John Kunz, the entertainment promoter for Madison’s Halloween Party on Oct. 28, today announced this musical lineup of local talent: I Voted For Kodos, the CREST, Plunket, the Mighty Short Bus, DJ Jeremy Thomas, Paper Tiger and Depth Beyond Depth.
The performances are scheduled on two stages between 7:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.
Dear Editor: Aaron Nathans’ article on the funding of University of Wisconsin student union construction was really quite heart-rending, with its dramatic story of disabled inaccessibility.
But does it really cost almost $200 million to solve the accessibility issues? No, because the bulk of the money being sought is for tearing down a fairly new Union South, which does not have these problems.
Tuition rates and access to University of Wisconsin System institutions have emerged as a major topic for debate among candidates. While it is good that UW issues are getting candidates’ attention, it is important for voters to have a deeper knowledge of what the facts are concerning some of the claims being made about the university.
For example, the candidates have been sparring over whether UW campuses give special consideration to nonresidents, both in cutting nonresident tuition and in granting special access. There is an implication that students from outside Wisconsin are favored at the expense of students close to home. Another contention is that students from outside Wisconsin are let in to UW institutions with lower academic credentials over Wisconsin students.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The University of Wisconsin has put its marching band on probation after receiving reports of severe misconduct during the band’s trip last month to the University of Michigan football game.
Here is a schedule of events for “Paris in Performance,” an interdisciplinary exploration of music, dance, poetry, lectures, film and art re-creating French political and artistic visions from 1870 to 1920.
All events except the UW opera performance are free and do not require tickets. Visit the UW School of Music Web site� for details.
University of Wisconsin pianist Catherine Kautsky has visited Paris many times since she first went there at 13. But there is one time she remembers most fondly and vividly.
She had a sabbatical in 1994-95, and she and her philosophy professor husband, and their two children, had decided to go to Paris because they thought that’s where they would live the good life.
….Now, with the support of the UW Arts Institute, she has a new project to bring the wonders of French music and culture, especially art about childhood and absurdist art, to a broad Madison public.
The question is: Has the University of Wisconsin’s marching band done something so egregious that it deserves to be put on strict probation or has the ghost of Puritan Cotton Mather reappeared on the UW campus in the form of Chancellor John Wiley?
When one door closes, another one opens. Or, in the case of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association this season, when 17 doors close, many others fly wide open, inviting opportunistic players to make their mark on the league.
The eye-catching statistic around the WCHA at the dawn of this season isn’t about who’s back; it’s about who’s not. The final count of players with eligibility remaining who left league teams to sign a pro contract was 17, a WCHA record.
Wisconsin received $387.7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health in 2005, down almost 1 percent from the $391.9 million the state received in 2004.
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has ordered a former dean to pay the school back $113,000 for credit card expenses he has failed to justify, according to documents released Tuesday.
But Howard Ross, former dean of the College of Letters and Science, said he had discovered receipts that would prove the expenses were legitimate. He said he intended to pay back only the $269 for a subscription to an Internet dating service that he says he charged to his card by mistake.
The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less.
Stem cell pioneer James Thomson and two other University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have started a company that aims to grow platelets and red blood cells from embryonic stem cells.
The company, Stem Cell Products Inc., has the chance to have the first therapeutic product based on human embryonic stem cells to make it to the marketplace, said Bob Palay, managing member of Tactics II Ventures LP, a Wisconsin venture capital firm that invested in and helped start the company.
In the first few days after the 2004 presidential election, Steve Freeman was more perplexed than anything.
How could it be, the University of Pennsylvania professor wondered, that exit polls showing John Kerry would win most of the critical battleground states were wrong and that George W. Bush wound up winning the popular vote by almost 3.5 million?
(UW-Madison political science professors Ken Mayer and Charles Franklin, described as critics of Freeman’s research, are quoted.)
A 20-year-old man was injured Monday when he turned the moped he was driving into an oncoming car.
The crash happened shortly before 10 a.m. in the 200 block of North Park Street. Police said the moped driver was heading south when he attempted a left turn, failing to yield to an oncoming car. The moped slammed into the car, throwing the moped driver onto the car’s windshield.
Can you imagine going to a University of Wisconsin football game at Camp Randall Stadium and not hearing the marching band play “On Wisconsin”?
It could happen if band members don’t shape up, and band director Mike Leckrone may be on the hot seat as well.
UW Chancellor John Wiley apparently read the riot act to the band at a meeting on Oct. 5 after reports of shenanigans by band members when they took a road trip to play at the football game between the Badgers and the University of Michigan Wolverines at the Big House, aka Michigan Stadium, in Ann Arbor on Sept. 23.
Gov. Jim Doyle today gave $1 million in state funding to a Madison-based firm headed by UW-Madison stem cell researcher James Thomson.
