Dear Editor: It seems pathetic that it will take a lawsuit from the Sierra Club for the University of Wisconsin to take action on an ancient power plant that has been polluting our city for years.
The Sierra Club’s filing suit comes after the community has spoken out about our desire for change for years. After nonresponsiveness, I am glad to see someone is taking action to protect our environment and community, and keep the good name of our university.
Mary Troestler is excited and proud to be working with stem cells at Madison Area Technical College.
….MATC’s 20-year-old biotechnology program recently received human embryonic stem cells from WiCell through an agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation so students can learn lab techniques relating to the culture of stem cells.
A construction worker died today from injuries he sustained in an accident Wednesday at a University of Wisconsin building, according to UW police.
Officers responded Wednesday around 1:35 p.m. to Hiram Smith Hall, 1555 Observatory Drive, where an employee of Robinson Brothers Environmental Inc. had fallen from a 10-foot ladder while working on asbestos removal in the building.
A new corporate emphasis on a “triple bottom line” is leading to new and varied jobs for University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates, a trend that is expected to grow rapidly.
“The traditional bottom line is that a company has to perform well financially, but now that company has to have a good environmental performance and a good social responsibility record as well,” said Dan Anderson, a professor in the UW School of Business who also teaches at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Some UW-Madison law students are questioning a decision by administrators to end the Legal Defense Program, in which students gain experience working as public defenders on criminal cases under the supervision of an attorney.
“The program offers so much of a diverse experience. I was able to handle every aspect of the criminal litigation process from the initial appearance in court all the way through sentencing,” said Nicole Weir, who is graduating this month. “No other program offers that independence.”
Dear Editor:
….I have seen firsthand how for-profit business infiltrates academic medicine, to the point where many faculty at the medical school receive tens of thousands of dollars in “consulting” fees from medical industry, for a few hours of time each year. Our new medical school even has corporate names and logos at the entrances to our lecture halls.
….It is time that the UW, with a rich history of integrity and commitment to the public good, follows other universities and bans such compromising industrial ties. Wisconsin deserves more, and we need to lead by setting a more socially responsible example.
Opinions vary on whether it’s good that college students today are much more connected to their parents.
But questions of independence and maturity aside, the trend toward what some call “helicopter parents” for their hovering tendency has been demonstrated by national studies. In fact, a survey by College Parents of America this year showed that 30 percent of college students communicate with their parents once a day and 73 percent do so two or three times per week, by phone or e-mail.
So University of Wisconsin-Madison officials decided to get into the act — with improved communication efforts and support services for parents.
If you were a news junkie in Chicago the past several decades, you knew the name Les Brownlee. He was, after all, the first black person to break into the otherwise all-white Chicago newspaper market and then became the city’s first African-American television reporter on WLS-TV.
He was a tough journalist, exposing drug dealers in poor parts of town and ferreting out crooked cops in the Chicago precincts.
….Interestingly, his journalism career really started at the University of Wisconsin, right here in Madison.
The UW-Madison School of Business has been ranked 13th in the U.S. and 26th in the world in the Financial Times’ annual list of executive education providers, up from 14th in the U.S. and 28th in the world last year.
Dear Editor: In his May 12 letter to the editor, Dr. James W. Tracy asserts that Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka has not worked with “live, infectious” 1918 Spanish flu virus on the Madison campus.
….In the spirit of transparency, the university should make available on its Web site all research protocols involving deadly airborne agents and explain the methods being used to contain them and safeguard the public’s health.
The University of Wisconsin System has responded appropriately to one of the ugliest scandals to break out in higher education: the revelation that private lenders have cultivated cozy relationships with campus financial aid officials in order to take advantage of students.
Quarterback John Stocco’s quest to land a job in the National Football League continues.
Stocco, a three-year starter who set several passing records at the University of Wisconsin, will not be invited to the New York Giants’ training camp.
