Opera entered Madison like a lion over the weekend, and locals pounced on the rare opportunity.
Madison Opera again sold out all its performances, but those who didn’t get in, or those who did but still want more, have another chance.
University Opera’s weekend production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” directed by William Farlow, runs through Tuesday and offers an opportunity to see some fresh talent and likely future stars.
WASHINGTON — Many college students across the nation will begin to see higher costs for loans this spring, while others will be turned away by banks altogether as the credit crisis roiling the U.S. economy spreads into yet another sector, student lenders and Wall Street firms say.
But most students in Wisconsin won’t feel a thing, university and finance officials said today in interviews.
….The situation in Wisconsin is much better than in many other states, so student loans will not be much of a problem here, according to UW-Madison and Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corp. officials.
Susan Fischer, director of student financial services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said today that just 200 students out of about 17,000 who have loans have lenders who will no longer lend.
Adam Nickel had everything going for him. He was set to begin his last year of UW’s demanding pharmacy program. He was an accomplished runner and had just reached his fundraising goal for an upcoming charity marathon, which he was running in honor of his grandmother.
On Sunday, Nickel’s promising life came to an end as he crossed the finish line in Little Rock, Ark.
“All I know is he crossed the finish line, he gave a smile and dropped,” his mother, Cynthia Nickel of Kaukauna, said today.
Nickel, 27, who was running his sixth marathon, finished 18th in a field of 1,600. He was pronounced dead 21 minutes after crossing the finish line.
Dear Editor: The University of Wisconsin administration has once again stepped out of line with our tuition dollars in hand — this time with its proposal to fund electronic ID scanners for local bars.
According to the chancellor’s office, “This is the university saying we are concerned about underage drinking.”
In our opinion, all the university is saying is that they do not know why we are paying them so much for tuition every year. Students are paying for an education, not to help offset costs that local businesses incur to comply with the law.
Is the administration really that out of touch with the students who pay the bills?
The University of Wisconsin System is looking at a variety of tuition options as a way to increase access to college while also gaining more revenue if state budgets slide.
An advisory committee will recommend to the Board of Regents on Thursday that it consider tuition stratification — charging more for institutions in high demand — and differential tuition — charging more for more expensive programs such as engineering, which is already being done to some extent.
The UW System also already uses tuition stratification to some extent, charging higher tuition for UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee than for other four-year universities and charging less for the two-year UW colleges than the four-year institutions.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A 27-year-old Wisconsin man collapsed and died after completing the 26.2-mile Little Rock Marathon.
Adam Nickel from Kaukauna, who was attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, collapsed Sunday shortly after he crossed the finish line.
Emergency personnel used mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to try to revive Nickel until an ambulance arrived with a defibrillator. He could not be revived and was pronounced dead after being taken to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Hospital.
The marathon’s medical director, Dr. Kent Davidson, said at a news conference Sunday that no determination had been made yet on what caused Nickel’s death.
If Big Ten football officials are looking for a training video to enhance their preparation for the 2008 season — specifically targeting the points of emphasis as mandated by the NCAA rules committee — they need look no further than the Big Ten Network for assistance; an odd starting point, to be sure. Yet, for months, the BTN has been running a “highlight” loop, which has included a helmet-to-helmet collision between Michigan State strong safety Nehemiah Warrick, the aggressor, and University of Wisconsin receiver Kyle Jefferson, the victim.
When it you win the same meet for the eighth straight year, it might be hard to make a statement, but that’s exactly what the University of Wisconsin men’s track team did Sunday.
Led by a strong finish in the 5,000 meters event in which Wisconsin took 25 of 39 possible points, the Badgers regained a lead they briefly lost and ran away with their record setting eighth-straight Big Ten indoor championship in front of a sold-out crowd at the Camp Randall Memorial Sports Center.
