience. The unique concept — a cast of five friends instead of a family, set in a city that hasn’t gotten a lot of airtime on cable — intrigued HGTV. Last summer a production crew followed the friends for three months while they flipped a house in Milwaukee.

Radosevich describes the floor-to-ceiling renovation as a Cinderella story. “We found the worst-of-the-worst house and made it a really beautiful home,” she says. The My Flippin’ Friends pilot first aired in April.

The production crew used plenty of drone footage to capture the city Radosevich describes as a hidden gem. “Watching the pilot, I thought, ‘Wow, they’re making Milwaukee look sexy!’ ”

Some of the less appealing characteristics typical of older homes in the region (think maroon walls and orange cabinets), along with vintage dark wood trim and built-ins, present Radosevich with some interesting design challenges, but she strives to find balance. “I pepper in more modern elements, while respecting what’s classic,” she says.

Milwaukee’s also an ideal environment for flipping, Radosevich says, with lower prices making everything from minor changes to a full remodel within reach for the average viewer.

“In New York or California, the cost of flipping is so astronomical that people can’t really relate,” she explains. “[In Milwaukee], the cost is more manageable, so we’ve gotten lots of positive feedback.”

Had Martinez been working on his sinking fastball? How did the movement of his sinker during his warmup set his game plan for the night? Noboa-Chehade translates each question into Spanish and listens intently as Martinez responds in the rapid-fire style of Spanish spoken in his native Dominican Republic. Noboa-Chehade doesn’t look at Martinez’s face. Instead, she gazes down or into the distance as she focuses on his every word, nodding repeatedly in affirmation and encouragement before giving the English translation.

The last question brings a quick smile to her face: “How much has he been waiting for a night like tonight?” As she shares Martinez’s response, the words that Noboa-Chehade speaks could easily be her own story: “I have been working really hard. I always had faith in myself and my team. I knew it would come eventually, but I really worked hard for this, so it feels great.”

She graduated from UW–Madison with a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies, political science, and Spanish literature — hardly the credentials a ball team would look for. But her upbringing in a Spanish-speaking family with a father obsessed with baseball — as well as her subsequent bilingual media training and experience — made her the right person, with the right skills, at the right time when Major League Baseball mandated last year that all teams with Spanish-speaking players hire full-time translators.

“Many people only wish they could do this,” Noboa-Chehade says, as she pulls open the doors to the Cardinals’ locker room and strolls in before another early season game. Songs from AC/DC and the Scorpions are blasting on the sound system. A couple of players chat at their lockers. Martinez — today’s starting pitcher and her main translation “client” — strolls through the locker room, but makes no eye contact with Noboa-Chehade or anyone. “No one talks to the starting pitcher,” she says. “That’s the rule.”

Noboa-Chehade is one of five women working as major-league translators. Her presence in the locker room is a given now that she has been on the job for a year, but that wasn’t the case at first. “There was that initial feeling of intimidation, walking into a clubhouse with 20-plus men and being the only woman,” she says. “I had to remind myself, ‘Yes, I have the qualifications and the skills to be here.’ ”

“Code switch” is the current buzzword for her skill, the ability to fluently switch between languages within a single conversation. Noboa-Chehade performs nimbly for the Cardinals’ 162 regular-season games, plus spring training, public appearances, and (fingers crossed) the post season. “You eat, sleep, and dream baseball,” she says. The truth, however, is that Noboa-Chehade was code switching long before the term was coined.

Born in Puerto Rico to a Dominican father and Colombian mother, she was not even a year old when her family moved to Middleton, Wisconsin, so that her mother, Nayla Chehade MA’90, PhD’99, could pursue her PhD in Spanish literature at the UW. Outside their front door, it was an English-speaking world; but at home, her parents spoke to her and her older sister, Nadia Noboa-Chehade ’03, JD’09, only in Spanish. “I remember coming home and wanting to speak English, and my parents wouldn’t let me or respond to any of my questions,” she says. “When we would travel to Colombia for the summer and then come back to Wisconsin, I would forget English. I’d sometimes make words up. I grew up with this duality, living this double life.”

To tweak a famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, one constant amid the dueling languages in Noboa-Chehade’s childhood was béisbol. Her father, Diogenes “John” Noboa, had been a promising player in his youth in the Dominican Republic and continued to play in recreational leagues in Middleton. The family’s TV was constantly tuned to baseball games.

“We didn’t so much follow teams as players,” Noboa-Chehade recalls. Pedro Martinez on the Red Sox. Sammy Sosa on the Cubs. They were definitely not Cardinals fans. “They beat everybody — they were too good,” she says with a laugh. The family’s favorite player was, well, family: cousin Junior Noboa, a utility player who spent eight seasons in the majors.

When it came time for her to choose a college, Noboa-Chehade admits that, as a local, she initially resisted attending the UW. But she came into her own identity during her time on campus. As a freshman, she joined Lambda Theta Alpha (LTA), a Latina sorority that her sister had helped to form a few years earlier. “Through LTA, I was able to bring cultural awareness to campus and be a part of a bigger movement that empowers Latinas in higher education,” she says.

That year she also took professor Francisco Scarano’s class on Latin American history. “I found it so interesting, to understand where I am from,” she says. “He inspired me and added so much to who I am today, to be bilingual and bicultural and to gain so much knowledge about both cultures.”

