Network equipment maker Cisco Systems (CSCO) said Chief Executive John Chambers will become chairman of the company when current Chairman John Morgridge steps aside on Nov. 15. [Morgridge and his wife Tashia are UW-Madison graduates and major donors to the university]
One of two felony charges against state Department of Administration official Georgia Thompson is that she manipulated the process for awarding a state travel contract by asking two agencies, Adelman Travel Group and Omega World Travel, to make “best and final” offers.
Yet during testimony at Thompson’s trial in federal court Wednesday, another member of the committee evaluating proposals, Lisa Clemmons, said asking for “best and final” offers was her idea.
The University of Wisconsin athletic department did the right thing by giving back the $500 to the fellow from Milwaukee who thought he was going to get a chance to buy season football tickets with his donation to the department’s Badger Fund.
As sports columnist Todd Finkelmeyer reported in The Capital Times Monday, Bill Meunier, who works as an assistant for a Milwaukee nonprofit, scrimped and saved to put together the Badger Fund donation because he heard ads on the radio that to him, at least, implied that if he forked over $500 he’d be eligible to purchase a season ticket.
Move over Bud. College life isn’t just about drinking beer. In a rare instance, Apple Computer Inc.’s iconic iPod music player surpassed beer drinking as the most “in” thing among undergraduate college students, according to the latest biannual market research study by Ridgewood, N.J.-based Student Monitor.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=432963
Quoted: Jack Kloppenburg Jr., associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A UW-Madison professor will be the liaison between U.S. plasma and fusion science researchers and a group that is building the U.S. share of ITER, an international experiment that aims to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power, which one day could be an abundant, economical and environmentally benign energy source, the UW announced.
On May 24, the seven international ITER participants initialed an agreement to construct the experiment. The U.S. Department of Energy and its ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) Project Office recently named UW engineering physics Professor Raymond Fonck chief scientist for the U.S. portion of the project.
Dane County and Madison are joining forces in the battle to keep up with the rising tide of computer crime.
….Computer analysis has been used to resolve sexual assault, financial crimes, homicide, theft, stalking and a variety of other types of cases. It was key to uncovering the fake abduction of UW student Audrey Seiler two years ago, (Madison Police Chief Noble) Wray said.
MILWAUKEE – A University of Wisconsin official was the first to suggest an extra step to evaluate the top two companies vying for a major state travel contract, she testified today at the trial of a state employee charged with rigging the contract process.
Lisa Clemmons, purchasing agent for the UW athletics department and a member of a committee that evaluated proposals for state travel contracts, said she, not Department of Administration official Georgia Thompson, was the first to suggest the committee solicit a best and final offer from Adelman Travel Group and Omega World Travel.
Dear Editor: I’m a huge Badger sports fan, stuck in North Carolina, and a UW alumnus. I bought student season tickets every football season for six years (as an undergrad and graduate student).
Does the athletic department realize how pathetic it is, with the huge amounts of revenue they’ve enjoyed in recent years, that they feel they have to resort to “bait and switch” tactics to collect “fees” for a chance to purchase season tickets?! I’m not satisfied with senior associate athletic director Vince Sweeney’s defense of this practice, as referenced in Monday’s article.
Dear Editor: I’m in the same boat as Bill Meunier, the subject of your article about the UW’s Badger Fund. I made a $500 donation for the first time this year, knowing that I’d have to contribute for several years before I’d probably get tickets.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=432640
Story discusses Salus Discovery LLC, a biotech tool company that uses a patented technology with the potential to make it faster and cheaper to find new drugs. Salus’ technology was developed by a team led by David Beebe, a University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering professor, and is based on two patents licensed exclusively to the company by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Months before other travel agents knew they could compete for a $750,000 state contract, Adelman Travel Group had already outlined criteria for selecting the winner, according to records introduced Tuesday in the federal fraud trial of the woman accused of illegally steering the contract to Adelman.
A decision on transforming the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha into a center for multiple higher education institutions has been postponed at the urging of the concept’s opponents.
Unless we’re talking 1971 or 1974, the NBA Finals typically do not rise to the Green Bay-backup-tackle level of interest around here.
Except now.
This time, it’s Dwyane Wade, among the all-time Marquette greats, against Devin Harris, among the elite high school players in area history. One of the NBA’s most dynamic talents against one of the league’s genuine fast-trackers.
A University of Wisconsin computer technician who claimed she lost an opportunity for a permanent job for speaking out about conditions for limited-term employees (LTE) will receive $145,000 to settle her First Amendment lawsuit against the Board of Regents.
Assistant Attorney General Michael Bauer said Monday that instead of going to trial last week, the state reached a tentative agreement with Wanda Ashman, who has a permanent part-time job with the UW-Madison College of Letters and Sciences.
