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Author: jnweaver

‘Thirsty Thursdays’ start weekend early

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Capital Times

Organized labor may have given us the weekend, but college students have extended it a day.

For many years, Thursday nights have rivaled Friday and Saturday nights as the night to go out and have fun in Madison. Some students refer to Thursday nights as “Thirsty Thursdays.”

“The drink specials are really good and the crowds are usually really fun. And it’s nice to know that you have two other weekend days ahead,” said Emily Byrne, 22, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student in elementary education, who was sipping a vodka and cranberry juice Thursday night at the State Bar & Grill.

“I think any night’s a good night to go out. Is it Thursday?” joked Byrne’s friend, Jason Preisler, 23, a UW accounting major.

25% of young voters turn out

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In an election season when young voters have made more impact than ever, a quarter of Wisconsin’s eligible voters under 30 participated in Tuesday night’s primary – making youth turnout here equal to Massachusetts and second only to New Hampshire this year.

According to The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, 220,200 voters under age 30 cast ballots in Tuesday’s primary – 25% of eligible voters in that age group.

At 16 voting wards at or near University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marquette University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sen. Barack Obama beat Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton among local college students, grabbing at least 79% of the vote. He was most popular at UW’s Gordon Commons, capturing 87% of the vote there.

Top traits for new chancellor discussed

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Capital Times

What do University of Wisconsin-Madison employees want in the new chancellor who will replace John Wiley when he steps down in September?

Some answers came in a public forum conducted by the chancellor search committee this morning at the Health Sciences Learning Center — though frigid temperatures, icy roads and a 7 a.m. start time limited attendance.

Kurt Zimmerman, an academic staff member in the School of Medicine and Public Health, said the committee should seek a campus leader who can improve legislative relations to correct a sometimes combative relationship with state legislators who control part of the university’s budget.

Primary brings out new student voters

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Capital Times

University of Wisconsin-Madison students, most voting in their first presidential primary Tuesday, were excited to have the opportunity.

Caroline Gomez, 19, who aspires to be a politician one day, voted absentee at the City Clerk’s office a week ago so she could spend all her time at the polls Tuesday volunteering, thanking voters and just making sure everything went smoothly.

“I like the election process. I’m a political science major and democracy in itself is inspiring,” Gomez said, standing next to the vote feeder and counter at the Doyle Administration Building on West Dayton Street just before the poll for Ward 44 closed at 8 p.m. “It’s a beautiful thing about our country, the ability to choose our leaders and choose how things are supposed to run,” she said.

Election observers closely watched student turnout for this election because young voters have been strong supporters of Sen. Barack Obama in his race for the Democratic nomination against Sen. Hillary Clinton. Obama targeted UW students for support early on and drew more than 19,000 people — many of them students — to the Kohl Center last week for a rally.

UW persuades Minority Student Network to bring offices here

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Capital Times

Recently, the University of Wisconsin scored a coup over Harvard and Penn when it persuaded the Minority Student Achievement Network to bring its offices from Evanston, Ill., to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research here.

So what, exactly, is the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN), and why were prestigious major research universities vying to offer it a home?

The group, whose Wisconsin members include the Madison Metropolitan School District and the Green Bay school system, is a consortium of about 25 high-performing school districts from across the country. They joined forces in 1999 to figure out why their students of color aren’t doing as well in school as their white counterparts.

UW athletic department: Finance committee votes to freeze ticket prices

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Capital Times

At the end of its meeting Tuesday afternoon, the University of Wisconsin Athletic Board’s finance committee voted to do nothing — and it may have been the most welcome inaction to Badger fans in a decade and a half.

The vote was to approve the freezing of ticket prices for a year, something the Athletic Department has not done since 1992. Back then, the department’s budget was $16.5 million; on Tuesday, the finance committee authorized a total spending authority of $89,149,700.

Making sure they’re good to go

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

For all the joy that comes from being in the Big Ten title hunt, there is some pain for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team.