Pressed by lawmakers for details on the proposed Wisconsin Covenant, Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration has slapped a price tag on it: $139 million over six years. The estimate didn’t quiet critics, who want more details about the workings of a program in which an eighth-grader pledges to maintain at least a B average in high school and meet other benchmarks in exchange for a guarantee of a seat in a Wisconsin college and, if eligible, a financial aid package.
THE ANSWER to the question of what becomes a legend most depends on the legend.
In the case of the late UW history professor Harvey Goldberg — whose passionate lectures formed the basis of his legend — there could be nothing better than hearing him in the classroom.
The charismatic Goldberg died 20 years ago, but on Friday, “Harvey Goldberg: The Bootleg Lectures, Madison, Wis., 1974-76,” a remastered CD compilation of more than 20 Goldberg lectures, will be released and launched with an event at the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative from 7-9 p.m.
Next time the Madison Symphony Orchestra wants to find an outstanding guest artist, it needn’t look any further than its own back yard. Or, perhaps, Middleton.
Pianist Christopher Taylor, associate professor of piano performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Middleton resident, figuratively took the roof off Overture Hall on Friday with an outstanding performance of George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F,” a performance that was one of the brightest lights of MSO’s entire season.
The end of the runway stretching the length of the Great Hall in the Memorial Union will be just the beginning of many journeys for students in the University of Wisconsin’s textile and apparel design program in the School of Human Ecology.
And becoming true professionals, they’ll show no sign of all the sleepless nights of preparation that lead up to the annual Textile and Apparel Student Association (TASA) Spring Fashion Show on Sunday.
Dear Editor: On April 3 Dr. Amna Buttar, associate professor at the UW School of Medicine, was physically and sexually assaulted in Pakistan by the elite police of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. She was participating in a peaceful demonstration protesting the suspension and house arrest of Pakistan Chief Justice Chaudhry Iftikhar.
….We cannot sit by and let such a despicable action go unchallenged.
….there is one legal reform that people on all sides of the gun debate should be able to agree upon.
In the aftermath of the horrific shooting spree at Virginia Tech University, which left 32 innocent victims and a deeply troubled gun owner dead, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is considering implementation of an executive order that would provide gun sellers with more information about the mental health of gun buyers. And, significantly, the Democratic governor is getting encouragement from legislators who champion the right to bear arms.
University of Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema literally could reach out and touch someone — a potential football recruit — during a recent visit to a high school practice field in Texas. But he was limited to window shopping.
“I’m standing 10 feet away from a prospect, and I can’t talk to him,” Bielema relayed on his cell phone. “That’s why the May evaluation period is so challenging, because we can’t speak to the kids.”
Nonetheless, this is a critical recruiting window for coaches like Bielema, who will spend all but a handful of days on the road this month.
Wisconsinites have an opportunity to shape the future of agriculture policies affecting the lives of rural and urban dwellers alike.
This message opened the Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin Conference this morning at Monona Terrace. Speakers urged farmers, policy makers and agriculture advocates to use research and recommendations presented at the event to shape a public private partnership to address challenges.
“If you’re looking for slick, that ain’t us, folks,” said Steve Stevenson of the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This is an effort to bring people to the table to look at what it will be like five, 10, 15 years down the road.”
MySpace, the popular social networking Web site, announced Thursday that it will be holding a series of town hall meetings with presidential candidates on college campuses across the country from September to December, right before the first 2008 primaries.
Each presidential candidate will hold an hourlong session, streamed live online, before 100 to 200 people, answering their questions as well as unfiltered questions sent online by MySpace users via instant messaging. The schedule and participating colleges have yet to be determined.
A Madison stem cell start-up company will get a $1 million boost from the state, Gov. Jim Doyle announced this morning.
Top University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Gabriela Cezar co-founded Stemina Biomarker Discovery Inc. in November with Beth Donley, the former executive director of WiCell, the stem cell subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
With the aid of two WARF stem cell patents, the company is developing ways to help drug manufacturers screen drugs for toxicity. The aim is to save millions of dollars in drug development costs by developing a library of biomarkers that discover toxins in the early stages of pharmaceutical development.