In your Feb. 21 article titled “Challenges remain for biotech,” The Capital Times reviewed an interesting talk given at the University of Wisconsin last week by Steve Burrill, a venture capitalist who has created a very successful business focused on biotechnology investments. In the talk, Burrill presented his viewpoints on the biotech industry as an investment.
As a biotechnology industry advocate, scientist, and entrepreneur of over 20 years and as a father to three children, I found the article and Steve’s talk too pessimistic and narrow in scope.
Students new to the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse next fall will see a $500 tuition increase, but how much extra financial aid they will get depends on what happens in Madison in the next two weeks.
Quoted: Beverly Aagaard-Kienitz, an assistant professor of neuroradiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Three statewide organizations with far-reaching constituencies have mounted strategic initiatives that see Wisconsin’s economic challenges in clear terms and then raise the bar on where the state should be headed.
They are the University of Wisconsin System, Competitive Wisconsin and a new entity called Wisconsin Way.
Bo Ryan doesn’t want to get philosophical but Tanner Bronson is the type of person who the University of Wisconsin coach thinks transcends the X’s and O’s of the game.
IF the University of Wisconsin business school ever writes a case study about itself, the lesson may be that some things are more valuable unsold.
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Condé Nast Portfolio reports that the school persuaded alumni to donate $85 million in exchange for a promise that it would not sell its name for the next 20 years.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A new report gives the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents several potentially controversial options to raise more tuition revenue in coming years.
The regents are expected to consider the report but take no action on any of the options at their meeting in Madison next week.
The options include raising the below-average tuition at some in-demand schools and continuing a trend of charging more to fund specific programs and initiatives.
Score another win in the art world for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is a co-winner of the Best Online Archival Exhibit for a show about book bindings.
Countering a poll paid for by the cable industry, an NFL Network-affiliated group has paid for a survey that produced very different results on topics that include a legislative proposal that would create a neutral arbitration process to settle disputes between cable providers and channels such as NFL Network.
The survey of 500 likely Wisconsin voters shows that 65.8 percent of the respondents support and 21.8 percent oppose state legislation creating a neutral arbitration system that could be used to resolve the current programming dispute between cable companies and independent channels like the NFL Network.
Quoted: UW-Madison telecommunications professor Barry Orton
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office delivered some good news to the University of Wisconsin-Madison today (Thursday).
In dismissing a key challenge to James Thomson’s breakthrough discovery on stem cells by New York and California interests, the office cleared the way for the UW to benefit from the research in the years ahead.
Congratulations to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds the patent, and Thomson, who pioneered the stem cell procedures. Not only will the school benefit, but so will Wisconsin taxpayers.
….Now the 10th-ranked Badgers can point to an achievement that occurred at the Kohl Center that betters anything they’ve done on the road. And, fittingly, you can’t pin it on one individual.
When the Badgers broke a school record by remarkably committing just one turnover during their 57-42 Big Ten Conference victory over Michigan State Thursday night, the credit had to be spread around the team.
“How many times do you see a game with a team with one turnover against a team that plays pretty good defense and will get in your shorts?” asked proud UW coach Bo Ryan after the Badgers played almost flawlessly with the ball, the exception being one bad decision by Joe Krabbenhoft in the first half.
“I don’t know what else you can say,” Ryan added. “Statistics always speak in a loud tone but I’ve never coached in a game where that’s happened, never defensively to another team, or another team defensively to us doing the same things. I don’t know if it’s ever happened. But our guys do value the ball.”
Wisconsins role in the commercialization of embryonic stem cell research has received a boost from the U.S. patent office, which rejected a challenge to a key patent held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
After years of conservative opposition and, more recently, months of procedural delay, a bill that requires hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims finally passed the state Legislature today. Gov. Jim Doyle has said he would sign the bill.
Sen. Judy Robson, D-Beloit, praised the bill’s passage in a news release after the final vote in the state Senate.
“It was a long and sometimes rocky road getting here, but I am pleased that the Assembly leadership ultimately permitted a vote on this bill,” she said. “The broad bipartisan support it received in both houses shows this is not a partisan matter. It is not a political matter. It is a matter of humanity and compassion.”