After graduation, Noboa-Chehade struggled for a year to find her path: she tried acting and modeling in Los Angeles and translated for social service agencies that served children and families in Madison. Then she firmly set her sights on a career in broadcast communications. She took a public speaking course in Colombia to polish her broadcast Spanish, then moved to Miami to complete a master’s degree in Spanish-language journalism and multimedia at Florida International University. “It was in Miami that I came to appreciate my UW–Madison education,” she says. “Compared with my fellow grad students, I realized how well formed I was in terms of my study habits and my level of accountability.”

In Miami, she connected with her family’s favorite player, Junior Noboa, now an executive with the Arizona Diamondbacks. “He became a mentor for me,” she says. He encouraged her to consider baseball as an outlet for her skills. When she called home to tell her parents she’d landed a job as a social media reporter for MLB.com, her father was thrilled.

For two years at MLB.com, Noboa-Chehade coordinated the Spanish-language Facebook and Twitter feeds for several East Coast teams. “You have 140 characters in English, but Spanish is so much longer when it’s written out, so that job made me a concise writer and thorough reporter,” she says. She relished the work trips to the World Series and All-Star Game, but MLB.com’s large-scale operations and the isolation of working from home weren’t the best fit for her outgoing personality.

“I wanted something smaller; I wanted to be with one club,” she says. When the Twitter announcement for the league-wide Spanish translator mandate crossed her desk, she saw her opening. “The fact that I am a native speaker was a big advantage,” she says. “I am able to understand the players’ culture and where they are coming from.”

That mutual understanding is greatly appreciated by the Cardinals’ players. “She has helped us tremendously since she came,” says Aledmys Diaz, the Cardinals’ Cuban shortstop. “When we don’t understand the question, she helps us to elaborate more when it comes to our response. Especially now that there are young Latino players coming up, the work she is doing is fundamental.”

  While Noboa-Chehade never has to make translation trips to the pitching mound — manager Mike Matheny is fluent in Spanish — the Cardinals call on her language and broadcast skills in many other ways. Behind the scenes, she helps players with everyday issues such as tax forms, housing deposits, travel arrangements, and ticket requests. For the Cardinals’ weekly TV show, she’s recording a series highlighting all the diverse backgrounds — Korean, African American, Hawaiian, and more — represented on the team.

During games, as the crowd cheers and the wave ripples around the stadium, she follows the action — especially Martinez’s performance — from the surprisingly quiet press box with her communications staff colleagues. With each major play, she updates the Cardinals’ Spanish-language Twitter and Facebook feeds, which she launched last year. “Our Spanish-speaking players have such a passionate following,” she says. “Any time I want to do an interview for our Spanish-speaking fans, the players always say, ‘I am so there — I’ll do it.’ ”

And when the players need her translation skills — signaled by a quick shout of “Ale” or a subtle nod — she is right there, at their sides. “What I most love about having Alexandra as my translator is that when I make a mistake in the interviews or I didn’t have a good game, she always helps me show my best side,” Martinez says. “She makes the interviews fun and helps me keep my cool. She truly helps me as a person on and off the field.”

Becoming “Facebook official” is a milestone in modern romance, but can it also help love last?

Catalina Toma, a UW assistant professor of communication arts (below), is the first researcher to examine the link between how couples present themselves on the site and the longevity of their relationships.

Toma

In a study of heterosexual college-aged couples, Toma asked questions about their relationships and how committed they felt to their partners, and then followed up six months later. She found that certain Facebook cues were positively linked to relationship commitment and increased the likelihood of couples staying together: being listed as “in a relationship,” posting photos with their partner, and writing on their partner’s wall.

“The claims people make about themselves in public are likely to be very influential in how we think about ourselves,” Toma says. “Now we’re finding that these self presentations also affect how you feel about a relationship partner.”

At least eighteen wild foxes make their home on the UW campus, including this young animal seen (here and in the photos below) roaming the grounds near the Soils Building on a spring morning. The kit and its siblings became social media stars when they were spotted living in the Observatory Hill area beginning in March. Some students took fox sightings as good omens for their exam grades. Photos: Jeff Miller.

The fox is in town and stealing hearts all over Madison.

From the steps of Bascom to the trails of Muir Woods and even atop the Water Science and Engineering Laboratory roof, red foxes recently have claimed the campus for their own. They’ve inspired a Tumblr page and a Twitter hashtag, and now, research projects aimed at understanding these urban canids.

“We think there are a lot around, and their populations are growing,” says David Drake, a UW associate professor of forest and wildlife ecology and an extension wildlife specialist who is studying the foxes. He will soon have a new graduate student working to better understand the wild animals that call the heart of campus home.

At last count, Drake says there were at least eighteen foxes on the UW campus, and he has received calls from people all over the city reporting additional sightings.

Drake wants to know how these nimble creatures coexist in a human-dominated landscape. Where do they go when they roam, whom do they encounter, and how many urban chicken coops and gardens might they be raiding? He plans to get the public involved.

So far, the foxes seem to have adapted well to their bustling environment, taking advantage of ample habitat under campus buildings, and finding plenty of fresh rabbits and other prey to eat. Kits born this spring and raised by their mother will strike out on their own this fall.

How far will they stray? Drake hopes to find out.