Doyle announced the combination of state grants and loans to Stem Cell Products, Inc., the second start-up firm headed by Thomson, at a news conference this morning.
The firm is developing the use of embryonic stem cells in producing components of human blood cells, such as platelets that assist in blood clotting.
In 1906, football was nearly eliminated as a sport at the University of Wisconsin.
Football was, at the time, legalized mayhem. In 1904, 21 players were killed and 200 injured. There were no eligibility rules, players were hired to play, and they could switch teams from week to week. That year a national football reform movement was launched.
We are living through an exciting period in women’s history, says Jan Gietzel, executive director of A Fund for Women, a nonprofit that is part of the Madison Community Foundation.
“The lives of women today are quite different from the experiences of their mothers and grandmothers,” Gietzel says, “and as the role of women in society has changed, women around the world, including Dane County, are accomplishing many ‘firsts’ in their careers and in their communities.”
Local trailblazers (including the entire Badger women’s hockey team and former UW System president Katharine Lyall) will be honored at the 2006 annual event and fundraiser of A Fund for Women, which will be Oct. 17 at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.
Dear Editor: In a recent article Professor Colleen Capper from UW’s department of educational leadership and policy analysis eloquently describes the harmful effects children and adolescents suffer from the terms “fag,” “faggot,” “that’s gay,” and “that’s so gay.” She lauds the Madison Metropolitan School District’s anti-bullying program supported by the Gay-Straight Alliance for Safe Schools.
As a school counselor I lament the fact that by giving such detailed attention exclusively to “gay language” harassment, Professor Capper implies that this harassment is more harmful than other types.
WASHINGTON – Hundreds of miles from the fierce gubernatorial debate over stem cells, leading scientists who work in public policy vented their frustration Monday with a federal government they believe fundamentally misunderstands the issue of embryonic stem cell research.
“I always thought members of Congress should pass a scientific literacy test before they take office,” said Donna Shalala, former UW-Madison chancellor and current president of the University of Miami at Florida.
When John Lemke puts on a costume to become a headless ventriloquist this month, he’s not just celebrating Halloween. The Wisconsin Historical Museum’s publicist is competing for your attention, and your time.
….Eight Madison tourist sites this month are beginning a collaboration, dubbed M8, to increase their visibility by presenting themselves as one. Lemke heads the charge; other participants are the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison Children’s Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Chazen Museum of Art, UW Geology Museum, Monona Terrace and Olbrich Botanical Gardens.
The University of Wisconsin has sold out its tickets for home games for the 2006-’07 men’s basketball season.
In a move that further damaged its rocky relationship with the state Legislature, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents passed a resolution Friday opposing the proposed constitutional amendment on gay marriage, saying it was the right move no matter what the political consequences were.
This season Booker Stanley would have been a fifth-year senior on the UW football team and likely would have been in coach Bret Bielema’s plans. But the world of big-time college football, where Badgers fans flock to Camp Randall Stadium on Saturdays in the fall, doesn’t exist any longer for Stanley.
Today, Stanley, 23, sits in a Dane County Jail cell, convicted of three felonies, including the sexual assault of a former girlfriend. The only football he sees is on a jailhouse television.
Like most college football coaches, Bret Bielema doesn’t worry about his team’s poll position.
“That’s not in my hands,” Bielema said after UW’s 41-9, Big Ten Conference victory over Northwestern. “I don’t vote so I really don’t have any say in that.”
A broad-based initiative to spur commercialization in Toronto, whether Wisconsin can compete with alternative fuels and China’s market for biotechnology products are just three of the topics to be covered this week at a conference in Waukesha.
Former Wisconsin Public Service Commission chairman Ave Bie and representatives from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin Agri-Service Association and BEST Energies Inc. will discuss whether Wisconsin has the tools to lead in the new economy being created from transforming substances like corn and soybeans into fuel.
In an intriguing finding, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have unveiled a critical protein that prevents influenza viruses from entering cells, a mechanism that could spark production of anti-viral medications to fight multiple flu strains, including the deadly strain of bird flu that’s circulating globally.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s patenting and licensing arm is creating a new position to help create more start-up companies from the school’s technological innovations.
Quoted: Dietram Scheufele, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Outlining some of the remaining challenges for stem cell researchers, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor James Thomson took the opportunity to inject some realism into the stem cell expectations game before UW-educated executives at a CEO Summit convened by John Morgridge, chairman and former CEO of Cisco Systems.
Brian Elliott wasn’t always the Brian Elliott.
A year ago the University of Wisconsin goaltender was a relatively unproven junior about to begin his first season as the No. 1 man. We know now that he was more than capable, but back then, Badgers coach Mike Eaves didn’t know if Elliott could play back-to-back nights.