MADISON, Wis. — The Wisconsin Women’s Foundation is releasing a first-of-its-kind report on Thursday that targets health concerns for women in Wisconsin.
The report targets more than 10 pressing issues related to women’s health. Dr. Teri Woods, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, examined the results.
“I think if we look at areas of tobacco-use, alcohol, obesity, and if we look at sedentary nature of Wisconsin women we can go a long, long way in helping ourselves be strong and healthy,” Woods said.
Just in case you haven’t had enough of winter yet, here comes the new art poster from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission that you can mount on a wall. The image on the poster, “Frozen-up, Sugar River,” is taken from a dramatic natural landscape oil-on-board painting by Belleville artist Jonathan Wilde.
…Wilde — yes, he is the son of the famous Wisconsin surrealist John Wilde — has been painting full time since May 1970, when he finished four years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a zoology major. His subject matter has consistently been the birds and landscapes of southern Wisconsin, where his roots and passion lie. Wilde’s style is representational.
Sometimes these things just seem to fall into place.
Right now, there is a big revival of “bel canto” singing. Witness the new productions in opera houses around the world and critically acclaimed new recordings by mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli and tenor Juan Diego Florez.
n May the Madison Opera will stage one of the biggest and best known of bel canto operas, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” based on the Gothic novel by Sir Walter Scott and featuring a famous mad scene of soaring arias.
In May the Madison Opera will stage one of the biggest and best known of bel canto operas, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” based on the Gothic novel by Sir Walter Scott and featuring a famous mad scene of soaring arias.
Keeping in that spirit, this week UW Opera will stage Donizetti’s last comic opera, “Don Pasquale.”
Dear Editor: What do we want our young people to be able to do once they graduate from college?
If you ask this question to the average parent, they’ll probably say that they want their child to be able to find work in a meaningful career.
But if you were to probe further, they would also agree that a good education would prepare their child for leading a fulfilling life. To that end, no matter what students major in, they should leave our institutions being able to think critically and creatively and to participate as active citizens in their communities.
There was some controversy on the University of Wisconsin campus this week over the scheduling of a speech by Canadian author Wendy McElroy on the topic “Don’t Vote! Why Voting Is Immoral.”
Some people even ripped up posters promoting the event, at which McElroy argued that voting only encourages a corrupt system and its values.
But there was no need for so negative a response.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has won a key patent battle for one of its stem cell patents, after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office upheld the foundation’s claim to the patent.
The decision affirms WARF’s contention that an initial UW-Madison human embryonic stem cell discovery is a patentable invention.
The decision was announced in a press release this morning from WARF.
Five bartenders at the Memorial Union’s Stiftskeller were charged Wednesday with stealing thousands of dollars by skimming off sales from various cash registers in the bar.
The complaint says the five, including one who said skimming from the tills was widespread and part of the “culture” of the Stiftskeller workers, took a total of more than $14,000 from the Union.
Nick Loniello never expected to get a chance to edit and comment on a column by William F. Buckley Jr. before it was published – let alone to do it while he watched Buckley give himself a shave in his underwear.
Then again, he never expected the conservative columnist who died Wednesday to rescue the newspaper Loniello helped found.
In 1969, as a University of Wisconsin-Madison student, Loniello and five others launched The Badger Herald to offer conservative views to counter the student-run Daily Cardinal. Two years later, the paper was nearly bankrupt.
The UW-Madison plans to help some downtown bars and liquor stores identify underage drinkers by providing free ID scanners that can read driver’s licenses or identification cards to find out if they are real.
University of Wisconsin officials want to offer scanners to those businesses based on UW’s successful use in the Memorial Union’s Rathskeller for the past year and a half.
The technology has been gradually upgraded and about 100 false IDs were found last year, according to Union spokesman Marc Kennedy.