Every other game or so, Trevon Hughes will land wrong and flash a grimace so fierce that you wonder if he aggravated the ankle injury that sidelined him back in December. Brian Butch has a bruised left elbow, one season after dislocating the right one. Senior Michael Flowers and junior forward Marcus Landry have had to leave practice early to get treatment for “general soreness.”

A cop shows path to trust

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Capital Times

Sgt. Tony Fiore not only does the Madison Police Department proud, he makes the entire city of Madison proud.

As described by reporter Anita Weier in Monday’s Capital Times, students at UW-Madison are honoring Fiore with a reception Wednesday for his past two years of working to better the conditions on Langdon Street.

Fiore’s tenure in the campus area is an example of what modern policing can do to bring people together in a cooperative effort to battle crime and make neighborhoods safe for residents.

Rob Zaleski: Winter not such a wonderland this year

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Capital Times

Is this somebody’s idea of a cruel joke?

….Of course, it’s not just newcomers who are wondering what’s going on and, more importantly, whether this is just a freak thing.

Ed Hopkins, assistant state climatologist at UW-Madison, says he wishes he had the answer and notes that many of his colleagues are scratching their heads as well.

Selig still reviewing cases cited in Mitchell Report

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said Monday that he is still reviewing cases of players accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs and steroids as outlined in the Mitchell Report released two months ago.

Selig said he had hoped to complete the review by spring training, but now does not know when he will finish or what punishment he’ll pursue.

“I’m still in that process,” Selig said at a news conference on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A 1956 graduate, Selig was invited back by the history department to speak with students about his career.

Students laud cop for Langdon St. beat

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Capital Times

There was a time when fraternity members might run at the sight of a police officer, but times have changed on Langdon Street.

Now, community police officers help sorority and fraternity members form night patrols and often patrol with them to keep the area where many Greek houses are located safe.

The Greek community credits Madison Police Sgt. Tony Fiore, who for the past two years was the neighborhood officer on Langdon. A reception to honor him will take place Wednesday at 4 p.m. in the On Wisconsin Room at the Red Gym.

But Fiore, who was promoted Feb. 3, very much credits the students he has come to know.

Enrollment at technical colleges up, could be linked to economy

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — The state’s technical colleges are seeing a slight gain in students, which they say often happens when jobs become harder to find.

The biggest growth spurts in the past 30 years at Wisconsin technical colleges coincided with the national economic recessions of 2001, 1991 and the early 1980s. It’s still not clear whether the nation is in a recession now, but enrollment at the state’s 16 technical colleges is growing.

According to the latest estimates, the number of full-time equivalent students is up 1.8 percent compared to the last school year. In the previous two years, annual counts fell.

Patent tug-of-war waged in Congress

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In the lawsuit it filed this month against Intel Corp., the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is going after a familiar adversary.

Its volley, alleging that Intel infringed on a patent covering a circuit developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isn’t the first the foundation has aimed at the computer chipmaker or the semiconductor industry.

Study finds tutor plan lacking

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Early reports from a University of Wisconsin-Madison study raise questions about the value of federally funded tutoring sessions for low-performing Milwaukee Public Schools students.

Obituary: Edward P. Leight

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Madison.com

MIDDLETON – Edward P. Leight, age 88, died Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, at Heartland Country Village in Black Earth. Ed graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1947 with a B.A. degree majoring in journalism. While attending the UW he worked as a hotel clerk at the Wisconsin Union and was a member of Alpha Phi Omega college service fraternity where he served as treasurer and president.

Obituary: Elisabeth Sequeira

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Madison.com

MADISON – Elisabeth Sequeira, age 75, passed away at home on Friday, Feb. 15, 2008. She was employed for many years by the UW Graduate School Admissions Office and was a member of the Friends of the Arboretum.

Obituary: Georgina R. Forbes

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Madison.com

EAGAN MINN./MADISON – Georgina R. Forbes (Springer), age 76, passed away peacefully at home on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008. She worked for WHA Public Television for several years and went on to work and eventually retire from a career as an administrative assistant at the University of Wisconsin Department of Program Information.

Doug Moe: Want to know a secret? UW’s Nagy pens fine novel

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Capital Times

SO THERE is this new novel that’s getting picked up by book clubs out in the Pacific Northwest but hardly anybody in Madison, where the author lives, even knows he wrote a book.

