Dairy science students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will see more wear and tear on the soles of their boots and less on the seats of their pants this school year, thanks to curriculum changes aimed to help students build their technical and analytical skills.
Many researchers use software such as RasMol to visualize three-dimensional structures of proteins. But what if a researcher is blind? What’s the best way to navigate those same proteins?
Timothy Cordes, a blind medical scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, faces this challenge every day in his X-ray crystallography research. In the past, he had to go through several steps to figure out the spatial relationships of atoms and amino acid residues in a protein. “For everything I wanted to look at, I’d have to go into one program and write a file and then read it in another,” he says. “I realized I needed a tool to help me streamline the process.”
Mentions Pleasant Rowland’s philanthropic projects, including the Waisman Early Childhood Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quoted: Steve Meili, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and director of the Consumer Law Litigation Clinic.
A recent working paper out of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the state exported 7,000 more college graduates overall than it imported from 1995 to 2000 – not a large number, but a loss nonetheless.
Quoted: Kent Peterson, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dear Editor: I was shocked to read of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s concern about vendors needing to pay third-party fees to present their ideas and products to UW-Madison officials on energy efficiency.
The UW shouldn’t be constrained to sifting through every hare-brained idea in order to find the ones that make sense. The organizer of such an event performs a vital service. Taxpayers should applaud the UW for finding inexpensive ways to build a better and greener university.
Kyle Stiegert, Fitchburg
A section of Ross Hill’s apartment building was burning Saturday when he said he went back inside to get his college diploma and some pictures of his kids. When he came back out, he said, a firefighter nearly tackled him and asked him if he was looting.
By his account, which contrasts with what police and firefighters report, an officer put him under arrest before he knew it, tentatively charging him with a felony.
MANY OF you probably already suspected that you lived in the greatest college sports town in the universe, or at least the Big Ten, and you didn’t need a national radio host to confirm it. But last week, one did.
I finally got a chance to listen to Scott Van Pelt’s recent ode to Madison on ESPN Radio, and it was an amazing thing to hear. Van Pelt sounded like a local tourism official who occasionally takes a second drink.
Three versions of the next state budget pending in the Capitol disagree on tax increases and spending levels, but all swim in a sea of red ink – future deficits of $669 million to $877 million.
Quoted: Ann Hoyt, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied cooperatives.
Family members of a missing UW-Green Bay student say they’re starting to lose hope for her safe return.
Family and friends have been hitting the pavement and going online in their search for 21-year-old Mahalia Xiong. She was last seen about a week ago after bowling with friends in Ashwaubenon.
MADISON, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin-Madison Badgers have filled their fourth and final recruiting spot on the basketball team with a 7-foot center from San Antonio. Ian Markolf has committed to the Badgers, choosing Wisconsin over Kentucky, Iowa State and Baylor.
Those familiar with his play say the 260-pound Markolf is both brawn and brain — he knows the game and has an NBA body already.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Apple Inc.’s flashy new iPhones may be jamming parts of the wireless network at Duke University, where technology officials worked with the company Wednesday to fix problems before classes begin next month.
Bill Cannon, a Duke technology spokesman, said an analysis of traffic found that iPhones flooded parts of the campus’ wireless network with access requests, freezing parts of the system for 10 minutes at a time.
It is nothing new for Christopher Taylor, the celebrated pianist and UW-Madison music professor, to play a concert in New York.
Kit Taylor, as he is known to friends, has admirers all over the world. But Taylor’s Sunday performance at the Caramoor International Music Festival, outside New York City in Westchester County, was special because of the instrument Taylor used to play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.
It’s been a bittersweet summer for Jolene Anderson, who won her third gold medal earlier this month with Team USA basketball.
The decision to play in the FIBA U21 World Championships in Moscow was a tough one for the senior-to-be with the University of Wisconsin women’s basketball team, who normally doesn’t turn down a chance to compete.
Anderson learned in late May that her grandmother, Nancy Rantala, was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and the Port Wing native was torn about whether she should make the trips to France and Russia to compete in team trials and the championships.
For a UW-Madison ophthalmology professor about to enter half-time retirement, his vision for the future is clear: a world rid of avoidable blindness within his lifetime.