“We have found identification scanners to be very effective,” said Dawn Crim, acting special assistant to the UW-Madison chancellor. “We plan to offer them to establishments to assist them in making responsible sales.”
Could there be a finer compliment for a civil rights lawyer than that paid the late Percy Julian Jr. by his friend and fellow attorney Jeff Scott Olson?
“He started out during the time of Martin Luther King Jr. and was one of the people who made the civil rights laws passed in the King era real tools for justice, especially for African-Americans,” Olson said after Julian died Sunday at age 67.
The city of Madison has ticketed 1,300 property owners — starting at $109 — this winter for not clearing snow and ice from the sidewalks in front of their properties, but not the owner of 325 W. Johnson St., where this ankle-bending sheet of ice was photographed Tuesday afternoon.
The owner? The city. The address on a busy stretch off State Street is the home of Fire Department Administration.
Among the Community Comments:
“All the sidewalks on campus are an icy mess. Why doesn’t the city ticket UW and all the landlords in that area of town?”
“The UW campus sidewalks are horrible in many places, but the city cannot touch the UW. And these are arguably some of the most highly used sidewalks in the city.”
Reading the first installment of the groundbreaking study on Milwaukee’s school voucher program is like reading the table of contents of a mystery: There are intriguing story lines but no way to know how the story will end. (One of the researchers was UW-Madison professor John Witte).
Gov. Jim Doyle on Tuesday said Wisconsin will need to brace for another round of fiscal belt-tightening as the national economic slowdown has ripped a hole in the state’s budget.
Faced with a lackluster number of college-educated adults in the state, University of Wisconsin System officials have their eyes on what they say is an under-served market: adults who have some college credits but never finished four-year degrees.
New tax credits have lured Universal Pictures to Wisconsin to film a Johnny Depp film about John Dillinger, Gov. Jim Doyle announced today.
Universal Pictures would spend about $20 million in Wisconsin on “Public Enemies,” garnering about $3.9 million in tax credits, according to the governor. The film stars Depp and Christian Bale and this week’s Best Actress Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard.
The film is being produced and directed by Michael Mann, a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus.
The despondent faces of poor, sickly people in developing nations on our TV screens most nights can seem a world away from the majority of people of Wisconsin. But my work in some of the world’s most impoverished regions confirms that many of the diseases exacting a toll in Madison are decimating countries like Vietnam and Uganda.
One of the chronic diseases I’m most familiar with is diabetes, a condition once considered rare in the developing world. The incidence of diabetes is increasing in almost every corner of the world due to the same risk factors that we see in Western countries: obesity, poor nutrition and physical inactivity. By the year 2025, diabetes is expected to affect some 40 million, with 75 percent of cases occurring in developing countries.
(Linda Baumann is director of global health initiatives and a professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
The first time Dr. Munci Kalayoglu scrubbed and went into the operating room, his realization that he really wanted to be a surgeon was confirmed. But that wasn’t always the case.
Earlier in life he planned to be an architect, but he couldn’t pass the engineering school exam in Turkey, where he was born and raised. So he switched gears, setting his sights on medical school. He passed the medical exam with flying colors.
Instead of focusing on building designs, Kalayoglu (kuh-LIE-uh-loo) has saved more than 1,400 lives as a liver transplant surgeon at University Hospital.
….Kalayoglu’s story is among those told by veteran medical journalist Stephen Busalacchi in his new book “White Coat Wisdom,” described on the cover as a book in which “extraordinary doctors talk about what they do, how they got there and why medicine is so much more than a job.”
MADISON – Gov. Jim Doyle today announced that portions of the upcoming film “Public Enemies” will be shot in Wisconsin. The movie will be directed and produced by UW alumnus Michael Mann and will star Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.
Universal Pictures reached agreement today with the Wisconsin Department of Commerce on tax credits from the new Film Production Services Tax Credit Program.
A bill that would expand the state’s oversight of for-profit colleges and universities is on a fast track after a long stalemate.