Somebody needs to remind Casey Nagy what the celebrated writer/journalist Jimmy Breslin once said: “If you do not blow your own horn, there is no music.”

“I’m not a self-promoter,” Nagy was saying Friday.

Gunman’s friendly exterior masked past

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DEKALB, Ill. (AP) — Steven Kazmierczak’s quiet, dependable and fun-loving exterior masked troubling details from his past that emerged as a stunned community struggled to understand what caused the 27-year-old to open fire on a class at Northern Illinois University, leaving six people dead.

A former employee at a Chicago psychiatric treatment center said Kazmierczak was placed there after high school by his parents. She said he used to cut himself, and had resisted taking his medications.

Wis. Parents Of NIU Students React To Shootings

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WISC-TV 3

MADISON, Wis. — The shooting at Northern Illinois University Thursday is the fourth at a U.S. school in a week, and the tragedy is hitting close to home for many families in southern Wisconsin.Some Rock County parents whose children are students at NIU all said they heard about the incident first through TV or radio. But in some cases, it was well more than an hour before they knew their children were OK.

Dave Smith’s daughter is a junior at Northern Illinois. He said that when he and his wife found out, they tried to track down their daughter, who was in basketball practice. Because of communications problems, the Janesville parents had to wait for their daughter to call them.

Scientists Continue To Test NASA Submarine In Lake Mendota

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WISC-TV 3

MADISON, Wis. — A robotic submarine that will eventually be used to explore a moon that orbits Jupiter continues to be tested in Madison’s Lake Mendota.

The saucer-shaped submersible known as ENDURANCE is cruising the icy depths of the city’s largest lake this week at part of $2-million project funded by NASA.

Man accused of using GPS to track wife

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Capital Times

A Madison man allegedly stalked his wife, a Madison police officer, by placing GPS devices in her vehicles, using sophisticated computer software to track her movements through her cell phone and hacking his way into the Madison Police Department’s human resources computer program to learn her work schedule.

Dustin M. Farberg, 38, a former corrections officer who now works as a human resources assistant for UW’s School of Medicine and Public Health, faces charges on felony counts of stalking, identity theft and vehicle theft and a misdemeanor computer crime for the alleged three-month-long stalking of both his wife and another police officer with whom she was having an affair.

‘We’re always ready’: UW trauma team responds to the worst

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Capital Times

A terrible accident on the Beltline in the dead of night. A 7-year-old child is thrown from the back seat of a car.

Paramedics arrive, assess the child’s condition, and one of them calls University Hospital’s trauma center to report that the child is bleeding from the mouth and ears. They expect to get him to the hospital in 10 minutes.

The nurse who takes the call consults with a physician, and they determine that the child is suffering from a massive head injury, and the wheels are set in motion.

Bill stumps for Hillary at UW Stock Pavilion

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Capital Times

Former President Bill Clinton came to Madison Thursday to give an issues oriented, policy-heavy hourlong stump speech making the case for his wife’s bid to become president of the United States.

“This is a time of great promise, but also significant problems and peril for America,” Clinton told about 2,000 people, mostly student Hillary Clinton supporters, in the UW stock pavilion. “We have a huge economic problem at home and a significant set of challenges around the world that will affect your tomorrows.”

Trip to Children’s Hospital put defeat in perspective for UW players

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Capital Times

It didn’t take very long for all the players from the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team to stop fretting over losing to Purdue last Saturday night.

It took just one trip to the hospital — or the new American Family Children’s Hospital at the University of Wisconsin to be specific — for the Badgers to get an attitude adjustment.

The Badgers spent a few hours there Sunday with the hopes of cheering up some sick children by playing, talking and just visiting with them. At the same time, UW coach Bo Ryan was at the Veterans Hospital visiting with patients there.

Ex-president stumps for Clinton around state

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Former President Clinton urged voters to support his wife’s presidential bid for both policy and personal reasons Thursday during stops across the state.