“It can be done,” says Dr. Suresh Chandra, quietly confident in his mission even after more than two decades spent fighting an epidemic that has only grown.
Chandra in 1984 started the Combat Blindess Foundation in 1984, and has been treating hundreds of patients across the world.
University of Wisconsin reserve tailback Lance Smith has been suspended from the football team for violating the athletic department’s student-athlete discipline policy, athletic director Barry Alvarez announced Wednesday.
Among the broadcast teams formed to handle football broadcasts this season for the Big Ten Network is one that includes Wayne Larrivee, the radio voice of the Green Bay Packers.
Lance Smith, the Badgers second leading rusher from last season, has been suspended from the team after violating the UW Department of Athletics’ Student Athlete Discipline Policy, Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez announced Wednesday afternoon.
Smith is suspended from competition and practice pending the availability of further information relating to his case.
On a hot Thursday night recently on the UW Memorial Union Terrace, as moths swoop in the stage lights and fans jockey for the prime spots in front of the stage, the members of the band Cloud Cult get ready to perform.
Cellist Sarah Young is seated at the front of the stage tuning her instrument, while drummer Dan Greenwood is doing a few experimental fills on his drum set. And, at the back of the stage, Scott West and Connie Minowa are making their own preparations. They’re mixing paint.
Dear Editor: Every once in a while someone says something so crazy or so outrageous it garners attention. Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay, has made a career of this.
Last year, Lasee suggested the way to reduce school violence was to put guns in schools.
Lasee again made headlines last week with his budget proposal to eliminate state funding for the University of Wisconsin Law School. Why, you ask? Because he doesn’t like lawyers.
The district attorney’s office and the University of Wisconsin both plan to do more fact-finding before casting judgment on Lance Smith.
The sophomore running back was released from jail Tuesday after a court commissioner allowed him to sign a recognizance bond while police continue to investigate an incident this weekend in which Smith allegedly battered his girlfriend and took money from her.
Former University of Wisconsin football star Joe Thomas — now a Cleveland Browns rookie — is helping Wisconsin fight a deadly viral fish disease.
Thomas, an avid angler, is featured in television and radio announcements for the state Department of Natural Resources describing how boaters, anglers and other water users can help prevent the spread of viral hemorrhagic septicemia.
The Big Ten Network is expected to announce today that Thom Brennaman and Charles Davis will be the lead football broadcast team for the network, according to industry sources.
The University of Wisconsin football program very likely will be without one of its more experienced and valuable assistant coaches for the 2007 season.
Henry Mason, UW’s wide receivers coach since the 1995 season and in his first year as associate head coach, is expected to miss most and perhaps all of the season while recovering from a spinal cord injury, UW officials announced Tuesday.
A special Assembly-Senate committee that will try to negotiate differences over the next state budget will not meet this week, officials said Tuesday.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has won approval to go it alone when it comes to patenting, licensing and spinning off companies from campus inventions and discoveries.
Armed with a huge desire to increase its relatively small research effort, and strong support from UW System President Kevin Reilly, the school asked the UW System Board of Regents for permission to break away from a systemwide tech transfer program and manage its own intellectual property.
Persistence is one of the great keys to success in college basketball. Persistent probing on offense will create holes against the best defenses. Persistent defensive tenacity will wear down the best offenses.
Persistence is key in recruiting, too. Ian Markolf, a physical 7-foot, 260-pound senior-to-be center from San Antonio who told Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan Tuesday that he will play for the Badgers, is a testament to that.
A SUSPECTED poisoning that put an internationally known anti-apartheid leader in a Madison hospital on three separate occasions nearly two decades ago is back in the news in stunning fashion, as the South African government on Monday charged two apartheid-era officials with the 1989 attempted murder of Frank Chikane.
The UW-Madison’s focus on serious research is a major reason given by university officials who want more financial support from the state Legislature. But research on fantasy baseball and competitive fandom?
That particular study, by Assistant Professors Erica and Rich Halverson, did not escape the notice of perennial University of Wisconsin System critic Rep. Steve Nass….