A “modernization” bill proposed by the Educational Approval Board was almost derailed by opposition from the Department of Public Instruction, which feared that the board would infringe on approval of teacher education programs or cause confusion and unnecessary expense for those seeking a teacher’s license.
But after months of stalemate, the board and DPI reached a compromise that protects the exclusive right of the state superintendent of public instruction to approve programs and schools that lead to licensure of teachers or provide professional development for them. The Colleges and Universities Committee in the Assembly is expected to approve the bill this afternoon.
Americans distrust the morality of nanotechnology but Europeans have much more faith in the burgeoning science, according to a survey by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication at the UW, says that is because religion exerts far more influence on public views of technology in the United States than it does in Europe.
Nanotechnology is a branch of science and engineering devoted to the design and production of materials, structures, devices and circuits at the tiniest possible scale, typically in the realm of individual atoms and molecules.
Scientists see huge potential for advances in computers, medicine and many other fields. But the survey of 1,015 adult residents of the United States found that only 29.5 percent found that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.
The Morgridge Institute for Research on Monday named stem cell pioneer James Thomson as director of regenerative biology and principal scientist.
As the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents prepares to search for UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley’s successor, the University of Colorado experience – as well as similar hiring decisions in West Virginia, Missouri, and Georgia – raises this question: Does an institution that spends more than $2 billion per year need a manager or an academic at the helm?
Mike Jurken doesn’t think he could get into the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – his grades aren’t good enough, and he doesn’t have time to keep up with the competitive atmosphere. Instead, he’s busy running his own company.
The study was conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project, part of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The main researchers included John Witte, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who conducted studies of the Milwaukee voucher program from 1990 to 1995, before the Legislature dropped the requirement for such studies.
UW-Madison stem cell pioneer and researcher James Thomson is the first person to be named to the multidisciplinary scientific leadership team at the Morgridge Institute for Research.
The Morgridge Institute is the private, not-for-profit side of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Thomson has accepted the position of director of regenerative biology and will become a principal scientist at the new institute, University of Wisconsin officials announced today (Feb. 25).
When we hear sedition is raging out of control at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, prompting student government to ban free speech on campus, citizens everywhere have a right to be alarmed.
What’s alarming, of course, is the apparent overwhelming ignorance of many of today’s student leaders at UWM about the principles of democracy and the Constitution of the United States.
Percy Julian Jr., a pioneering Madison civil rights and liberties attorney, died Sunday in Madison. He was 67. Julian never regained consciousness after suffering a stroke at his home Saturday, according to Jeff Scott Olson.
“He was a pioneer in the field of civil rights litigation,” said Olson, Julian’s close friend and fellow attorney. “He started out during the time of Martin Luther King Jr. and was one of the people who made the civil rights laws passed in the King era real tools for justice, especially for African-Americans.”
Julian was best known for representing University of Wisconsin-Madison students charged in the Dow Chemical demonstrations in the 1960s and handling pioneering employment discrimination and voting rights class action suits across the United States, often in cooperation with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Julian received his law degree from UW-Madison in 1966.
UW women’s basketball: Anderson gets third POW honor
Jolene Anderson netted her third Big Ten Conference Player of the Week honor of the season Monday after leading the University of Wisconsin women’s basketball team to three victories in a six-day span.
A chemical spill on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus cleared the 12th floor of the Engineering Research Building just before 4 p.m. Friday. No one was injured.
Chemists from the 11th floor of the building met members of the Madison Fire Department when they arrived on the scene and said there was a spill of nitric acid. Officers upgraded the call to a hazardous materials call, prompting the dispatch of firefighters in full hazmat gear with several more fire and rescue vehicles sent to the scene for handling the spill.
The leadership of the UW-Madison Faculty Senate is proposing a campaign to raise as much as $1 million for need-based scholarships for students as a way of resolving concerns about lack of access to the university for low-income residents.
The senate — the governance body of the university faculty — will vote on March 3 on a resolution that would launch a campaign to provide and raise funds for such scholarships.