She “has the best heart-and-mind combination of anyone I’ve known,” the former president told a crowd of 2,100 at the Stock Pavilion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

State deficit repair plans offered

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Two parts of a possible deficit-repair package – a tax on hospitals and continuing to collect the estate tax that officially ended on Jan. 1 – were suggested by Democratic leaders Thursday.

Bank account

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Maybe years from now, Brian Butch will take creative license with the last-second, winning three-pointer he hit to lift the University of Wisconsin to a 68-66 victory over 13th-ranked Indiana Wednesday night at Assembly Hall, telling anyone within earshot that he intended all along to use the glass.

But in the immediate aftermath of the Badgers’ seventh road victory, all he could say is that regardless of how the shot look, it felt good going off his hands.

Bad times hit state budget

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The slumping economy will result in state tax collections falling $650 million below projections in the current two-year state budget – 60% more than the shortfall estimated last month, a report warned Wednesday.

Aides to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle took austerity measures to bring that potential budget deficit down to about $416 million, an amount Doyle and the Legislature will try to make up this year. Those emergency steps included a delay in paying off $125.4 million in debt.

Candidates go hard after young voters

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Capital Times

It was no accident that Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s first appearance in Wisconsin this week was at the Kohl Center in the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

And even before Obama could get there, his rival, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, had already sent her daughter Chelsea on a two-day tour of college campuses around the state.

Both events drew big crowds of young people. More than 17,000 people, many of them students, filled the Kohl Center to hear Obama Tuesday night in the largest such pre-primary event in Wisconsin history.

Chelsea Clinton’s appearance, meanwhile, was a prelude to at least two more events focused on campus voters, including an appearance by Sen. Clinton herself on Monday and an event featuring former President Bill Clinton Thursday.

UW men’s basketball: Mode of travel has mostly been by bus, though Badgers flying to Indiana

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Capital Times

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — A chartered jet is flying the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team to and from tonight’s Big Ten Conference game with Indiana at Assembly Hall.

Don’t shrug your shoulders and say, so what? It’s not as regular an occurrence as you might believe for the 15th-ranked Badgers.

Tonight’s game is just the third time in six conference road games — and the first time in the past four road games — that the Badgers haven’t needed to travel by bus.

Obama energizes 17,000+ at Kohl Center (with full audio)

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Capital Times

As the news came in that he scored resounding victories over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia Tuesday night, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama pumped up an overflow Madison crowd at the Kohl Center.

“This is our moment. This is our time,” Obama said to overwhelming applause during a 25-minute stump speech in front of more than 17,000 supporters in the arena and another 2,000 in the Kohl Center’s Nicholas-Johnson Pavilion. “And where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born?”

Obama fans, political undecideds fill arena

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Nicole Neis came to Barack Obama’s rally Tuesday to help figure out how to cast her vote Feb. 19.

By the end of the night, she was a firm supporter of the U.S. senator from Illinois. But even before he took the stage, she said she was starting to lean toward him as she took in the capacity crowd at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Kohl Center.

Obama blazes trail into Wisconsin

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

With three more lopsided victories in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, Democrat Barack Obama arrived in Wisconsin like a February freight train, telling a roaring Kohl Center crowd of more than 17,000 that “tonight we’re on our way.”

Doug Moe: Pizza Pit ad still an icon of other snowiest winter

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Capital Times

DICK ZILLMAN doesn’t like winter, which is odd when you consider the role played in his considerable success by the two snowiest winters in Madison history.

This winter — later this month — Zillman will receive the Madison Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award for career achievement. It’s a fitting tribute to one of Madison’s more creative and enduring advertising minds.

It was another brutal winter that helped put him on the map.

Chelsea Clinton stumps for Hillary at Memorial Union

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Capital Times

It was a surprising choice of topic given the mostly student crowd stuffed into a lounge at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union. But the first question posed to Chelsea Clinton, who was stumping in Madison this afternoon for her mother, concerned Social Security.

“It is important to me because the Baby Boomers are aging,” the young woman told Clinton.

Big turnout expected for Obama rally here

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Capital Times

While organizers geared up for a massive turnout at Tuesday’s appearance in Madison by Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, supporters of his rival, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, today stepped up their call for the two to face each other in a Milwaukee debate.