“We are trying to figure out a whole new genre of online learning environments, how people learn in those environments and what they learn,” Rich Halverson said today in an interview.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison next week is hosting more than 1,100 attendees of an international turfgrass industry convention, symposium and trade show.
FOR A while there Monday, this was going to be a column about how a Madison native and UW-Madison graduate named Ben Relles is riding the new technology wave to fame and fortune, with the sequel to his hugely successful “I Got a Crush on Obama” music video hitting the Internet Monday morning and generating approximately 600 million hits in the first hour, with a book deal, HBO special and maybe even a chain of restaurants announced before sundown.
University of Wisconsin running back Lance Smith was arrested after a weekend dispute with his girlfriend over cab fare, Madison police said.
The 19-year-old Warren, Ohio, native was being held today in the Dane County Jail on tentative charges of false imprisonment, robbery and battery as he awaits formal charges.
Smith is subject to the UW’s student-athlete disciplinary policy, and faces possible suspension from the team. Athletic department spokesman Justin Doherty said Monday afternoon that the school is aware of the incident and is “in the process of gathering facts about what happened” before making any decision on Smith’s status.
University Of Wisconsin running back Lance Smith-Williams was arrested last weekend following an incident with his girlfriend and is tentatively charged with kidnapping / abduction, robbery and battery.
Quoted: Harry Brighouse, a British political philosopher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
GREEN BAY, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin-Green Bay student leader disappeared this weekend after a night out with friends.
Mahalia Xiong, 21, was reported missing after she didn’t return from a night of bowling and drinking at Ashwaubenon Bowling Alley.
Quoted: Hugh Iltis, professor emeritus of botany, who is among several UW-Madison experts, past and present, mentioned in this story.
We’ve all seen the bitingly clever bumper stickers that proclaim “My child and my money go to X University.” I’m a college professor, and when my students gripe about $50,000 annual costs and associated debt, I tell them they don’t want to know what I paid a quarter-century ago (60 times less in current dollars).
(Written for the Baltimore Sun; reprinted in 7/16 Capital Times)
I hope the Republicans who control the state Assembly were just playing silly political games last week when they voted to slash a host of state programs for the most vulnerable among us and then lopped off a crippling $120 million from the University of Wisconsin budget.
Because if they are actually serious about the draconian budget they passed, then we might just as well kiss our world-class university goodbye.
I’ve been reading with dismay about the state Legislature’s negotiations over the budget, particularly the appropriations for the University of Wisconsin, where I work.
The Assembly wants to reduce by $100 million the amount provided to the UW in the governor’s budget. This proposed reduction comes at a time when the university is already reeling from cuts it has suffered over the last two biennial budgets. I’m having a hard time understanding why the Assembly would want to do such a thing.
Last week’s ambitious schedule included a tailgate benefit in Dodgeville, the first session of his youth football camp in Lancaster, a golf outing at Erin Hills, a benefit at the Oak Creek Community Center, a Brewers game, and the second session of his youth camp in Milwaukee. In mixing business with pleasure, Detroit Lions running back Brian Calhoun was also making a commitment.
“There’s so much negative with a lot of (NFL) players,” said the former University of Wisconsin tailback and Oak Creek High School product. “I wanted to get the kids involved and try to give back to the community.”
Dear Editor: Jason McMahon’s recent column on the Big Ten Network was right on point: Commissioner Jim Delany needs to get real about charging Wisconsin fans millions of dollars to watch his new Big Ten Network — the second most expensive national cable channel in the country — which will air what sports columnists are now calling “fifth tier” sporting events such as nonconference tune-up football games and university swim meets.
In order to salvage the BTN into a profit-making venture, Delany says that he will try to migrate to his network many games from the ABC and ESPN networks, thus asking consumers to pay premium fees for many of the games they used to be able to see for free.
YPSILANTI, Mich. (AP) – The president of Eastern Michigan University has been fired, months after top university officials were accused of covering up the rape and slaying of a student by publicly ruling out foul play despite evidence to the contrary.
The president, John Fallon, confirmed that he was fired Sunday evening by a unanimous vote of the Board of Regents, The Ann Arbor News reported in its Monday editions.