The University of Wisconsin Foundation would match contributions to the initiative.
Lester Hunt wasn’t expecting hate mail after he sent out an e-mail last week announcing a talk called “Don’t Vote! Why Voting Is Immoral,” being held tonight on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
To his surprise, hostile responses started filling his inbox. “Don’t send me this junk,” demanded one person. Another complained, “It is because of a democracy that loopy liberals such as yourselves can have such ridiculous beliefs and morals.”
Some even used obscenities to describe their feelings about the guest speaker, feminist author and anarchist Wendy McElroy, who argues that to vote to endorse a corrupt system and its values.
Posters for tonight’s event were torn down and ripped up.
Women who exercise after a breast cancer diagnosis can improve their chances of survival, according to a study by researchers at several universities and cancer centers, including UW-Madison.
The six-year study indicated women with breast cancer who engaged in moderate to vigorous exercise had a 35 to 49 percent decreased risk of dying from the disease. Women who had the most physical activity had higher survival rates than those with the lowest level.
A research team including investigators from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health made the findings in a study published in the February edition of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.
A pleasant house on Gorham Street is offering hope and help to young men with alcohol or drug addiction problems.
That house is the result of Tom and Cathy Meyer’s devotion to their deceased son and their wish to make one of his ideas become reality. It’s also the result of many donations of time, furnishings and renovation by a caring community.
Hereâ??s further grist for the mill for anyone deconstructing how Senator Hillary Clinton lost so many states to Senator Barack Obama.
The story is starting to sound the same everywhere: slow start and outspent, if not out-organized. These are the details from Wisconsin, as culled by Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which analyzes political advertising across the country.
The knee injury suffered by cornerback Jack Ikegwuonu was so devastating and caused so much swelling that a month later he still hasn’t even been able to undergo reconstructive surgery.
Veolia Water SA of France, one of the world’s biggest water-technology companies, spends $50 million a year to develop ways to clean wastewater in a world beset by water shortages. And starting soon, it plans to be spending a share of its research-and-development budget in Milwaukee.
The company, a newcomer to the city, will give a $1.5 million research grant to the Great Lakes WATER Research Institute, an arm of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, company officials said.
Rich in intellectual capital but saddled with attitudes that get in the way of leveraging it, Wisconsin needs to change its culture. So says G. Steven Burrill, the chief executive officer at Burrill & Co., a San Francisco venture capital firm whose funds invest nearly $1 billion in life sciences companies.
Burrill says he isn’t buying the state’s standard argument – that it lacks the kind of capital available on the coasts to fund new companies.
“There is more than enough capital in the world to do all the things that need to happen here, you just need to go get it,” said Burrill, who sponsors an annual business plan competition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you had thousands of great business plans on every street corner in Madison, all the capital in the world would get pretty tired of flying here and they’d set up shop here.”
Burrill & Co. would invest its funds’ entire $1 billion in Wisconsin companies if the opportunities were there, said Burrill, a Madison native who went to UW-Madison and has a vacation home in the state.
Not too many full-time college students start their own business.
And it’s a fair bet that the ambitious few who do don’t give away their product to support a worthy cause.
But that’s what 21-year-old UW-Madison economics student Ryan Schmudlach is doing.
“That might have been a little bit of a mistake on my part,” he quipped, referring not to the charity but to his full plate, before adding that, “It’s working.”
Influenza has hit the UW-Madison campus hard this month, and the illness is strengthening statewide.
The number of cases on campus doubled from the weekend ending Feb. 1 to the week of Feb. 11-15, when there were 40 student visits to University Health Services with flu symptoms.
“Flu season on campus has begun,” said UHS epidemiologist Craig Roberts. “We believe that cases will continue to rise.”
Students, faculty and staff are being encouraged to prevent further spread of flu by washing their hands frequently, using soap and water or alcohol-based gel; getting sufficient sleep, exercise and nutrition; covering coughs and sneezes; and staying home if they are sick.