Obama spokesman Dan Leistikow said the response to Obama’s appearance has been “tremendous. We sent out an initial e-mail to about 9,000 people in the Madison area. Within 24 hours, 50 percent of those people not only read the e-mail, but RSVPed on the Web site. That is unprecedented.”

Leistikow said the event “will be more than just a rally” and that attendees are being asked to bring their cell phones so they can find new ways “to take action and volunteer via text messaging.”

Hekkers was NFL player, WWII vet

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The life of George Hekkers, a Washington High School graduate known as “Big George,” included being shot down over North Africa during World War II, playing football for the Detroit Lions and owning Jimmy Durante’s piano. He played at UW-Madison for two years before WWII.

Assistant professor who disappeared fired

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents on Friday fired a former UW-Parkside assistant professor who filed a race discrimination lawsuit against the university last summer.

Ogbonnaya “Oko” Elechi lost his job because he stopped showing up for class, not because he filed the lawsuit, according to university officials. Elechi took a job at Prairie View A&M University in Texas without telling Parkside he was leaving, said Lenny Klaver, UW-Parkside vice chancellor.

Rob Zaleski: Slow down, Fitchburg, prof urges

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Capital Times

Does the city of Fitchburg really need this?

That’s the question Fitchburg residents should be asking themselves regarding the proposed 868-acre Northeast Neighborhood in the city’s far northeast corner. Or so says Cal DeWitt, UW-Madison’s highly respected environmental sciences professor.

Indeed, if Fitchburg residents took the time to look into the issue, DeWitt says, they’d quickly realize why the city would be making a huge mistake by approving the project. And why that approval could well come back to haunt the city years down the road.

Teachers who can

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Capital Times

In the small second-floor Mayer Gallery at the Chazen Museum of Art, the five strikingly contemporary digital inkjet portraits by Dennis Miller that depict human sensory organs hang on a wall only a few feet across from a dozen of Leslee Nelson’s old-fashioned embroidered linens.

Figuratively, you can situate most the rest of the huge show of new art by faculty members at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in between those two extremes.

Variety in both technique and subject matter is what once again recommends this extensive survey show, which has taken place every four years or so since 1974. Visitors are sure to find things they love, like, dislike and hate.

That is as it should be in the experimental environment of a world-class public teaching institution that was ranked last year as 13th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. An art school, after all, encourages the faculty to learn from the students, and each other, as much as it encourages the students to learn from the faculty.

Smiling right until the end

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Capital Times

Jim Klebesadel didn’t have to say anything. His smile told the whole story.

He was smiling when he arrived at the Kohl Center as a guest of the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team during its practice Monday and he was still smiling when he left Bo Ryan’s office later that afternoon accompanied by his three daughters.

Klebesadel, the 81-year-old grandfather of former Wisconsin standout Mike Wilkinson and an unabashed fan of the Badgers, told Ryan that it was one of the best days of his life.

WARF files suit against Intel

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Capital Times

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has filed a lawsuit alleging patent infringement against computer giant Intel Corp.

The lawsuit filed by WARF on Tuesday in federal court in Madison charges that Intel’s CoreTM 2 Duo microprocessor is infringing on a UW-Madison invention that significantly improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing.

Intel has aggressively marketed the benefits of this invention as a feature of its Core 2 technology, WARF said in a news release.

New firm aims to microwave cancer

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Although NeuWave looks like an embryonic company at first glance, the reality is the two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors who founded it invested about $280,000 of their own money and landed a federal grant to build a “very robust” prototype and conduct more than 100 animal trials,

Coach, QB focus of signing day

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Even before the University of Wisconsin revealed its 2008 class of football recruits Wednesday, coach Bret Bielema shared the most important item of the day, though one that shouldn’t surprise fans.

Wide receivers coach Henry Mason, who missed the 2007 season while rehabilitating from a spinal-cord injury he suffered last summer during a fall in his home, will not be able to coach next season.

DelVaughn Alexander, who was hired as the interim receivers coach for the 2007 season, will remain on staff at least through the ’08 season.