He made the jump from ordinary to extraordinary and the Badgers won a national title as a result.
Will anyone make that kind of leap this year?
Can religious student organizations in the University of Wisconsin System limit their leadership to students of a particular faith? Can a Christian organization prohibit homosexuals from serving among its leaders?
Those questions crashed down on a federal court in Wisconsin Monday, when the Alliance Defense Fund, a national organization that promotes religious freedom, filed a lawsuit on behalf of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents should consider adopting a policy in which the contracts of all athletic directors and coaches include a clause that addresses the need to monitor athletes academic performance, a new UW audit concludes.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will re-examine three key patents on embryonic stem cells held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
After the war (WWII) he accepted a research and teaching position at the University of Wisconsin and moved to Madison. In 1952 he became a full professor of physics. While at the University he served terms as Department Chair and Associate Dean of Letters and Science. Hugh’s true passion was scientific research and he was a mentor to forty-nine PhD level graduate students.
After the 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall in which a physics graduate student was killed, and years of valuable research destroyed Professor Richards’ leadership has been credited with preserving the personnel, focus and morale of the physics department.
THIS IS how far Silas Bernardoni can heave a pumpkin. Imagine him standing on the 50-yard line at Camp Randall. From there, Bernardoni could send the pumpkin clear out of the stadium.
Not by himself, of course. Bernardoni, a senior in engineering at UW-Madison, utilizes a trebuchet – a large catapult-like device that was once employed by invading armies to hurl stones at castle walls.
Mostly obsolete since the 1300s, the trebuchet has of late made something of a comeback, as engineering enthusiasts and others have staged competitions and teachers have learned that the visually stunning trebuchet tosses can get students excited about science.
….Bernardoni has since gained a supporter in UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley and thinks a world record pumpkin launch may be in reach.
A liner on a 1.5 million-gallon swine manure storage pit at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Arlington Agricultural Research Station leaked during the summer, requiring a cleanup of soil beneath the liner and an expensive replacement.
The State Building Commission will consider the $275,000 cost for general fund-supported borrowing on Wednesday morning at the State Capitol, because the low bid came in above the $150,000 limit that can be acted on without commission approval, university officials said.
There are still plenty of tickets remaining for Madison’s annual Halloween party. But an official was pleased after the first day of sales.
On Monday, the city sold 321 ticketsÃ? out of 80,000 printed for the city’s first paid-admission Halloween party on State Street.
“For the first day, I think it’s really quite good,” said Laura Whitmore, city parks community relations coordinator. Most of the tickets were sold at the ticket booth at Library Mall, but a small number were sold at the Parks Office in the Municipal Building at 215 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
A state-run program allowing employees to donate part of their paychecks to charity may not exclude religious charities on grounds that the groups use religion as a basis for employment or membership on their governing boards, a federal judge has ruled.
The Association of Faith-Based Organizations, a coalition of faith-based groups based in Springfield, Va., filed the lawsuit in the spring. It challenged an annual program, called State Employees Combined Campaign, that allows state workers to direct payroll deductions to charities that are deemed eligible by a state committee.
A Christian organization at the University of Wisconsin-Superior has filed suit against the university, claiming it wrongly de-recognized its campus chapter.
The university notified the campus chapter of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship that it could not be recognized for the current school year because it required its leaders to take a religious vow. The UW System has stated that under a United States Supreme Court decision, it cannot allow student organizations to discriminate.
The discovery of student athlete Luke Homan’s body Monday in the Mississippi River left a legion of his family, friends, coaches and even former competitors in disbelief that he had met the same mysterious fate as seven other young males in recent years.
University of Wisconsin-Madison football players Joe Thomas, Ben Strickland and Steve Johnson, all former Brookfield Central students, helped in the search, along with Brookfield Central High School Athletic Director Scott Nelsen. Former high school athletes who competed against Central also turned up for the search.
….if a University of Wisconsin football player wrenches the leg of an opponent but, luckily, the foe isn’t seriously injured, is such an action still a dirty play?
Hmmm.
In the eyes of first-year UW head coach Bret Bielema, the answer to the second question, apparently, is no.
Madison Area Technical College and the UW-Madison announced a $20,000 award by the Focus on Energy program to construct a solar collector testing facility at MATC – just the second of its kind in the U.S.
The lab will join the University of Central Florida’s Solar Energy Center as the only facilities in the country authorized to certify solar panels, which qualifies the homeowners who install them for tax credits and rebates. There is a certification backlog in the U.S.
The Grand Reading Room was dedicated as the Habush Habush & Rottier Reading Room in a ceremony at the University of Wisconsin Law School Library.
….The renaming recognizes a major endowment and a contribution for renovations throughout the Law School, including a student commons area, a locker room and restrooms.