Stemina Biomarker Discovery Inc. will receive $1 million in loans and grants from the state, Gov. Jim Doyle will announce today.
The Madison company was founded in November by a former top executive at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s patenting arm and a high-profile UW scientist. It is the third company started in the state that uses embryonic stem cells.
They came to Penn State University for the 2007 Big Ten Conference outdoor track and field meet expecting to dominate and make history.
The University of Wisconsin men, led by perhaps the most successful senior class in program history, did not disappoint Sunday afternoon.
State officials are trying to come up with a universal policy on criminal background checks for current and future workers – and the emotional issue is giving union leaders and some state workers nightmares.
Quoted: Stanley A. Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of wildlife ecology and conservation biology.
When it comes to marketing Wisconsin, what should the state play up? Its great outdoors? The emerging research economy? Its agricultural and manufacturing history?
Those are questions some state leaders want to begin to answer as a way to move Wisconsin past its current image of the cheesehead, beer and brats state that was home to “Laverne & Shirley” and “That ’70s Show.” They want to create a state brand to be an umbrella marketing tool for selling opportunities for economic development, tourism, educational and other things that contribute to quality of life in Wisconsin.
University of Wisconsin System officials said Thursday that they were crafting guidelines that would eliminate ties between financial aid offices and private lenders of student loans that pose conflicts of interest.
Google me Ishmael.
Someone somewhere in the world is searching for the opening lines of Melville’s “Moby Dick,” or maybe a phrase from Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” an anecdote from a Bart Starr biography, a speech by Churchill or by the evil genius in a James Bond novel. Our searcher is in a hurry, and not inclined to rise from the computer.
To avoid such an inconvenience, there is the promise (or the hype, depending on your point of view) of Google Book Search, the Internet search giant’s quest to digitize all of the world’s books and make them available online in snippets, pages, chapters, even entire works.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/conditions/05/09/vaccine.gardasil.reut/index.html
Quoted: Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate who said he posted threatening messages on Facebook.com as a joke has apologized to the campus community and members of UWM’s student government who were the target of the hoax.
UW coach Coach Ed Nuttycombe spins his cautionary tale of doom-and-gloom before every Big Ten Conference track and field championship, indoor or outdoor, rain or shine.
“He does that all the time,” Omole, a former standout at Whitefish Bay Dominican High School, said with a knowing smile. “Were into his game. Hell go: Its going to be a dogfight and we have to bring our A game.
“Then we win by 60 points and we just look at him. Now we just run. We dont really listen to him anymore.”
Citizen involvement has been an underpinning of the two-year Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin Project. People from around the state had a hand in fashioning the list of recommendations released last week and featured on the front page of The Capital Times.
The recommendations — essentially action steps offered to policymakers, community leaders and interested citizens — will be discussed at the statewide Future of Farming and Rural Life conference May 14-15 at Monona Terrace. Information on registration is available on the project Web site. A report this summer will include the final recommendations.
TomoTherapy Inc. made a big splash today in its debut as a public company.
Even after adding shares and pricing above the previously set range of its initial public offering of stock, the Madison-based maker of cancer treatment systems (and UW-Madison spin-off) opened up about 25 percent as it launched on Nasdaq under the symbol “TTPY.”
A young attorney who has served as Madison’s bar czar for the past two years will join an attorney who moonlights with a salsa band, a civil servant who has served three mayors and a former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffer as Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s assistants.
Cieslewicz lauded Joel Plant as one of the key players in the development of last year’s successful Halloween celebration and predicts Plant “will bring that consensus-building approach to a wide range of issues in our office.”
The 29-year-old Plant has been the city’s alcohol policy coordinator since 2005.
The state of Wisconsin and its flagship university — UW-Madison — ought to be in the forefront in meeting at least the spirit of the nation’s Clean Air Act.
