As a public radio listener, you’re probably familiar with the theme song for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” It’s had a few variations over the decades.
But did you know it was originally composed in Madison in 1971?
It was written by Don Voegeli, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and the longtime music director at WHA (now known as Wisconsin Public Radio).
Noted: The 2012 University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Science graduate joined the guard 3½ years ago because she wanted to serve in the military. There are no veterinarian jobs in the Wisconsin National Guard — only in the reserves and active duty military — so she opted to enlist as a medic.
Instead of just hanging up or letting the calls go to voicemail, Barry Orton attempts to shame phone scammers into seeking another line of work.
The retired University of Wisconsin-Madison telecom professor gets the usual mix of calls peddling everything from back braces to extended car warranties. When it’s a scam and there’s a real person on the line and not a robot, he makes the call a bit personal.
“I tell them that their parents or grandparents would be ashamed if they knew what they were doing. And can’t they get an honest job?” Orton says.
Construction work on three capital projects designed to improve the Kohl Center, Camp Randall Stadium and the University of Wisconsin Field House is set to begin soon.
Quoted: There has been a resurgence of interest among educators in recent years, driven in part by people like Mark Seidenberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist whose 2017 book “Language at the Speed of Sight” argued that the current approaches to reading instruction were out of sync with the latest research into how children learn.
Speaking at the Capitol Wednesday, Seidenberg said DPI “has done little to address literacy issues that have existed for decades.”
“We know the best ways to teach children to read,” he said. “Wisconsin is simply not using them, and our children are suffering.”
Quoted: Among those who spoke was Mark Eppli, director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When Eppli came to Marquette, he had dinner with Daniels, then a professor in the economics department. Their friendship blossomed from there.
As interim dean from 2012-’15, Eppli used Daniels as an assistant dean. He described Daniels as “extraordinarily thoughtful.”
“As an economist, he was always thinking of the unintended consequence of an action,” Eppli said. “He was a perfect person to be the dean. He was a servant leader looking to take care of others first.”
Get pumped because Bill Nye, who you should all know as the Science Guy, is coming to UW-Madison April 21.
The science educator, mechanical engineer and author will lead a conversation about one of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change.
Target released a statement apologizing for some misprinted onesies bearing the name “Minnesota Badgers” in the familiar University of Minnesota maroon and gold, releasing a statement to WCCO-TV.
“Color us red,” the statement began. “As a Minnesota-based company, we know we are home to the Gophers.”
Russia has always seen Ukraine as its own backyard and sphere of influence, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Yoshiko Herrera. When Ukraine considered having a relationship with the European Union, though not joining the EU, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials got nervous.
This was a day to reminisce, to celebrate the past and to honor a coach and a group of players who helped lay the foundation for the heights the Wisconsin men’s basketball program has since reached.
The abrupt resignation of Erik Helland, the strength and conditioning coach for the Wisconsin men’s basketball team for the last six-plus seasons, appears to have hit the players hard.
Quoted: Robert Drechsel, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in media law and constitutional issues, said the agency is free to ask the reporter not to publish but cannot legally compel them to do so.
“I don’t know how common it is for a Wisconsin state agency to tell a reporter to ‘cease and desist’ and threaten prosecution this way. No other examples come to mind in all the years I’ve lived in Wisconsin,” Drechsel said after reviewing the agency’s letter to NBC News. “Any formal legal cease and desist order issued against the news media would be a prior restraint that is almost certainly unconstitutional.”
Among the thousands of voters flagged to be possibly removed from Wisconsin’s voter rolls are two state lawmakers, a cabinet secretary, a Milwaukee County supervisor and a former University of Wisconsin chancellor.
Election officials in October asked more than 230,000 people to update their voter registrations because they believed they had moved. The letters triggered an ongoing legal battle over whether the recipients should be quickly taken off the rolls.
Among those who were targeted were Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam; Rep. David Crowley, D-Milwaukee; Workforce Development Secretary Caleb Frostman; Milwaukee County Supervisor Sequanna Taylor and former UW Extension Chancellor Cathy Sandeen.
Pewaukee High School and University of Wisconsin product J.J. Watt gave comedy a swing as host of Saturday Night Live on Feb. 1, and it was a pretty successful debut in the late-night showcase.