Minorities in Wisconsin are lagging behind in both length and quality of life, as racial health disparities across all life stages reflect troubling differences, a new study by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute shows.
It’s the Capitol’s version of the World Series of Poker. But it’s playing with your money.
Eight legislative leaders – four Democrats and four Republicans – will face off this week to try to decide how state government should spend $56.3 billion to $66.1 billion by mid-2009.
Budget poker now moves to the next round of betting in Madison, and eventually we’ll get to see if anyone is bluffing.
Jerel McNeal and Wesley Matthews of Marquette University and Brian Butch of the University of Wisconsin were among 16 players cut from USA Basketball’s Pan Am Games team on Sunday.
It’s silly and pointless, even counterproductive, for the Big Ten Network to take out advertisements for the fledgling operation in which they encourage viewers to call or e-mail their local cable provider to put the new channel in the lineup.
The new network took out an advertisement in this newspaper last week to help spread the news that it will debut Aug. 30. Fine.
For Clark Johnson, the quest to see if life might exist elsewhere in the universe begins by looking at chemical isotopes – different forms of the same chemical element.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison geology professor hopes to find out if microscopic living organisms produce different ratios of these isotopes compared with isotopes produced in non-biological processes.
George Ceremuga spent the last week in June helping his father, Dr. George Ceremuga, Sr. and 10 medical students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison conduct health clinics in remote areas of Guatemala.
A dozen students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are completing eight-week internships here on and off Capitol Hill. Both Kohl and House Republican Tom Petri of Fond du Lac have Badgers on board through the program, now in its second year.
Quoted: Ken Goldstein, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
If nanoscience is the field of stuff so tiny it can never be seen, does it matter if the scientist can see at all? At the University of Wisconsin’s nanoscience center, Andrew Greenberg is in charge of education and outreachâ??and it occurred to him that blindness, often thought of as a handicap in the sciences, becomes irrelevant when the subject matter is invisible anyway.
With the sophistication of a political campaign, the Big Ten Network has launched an Internet and telephone effort designed to put pressure on cable providers to carry the fledgling channel.
The University of Wisconsin’s nine assistant football coaches received pay raises totaling more than $208,000 and averaging more than $23,000 per coach after the team’s successful 2006 season, according to UW records released Thursday.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Carlos E. Santiago said the Assembly proposal would “severely” impair the ability to expand the campus and transform UWM into an economic engine for the region.
“At a time when the state should be investing in our efforts to build a competitive advantage in engineering and the sciences, the Assembly budget would begin dismantling the infrastructure required to support our economic development initiative,” Santiago said.
The budget Assembly Republicans passed this week would all but eliminate taxpayer support for public broadcasting, a move that officials said Thursday would cripple the state’s Amber Alert program.
Wisconsin Public Radio is the backbone for the state’s child abduction warning system, said Malcolm Brett, broadcasting director of the University of Wisconsin Extension, which runs Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. Also mentions the defunding of the UW Law School.
A Web site established to aid in the search for UW-Whitewater student Kelly Nolan has become a condolence book of sorts for the young woman’s family after the 22-year-old’s body was found Monday north of the village of Oregon.
….”Rest in peace, Kelly. I didn’t know you, but because of what happened my group of friends has formed a buddy system that we are not going to break,” Cassandra Hein of Madison wrote on Tuesday night.
“We decided that every time we go out, one of us will be sober, and we will take turns and if someone gets angry that we won’t let them go with someone, then we will either take them straight home or call the police and have them escorted home.
“There will be no more thinking, ‘Oh, nothing will happen to me.'”
Very old women are seen throughout Japan in the various parks and roadways tending gardens, sweeping paths and cleaning benches and statuary in public places.
…it is with great interest that I learned of an ongoing study by University of Wisconsin aging expert Carol Ryff. Ryff and a team of experts from the U.S. and Japan are examining the consequences of cultural differences on people’s emotional and physical health as they get older. The study is called Midlife in Japan, or MIDJA.
This current study builds on Ryff’s previous investigation of midlife and aging in the United States (MIDUS) that looks at psychological and social factors such as relationships with others, purpose in life and self-acceptance and how they are linked to biological markers for stress, immune function and cardiovascular risk.