….right here in Madison, the UW and the state’s Department of Administration jointly operate one of the oldest and worst polluting plants — the more than 50-year-old coal-fired Charter Street plant just south of campus.
Take his word. There’s no chance that University of Wisconsin men’s track coach Ed Nuttycombe would ever take winning for granted. Especially winning Big Ten championships.
That won’t happen, he insisted, despite his lengthy resume, which includes 22 Big Ten titles, one shy of the conference’s all-time record held by legendary Indiana swimming coach Doc Counsilman. None of this has become “old hat” or mundane, according to Nuttycombe, even though the Badgers have won seven consecutive Big Ten indoor championships and are the favorite to win their fourth straight outdoor crown this weekend at Penn State.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee administration pushed Monday for a policy that would allow all campuses in the UW System to punish students for off-campus misconduct, saying the “escalating negative behavior” of a small number of students had caused the university to become “greatly concerned about the health and safety of its student body and neighboring community.”
Quoted: Timothy Kamp, a stem cell researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sensuality and spirituality tend to operate at odds, at least on a theoretical plain, with one transcending the other, or at least both occupying their separate realms of reason. It’s often the arts that marry the two, and the success of that union depends on the skills of both the artist and his or her interpreters.
The considerable talents of the UW Choral Union, supported by the UW Symphony Orchestra, helped uncover the sensual nuances of Francis Poulenc’s music Saturday at Mills Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus.
Here’s the latest buzz. Madison art museums are infested with insects. It started at the Chazen Museum of Art and has spread to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
But these are cultivated bugs who don’t swarm. They stay synchronized — in artful rigor mortis.
A child’s first word is a special moment, their eyes widening in curiosity, one chubby finger pointing to an object in sudden recognition as “juice” or “train.” Forever written in baby books and memories, that first word is a triumph, their induction into the speaking world.
But it is what precedes that moment, the processes leading to language comprehension, that most interests the Waisman Center Infant Learning Lab.
“Our research provides us with a way to actually try to understand and study something that appears almost magical,” said Professor Jenny Saffran, who runs the Infant Learning Lab.
This week Madison will have the opportunity to see living examples of the University of Wisconsin’s best tradition. In a gathering at the Memorial Union, we at the Wisconsin Alumni Association will be handing out the university’s Distinguished Alumni Awards.
But the awards aren’t the tradition I’m talking about — they’re just a bit of recognition, a highlight on UW-Madison’s true source of greatness. The university’s strength flows from its students, graduates, faculty, and staff. They’re the heart of the UW’s best tradition, which is encapsulated in the Wisconsin Idea, the principle that the university’s true purpose is to spread the influence of education and research to serve the entire state and indeed the world.
True compassion breeds confidence and harmony, the Dalai Lama told a sellout crowd of 12,000 at the Kohl Center.
At the hushed sports arena Friday afternoon, in a 90-minute talk punctuated with laughter, the exiled political and temporal leader of the Tibetan people invited his audience to cultivate true compassion and, by nurturing internal peace, sow the seeds of peace in the world.
The Nobel Laureate, who has made several trips to Madison and the University of Wisconsin because of their proximity to the Deer Park Buddhist Center in the town of Dunn with which he is closely tied, was graciously received by an audience who traveled from nearby dormitories and across the country to hear him.
The Sundance Kid welcomed everyone to Madison’s newest theater Sunday night. Only he did it by proxy, through Paul Richardson, president and CEO of Sundance Cinemas.
….About 600 people dressed in black and white, the evening’s theme, got a sneak preview of the six-screen theater and restaurant complex Sunday night in a sold-out fundraiser for the Chazen Museum of Art, complete with tours, wine, hors d’oeuvres and music from the UW Jazz Trio.
The Dalai Lama, known worldwide as an advocate for peace, told some 12,000 people in the Kohl Center on Friday that compassion as “a method of inner disarmament” is the key to happiness and tranquility in the 21st century.
A dozen states including Wisconsin are competing intensely to play host to a government lab full of killer germs like anthrax, avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease – a prospect some of their residents want to avoid like the plague.