The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is looking at potential layoffs in the wake of a “drastic” decline in enrollment this fall that resulted in almost 500 fewer students than the fall of the year before.
Gov. Tony Evers signed an executive order Wednesday creating a task force to research the mounting pressure student debt places on Wisconsin college students, which some say has reached crisis levels — not just in the state but nationwide.
In a promo for his hosting gig on this Saturday’s “Saturday Night Live,” Pewaukee native and former University of Wisconsin Badgers star J.J. Watt gets a “test” from “SNL” regular Kyle Mooney.
In the wake of news that Kobe King was leaving the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team, another prominent player to move on from the Badgers program chimed in with some thoughts in a Twitter exchange.
Noted: Red Arrow first welcomed campers in 1922, with the boys taking trains from Milwaukee and Chicago. To help launch the camp, Razz brought on Paul Waterman, the business manager for MCD, as his co-director, and Rollie Williams, the University of Wisconsin’s first nine-letter athlete, as the athletic program director. For counselors, he hired athletic young men from MCD and UW.
Quoted: “I think his perspective is overlooking all of the work that has been done on coronaviruses,” since SARS, said Robert N. Kirchdoerfer, assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“One of the challenges with designing vaccines for emerging viruses is that it is incredibly difficult to predict which virus is going to cause the next outbreak.”
Noted:
Conor Williams, an economist and policy analyst from Community Advocates, hosted the panel featuring Sylvester Jackson, a community organizer for EX-incarcerated People Organizing; Christine Apple, chief psychologist at Wisconsin Department of Corrections’ Milwaukee Community Corrections; Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin Law School professor; and Carr.
Klingele said a piecemeal release of prisoners won’t reduce prison costs.
“There will be no cost savings anywhere unless we shut down prisons, and that is going to take large-scale change,” she said.
Quoted: Keith Findley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who co-founded the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said that when physicians work in concert to shape the message sent to investigators, “it undermines the legal system’s access to full truth.”
“What they’re really doing is shaping the evidentiary record, and in fact deliberately hiding from the legal system inconsistent opinions that might be useful to the legal fact finders who are working to determine what actually happened,” Findley said. “It’s deeply problematic.”
Noted: America’s education desert zones are generally less populated than those with easy access to a college, with the average population of a commuting zone desert approximately 72,100, according to a study done by Nicholas Hillman and Taylor Weichman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But not all are — 15 commuting zone deserts across the nation have populations of more than 250,000.
Noted: Stewart basically pulled back from entertainment work after leaving his gig hosting “The Daily Show” in 2015. But in 2017, he reached out to Kathy Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and author of “The Politics of Resentment,” to get insights on the political climate in Wisconsin for a possible feature film.
Cramer’s book, published in mid-2016, looks at the role disaffected rural voters had in Wisconsin’s shift to the right after the Great Recession — a shift that some believe contributed to Donald Trump’s winning the state in 2016.
Six students at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, who were all recently in Wuhan, China, epicenter for the new coronavirus, are being monitored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — though none has shown signs of the respiratory disease.
Gerald Whitburn, who served for nearly 10 years across two terms on the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents, resigned Thursday, effective immediately.
Noted: Before she was a mathematician, before she earned a doctorate in abstract algebra at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before she began teaching math at Carthage College in Kenosha, Jensen was a little girl learning to knit from her grandmother.
Noted: Madison officials also work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to recruit college students — in friendly competition with the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, which had the highest voter turnout in the midterms of the largest public universities in the nation.
When she was 8 years old, Mae Jemison looked to the world’s first astronauts venturing into space and asked: “What happens if the aliens only see these guys and they think that everybody on Earth is a buzz-cut-haired white male?”
Decades later, Jemison would remedy that quandary on her own by becoming the first woman of color to go to space.
Quoted: A nominating committee of about 30 artists, scholars and record industry insiders draws up the ballot each year. Craig Werner was on that committee for 18 years. An Emeritus professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Werner is also a music writer and he has no problem with the nomination process.
“The issues are much more what happens to that ballot once it goes to the larger electorate,” Werner says. Then he sighs. “Well, I’m just going to say it: I think that the electorate makes dumb decisions on a regular basis.”