A lightning rod in the tempest surrounding 9/11 conspiracy theories, University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer Kevin Barrett Sunday divided the public into “sheeple,” those who believe the official version of events, and TMMs, those who subscribe to the “truth movement.”
Barrett said such disparate worldviews often lead to “mutual accusations of insanity.”
He called on scientists like his co-presenter and fellow Scholars for 9/11 Truth member James Fetzer, a professor emeritus from the University of Minnesota, to provide empirical evidence to fuel the 9/11 debate.
LA CROSSE (AP) – The body of a 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student was found in the Mississippi River this morning, police said.
Lucas G. Homan was last seen around 2:30 a.m. Saturday after he celebrated Oktoberfest downtown, police Capt. Robert Abraham said.
The La Crosse Police Department and Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigations are continuing their investigation of his death, a statement from La Crosse police said.
Issues of supply, security and ecology demand the production of alternative sources of fuel, said the British ambassador to the U.S. in an address at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sir David Manning was in town to hear from a panel of UW-Madison scientists at a private luncheon Friday before giving a public address on “energy security and climate security.”
“If we can find alternative sources of energy that are clean sources of energy, we reduce our dependence on unstable parts of the world,” Manning said. If companies do this, “they will be in the forefront of the new energy technology. They will make a lot of money for it.”
Joseph Kauffman, the dean of student affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the turbulent late 1960s and an architect of the Peace Corps, died on Friday, the university reported.
Kauffman went on to direct the university’s doctoral program in university administration. He was an emeritus professor of educational leadership and a UW System executive.
The cause of death was cancer, the university said in a written statement. He was 84.
With the University of Wisconsin nearing the midway point of its regular-season schedule, Bret Bielema has formulated some strong opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of his football team.
Unranked UW (4-1, 1-1 Big Ten Conference) boasts a fast, versatile defense that should keep the Badgers in every game left on the schedule. UW showed against Michigan it has the stamina to stay with a team determined to run the ball and Saturday against Indiana displayed the ability to blanket the passing lanes with seven or eight nimble defenders.
It’s not like Luke Homan to just disappear.
He always checked in with his parents, or else his roommates knew his whereabouts. But when the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse athlete didn’t show for a golf outing Saturday morning, friends knew something was wrong, and reported him missing.
If you think of universities as the new coal mines, then the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a mother lode – a vital fuel for economic growth.
But for all its excellence, UW-Madison needs to do a better job of fostering new companies.
Quoted: Karen Holden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies the issue.
Quoted: Hans Sollinger, head of the University of Wisconsin-Madison organ transplant program.
This Saturday, which happens to be UW Arts Night Out, a campus-wide celebration of the visual and performing arts, features one of the concerts on my “must hear” list for this season.
Saturday night at 8 in Mills Hall, the UW’s Pro Arte String Quartet will perform a surefire program of great masterworks, all meant to celebrate anniversaries.
High school seniors: Have you thought about using college as more than a place to learn, but also as an opportunity to contribute to society?
If you are creating a list of colleges to which you might apply, I hope you will look for colleges that encourage community service or volunteerism. If you want to make a difference in the lives of others, consider a college that challenges students to take an active role in organizations that exist to facilitate social and political change.
USA Hockey keeps calling – and Mark Johnson keeps answering.
The UW women’s hockey coach today was named to lead the U.S. select team that will compete in the prestigious Four Nations Cup, held Nov. 7-11 in Kitchener, Ontario. Recently, he was appointed head coach of the 2007 U.S. women’s national team.
How many University of Wisconsin women’s hockey players can you name? If you were walking down the street side-by-side with the best player in the country, would you even know it?
The defending national champions begin their road to repeat Friday and they hope that their continuing success brings more optimistic answers to those questions and draws bigger crowds to the Kohl Center this season.
Police Chief Noble Wray has a vision for the future of downtown, and it includes cops on horses.
Wray, battling the perception that the downtown area has become unsafe, told Rotary Club members Wednesday that he hopes to permanently add foot, bike and horse patrols to the downtown police mix.
….The added officers are part of a vision Wray laid out for keeping the downtown safe, which included more neighborhood involvement, creating safe zones where pedestrians pass through areas of high visibility, increasing transportation options and, most of all, battling the drunken excess he sees as the root of downtown’s woes.
“We must move away from the entitlement culture of binge drinking,” he said.
WASHINGTON – Federal legislation likely to pass before Congress recesses Friday outlines the future of the National Institutes of Health, the primary source of money for UW-Madison biomedical research. But the real fight for money may come after the Nov. 7 elections.
Tickets to be admitted onto State Street for Madison’s Halloween party will go on sale Monday at Library Mall and the Parks Office in the Madison Municipal Building, 215 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Suite 210.