Quoted: Bob Drechsel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor and a member of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council board of directors
On Thursday, Wisconsins 75,000 eighth-graders will get their first opportunity to participate in the Wisconsin Covenant, a program that Gov. Jim Doyle hopes will lead to dramatic progress in college participation in the state.
The California-based group challenging the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s stem cell patents wants WARF managing director Carl Gulbrandsen to step down from a U.S. Patent Public Advisory Committee until the case is settled.
Gulbrandsen was appointed in 2005 as one of 12 members of the committee, which advises the patent office on matters of administration, policy and budget. Another 12-member panel advises the government on trademark issues.
In a case closely watched in higher education, the University of Wisconsin-Madison agreed Thursday to award more than $250,000 in student fees next year to a Catholic group to settle its religious discrimination lawsuit.
Both the university and the UW Roman Catholic Foundation praised the agreement, which settles a federal lawsuit filed after the university refused to recognize the group despite a campus presence dating to the 1880s.
A pioneering UW researcher whose work has led to insights into a host of diseases, and a UW geneticist who has authored two books on animal evolution, have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Laura Kiessling, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Sean Carroll, professor of molecular biology and genetics, are among 72 new inductees to the prestigious academy.
Dalai Lama good, mad cow disease bad.
In a nutshell, that’s the way Dunn Town Chairman Ed Minihan described his day on Thursday, welcoming the Tibetan spiritual and political leader to the Deer Park Buddhist Center before following the Dane County Board’s vote against locating a $400 million national biological and agricultural defense facility at the University of Wisconsin’s Kegonsa Research Facility.
The aging Charter Street Power Plant in the heart of the UW-Madison campus has become a lightning rod for environmentalists looking to reduce the state’s reliance on coal-burning and its growing global warming footprint.
Wisconsin’s greenhouse gas emissions grew at a faster rate than the national average during the 1990s, jumping 26 percent compared to 20 percent nationally. About 70 percent of the state’s electricity is generated by coal burning, with at least three new coal-fired power plants in the works here.
To address the pollution issue, the Sierra Club on Thursday filed a lawsuit accusing the university and state of violating the Federal Clean Air Act.
Almost 60 years after graduating from Marquette University, a couple who made their fortune moving cargo up and down the Mississippi River will donate $51 million to the university, a gift that will launch construction of a new law school building.
The donors are Raymond and Kathryn Eckstein, who live now in Boca Raton, Fla., but spend several months a year in Cassville, the small town in Grant County on the Mississippi River where he grew up and worked for many years.
Friday should be memorable artistically for many reasons.
From 5 to 9 p.m. it is Madison’s Gallery Night, which takes place every fall and spring, and this time it is especially noteworthy: A record-setting 51 venues have signed on to the event that is organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
How many people show up for the annual Mifflin Street block party Saturday is anybody’s guess. A lot of it depends on the weather, which right now calls for coolish conditions.
….”It could be a thousand people, it could be 40,000. We have no feel for it at all,” said Madison Police Sgt. Dave McCaw, adding that another factor is the final exam schedule of colleges and universities in surrounding states.
The police are introducing mounted horse patrol to Mifflin Street for the first time in the event’s 38-year history. “They won’t be as much crowd control as they will be crowd management,” McCaw said.
The University of Wisconsin’s is set to open the 2007 Big Ten Conference football season under the lights. UW’s league opener on Sept. 22 against Iowa has been scheduled for 7 p.m., UW officials announced Tuesday.
Quoted: Neil Binkley, a co-director of the University of Wisconsin Osteoporosis Clinical Center in Madison.
Mentions that, at the University of Wisconsin, the lowest APR score was 931 for the men’s basketball team. The football team score was 935. Men’s cross country, men’s tennis, women’s ice hockey, women’s swimming, women’s tennis and women’s volleyball were honored for high APR scores. An APR score of 925 translates to an NCAA graduation success rate of approximately 60%.