Noted: Separately, Lucas is a senior writer for UWBadgers.com, and has been a color commentator on University of Wisconsin football and men’s basketball games.
Despite a one-point loss to Oregon in the Rose Bowl, Wisconsin finished in the top 15 of both major polls.
The Badgers (10-4) finished No. 13 in the Amway coaches poll and No. 11 in The Associated Press poll.
Noted: After Kolb told Kanarowski-Peterson it looked like blister beetle poisoning, she began picking through the alfalfa hay and found what looked like beetles. Samples were sent to PJ Liesch, an extension entomologist and director of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at UW-Madison.
While Liesch has seen blister beetles in Wisconsin yards on occasion — usually in late spring or early summer — it’s a “fleeting phenomenon” for a few days, and he’s not aware of any other cases of beetles being found in hay in Wisconsin.
“Overall I would say that (blister beetles) are not uncommon if you know when and where to look for them,” he said. “To have them occur in hay or animal feed, that seems to be a very rare occurrence.”
In the latest sign that virtually everything is politically divisive, the location of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 14 campaign rally has become something of an issue because it bears the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s name and its Panther mascot.
Quoted: Howard Erlanger, a University of Wisconsin law professor, said that while an 11th-hour claim may raise eyebrows it could be legitimate.
“It’s not implausible as a fraud but it’s also not implausible as a genuine story,” Erlanger said.
Noted: It touted efforts it plans to focus on over the coming years, such as developing a program in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin to assist farmers to reduce leaching nitrates from fertilizer into groundwater. The report also noted the administration had started a program to monitor water chemistry and fish tissue near sites contaminated with PFAS.
Noted: Polack, who grew up in Racine and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served at the U.S. Treasury Department as an intelligence analyst and policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Noted: Plans for the institute surfaced in August 2018 as part of the unveiling of Foxconn’s partnership with UW-Madison, a partnership best known for the company’s pledge of $100 million to the university.
Foxconn’s donations to date stand at the previously reported $700,000, university spokesman John Lucas said Tuesday by email. He directed questions about the research institute to Foxconn.
The summer before JT Nejedlo attended UW-Madison unitentionally became a difference maker in the 2016 Kettle Moraine High School graduate’s young life.
Noted: “Avengers: Endgame”: Kenosha native Mark Ruffalo returned as a less-monosyllabic Hulk in the final chapter of the Marvel saga. Also, stage stalwart Carrie Coon, who got her start at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Madison-area theater, returned (voice only) as Proxima Midnight, one of Thanos’ allies.
Noted: Jessica Antonio: Antonio was one of the first graduates of Cristo Rey High School and one of the first participants in the promising All-In Milwaukee nonprofit effort to provide help in several ways (including financial) to low-income students as they tackle college. She enrolled this fall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is off to a good start.
Noted: This winter, Wisconsin farm couples can attend workshops in Mineral Point, Wausau, Appleton, Waupun, Eau Claire and Rice Lake, aimed at helping them manage stress associated with financial problems.
The workshops, sponsored by the state agriculture department and University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, will include a segment on how to talk with children about problems on the farm, and decision-making when the farm may have to shut down.
Noted: Later, soon after she earned her degree in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Giorgio saw an episode where John Boy’s professor told him he was becoming a “real literary lion.”
Quoted: “A weakness of the [Catalonia] study is lack of information on co-occurring conditions such as intellectual disability, and information about sociodemographic variables,” says Maureen Durkin, professor of population health sciences and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in either study.
Guests include Paige Glotzer, a professor in the department of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has written extensively about housing segregation in the U.S., the history of housing policy, and urban and suburban development. She is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960, which will be published in April 2020.
A bipartisan legislative committee unanimously approved pay raises Wednesday for state and University of Wisconsin employees, but Republicans shot down Gov. Tony Evers’ request to raise the minimum wage for state workers to $15 an hour.
State lawmakers on Wednesday approved an $84 million compensation package that includes a 2% raise for all state employees, but a pay bump for state troopers was put off after Republicans said the raises would make the salaries unaffordable for taxpayers.
The University of Wisconsin System’s presidential search and screen committee launched an online feedback form for the public to share the qualities they’d like to see in the next UW System president. The form can be found on the System website.
Quoted: “Typically, the Saturday before Christmas is very close to Black Friday in sales,” said Executive Director of the Kohl’s Center for Retail at UW-Madison, Jerry O’Brien. “There’s a lot of people [where] it’s actually part of their tradition, you go out just before the holiday and buy the stuff.”
O’Brien says one of the advantages of having a mid-week Christmas is the potential many workers might either start their holiday next weekend, or begin a long weekend at the start of Christmas.
“Additionally, it’s the time where people are taking their returns in, and they have gift cards, so there’s a lot of traffic in the stores and there’ll still be some really great deals out there,” he said.
Noted: Debra Shapiro is a University of Wisconsin librarian and instructor in Madison and is a freelance cook and cooking teacher with extensive restaurant experience. She helps prepare monthly breakfasts for 60 to 70 diners at a community center. She shares recipes at debslunch.com/blog and conducts occasional cooking classes.
When Michele LaVigne’s mother died about two years ago, she gave a certain amount of money to each of her five children to be put toward some educational cause.
It was a fitting gesture by Marion LaVigne, who had taught math to middle school-age children for 49 years in New York. Michele LaVigne knew what she was going to do with her money the day she attended an event honoring jazz musician Richard Davis, where she heard how much he enjoyed being an educator and how a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools had inspired him.
LaVigne, a clinical law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who takes jazz piano lessons, said she decided to pursue a jazz residency at Sherman Middle School, hoping it would inspire students.
Noted: The Aldo Leopold Foundation subsequently began a tradition of producing an annual Wisconsin Phenology Calendar. The 2020 edition is packed with photographs and information, including monthly sidebars written by Stanley Temple, UW-Madison professor emeritus and senior fellow at the foundation.
Noted: Now, she’s made a home in the city of Madison with her husband, Anthony. In addition to being on television, Fitzgerald is currently pursuing her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, working as faculty within Madison College’s Psychology Department, and serving as Director of Family, Youth & Community Engagement for Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). When she’s not wearing either of those roles she may be giving others financial planning advice.
It can take a dozen times of trying a vegetable before a child learns to like it. That’s not a risk some lower-income parents can take, no matter how many vitamins are in beets.
“That’s one thing schools can be useful for,” said Jennifer Gaddis. Parents “maybe knew over time their kids would like something,” Gaddis said. “But in the immediate term, they couldn’t afford their kids not eating.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said removing voters from the rolls because they are believed to have moved would more likely affect Democratic voters because they are more likely to move frequently.
“Mainly because they are younger, supporters of Democratic candidates tend to change their residences more often,” he said by email. “As a result, their voter registrations are more likely to be out of date, and they are more likely to be targets of efforts to clean up the rolls.”
Noted: Gia Gallimore is the director of diverse alumni engagement at Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association. One of her core goals is to connect alumni of color with the alumni association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To do so, Gallimore had a hand in creating a strategic plan for diverse engagement, including strengthening the alumni of color network, enhancing marketing and engagement programs and cultivating student-to-alumni connections. She is also the founder of and driving force behind Badger Vibes, a monthly newsletter highlighting faculty, students and alumni of color in order to celebrate the diverse UW experience, produced in partnership between the WFAA and Madison365.
Noted: Carl Hampton is Senior Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the University of Wisconsin System, based in Madison.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin Health’s American Center Hospital in Madison turned away ambulances for about 120 hours this year. Most of the hours came over several days in April.
In a statement, UW Health spokesman Tom Russell did not address the reason for the diversions but said, in part: “In the rare instances where we have had to divert patients from our smaller east side Madison hospital, our Level 1 Trauma and Comprehensive Stroke Center at University Hospital was a very close option for emergency crews.”
Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology, is the guest.
Quoted: “Our data suggest that the environment was changing before the asteroid impact,” said Benjamin Linzmeier, the study’s first author, said in a statement. “Shells grow quickly and change with water chemistry,” Linzmeier, a postdoctoral geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. “Because they live for such a short period of time, each shell is a short, preserved snapshot of the ocean’s chemistry.”