Dane County prosecutors said today they will retry Ralph Armstrong, whose conviction for the 1980 rape and murder of University of Wisconsin student Charise Kamps was overturned last year by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard said today that “after analyzing all the evidence in the case,” he has decided to prosecute the case again. Under terms of the high court decision, the state had the choice of going to trial again or of dropping the case altogether.
MILWAUKEE – A travel consultant testified today he objected to a state purchasing official’s plan to add an additional step to the process used to award a major travel contract.
On the second day of Georgia Thompson’s trial on fraud charges, travel consultant Ian Thomas said he told Thompson in an e-mail he disagreed with the decision to pit Omega World Travel and Adelman Travel Group against each other in a tiebreaker after an initial evaluation showed Omega leading Adelman by 21 points on a 1,200-point scale.
A state purchasing officer repeatedly cited “political” reasons why a major state travel contract had to go to Adelman Travel, a witness in the official’s criminal trial told a federal jury Monday.
Lawyer Stephen Hurley also portrayed his client Georgia Thompson as the victim of University of Wisconsin System officials and state bureaucrats who did not want anyone to tell them which company they had to use to book their flights and hotels.
Gov. Jim Doyle will take his support for embryonic stem cell research to a national stage Saturday as the keynote speaker at a stem cell summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Mentions Doyle’s support for the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Quoted: Gary Cook, an education researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When Christopher Contag moved into his office at the James H. Clark Center at Stanford University, he wanted to show it off to his kids.
or Discovery. And it kind of does.
Set within a cavernous space, the office is entirely prefab: The walls are constructed of rectangular pieces of fluted glass fitted to make a very large box. The ceiling is enclosed by large glass panels. Light fixtures hang from steel girders that crisscross the ceiling.
The collaborative approach to expanded educational offerings has become a model for Wisconsin educators who are considering launching a university center in Waukesha County.
Quoted: Erik Wait, an obstetrician and gynecologist with the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison and Meriter Hospital.
Also on Thursday, the state’s lowest-paid workers got a raise – to $6.50 an hour, the second of a two-step increase in the state’s minimum wage. Critics say raising the wage floor lowers the number of jobs available to low-income people – an argument that makes sense in theory but fails to hold up in practice. Sure, individual firms may find themselves forced to cut jobs. But the trend overall is that the number of jobs expands after the floor is lifted. The Center on Wisconsin Strategy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the latest to document this phenomenon.
Quoted: Charles O. Jones, professor emeritus of political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
After you’ve buckled your seat belt and made sure your tray table is in the upright and locked position, you can feel pretty certain that for the most part your flight will be humdrum.
Nevertheless, there are atmospheric conditions that can make aviation hazardous – thunderstorms and volcanic ash are two. And researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere are working to improve knowledge of these potentially flight-interrupting events by using data from weather satellites.
The effort is an innovative one, said Wayne Feltz, a scientist at the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center, which leads the Wisconsin effort, because it is designed to make satellite data routine and automated in aviation.
Quoted: Robert Glenn Howard, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin
Traditional science has flourished for centuries in traditional university buildings, where walls and doors separate the spaces – and the scientists who inhabit them – into offices and labs, departments and disciplines.
In the last decade, however, researchers have begun investigating questions that demand a more collaborative, open environment. Creating that environment is the goal of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, a planned $150 million research facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Among those arrested in southeastern Wisconsin over the last 20 months were a Waukesha firefighter; a University of Wisconsin-Madison English professor; former teachers at school districts as diverse as Milwaukee, Shorewood and Mequon; and a former computer consultant for S.C. Johnson in Racine.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=431170
Madison-based Venture Investors LLC will announce today that it has closed on $69 million in commitments for a new venture capital fund that will invest in very young companies in Wisconsin and the Midwest.
The fund – Venture Investors Early Stage Fund IV Limited Partnership – is the largest of its kind ever created in Wisconsin. It will help finance young companies formed around discoveries in the life sciences, engineering and information technology sectors.
The fund’s broad range of deep-pocketed investors includes the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and several big insurance companies and financial firms.
Quoted: David Bernhardt, a professor of pediatrics and sports medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison industrial engineer professor Vicki Bier.
….At the same time we are concerned about our talented students leaving Wisconsin, our university system is invoking a policy that gives these individuals even more reason to abandon our state.
This type of policy is an insult to the many minorities in our country who have risen to greatness because of their knowledge and hard work, not because of the color of their skin.
When Joe Krupp left the family farm near Elkhart Lake in 1968 and headed to Madison for college, he never figured he’d one day be shaping the city.
Like many students at the University of Wisconsin at the time, Krupp had thoughts of somehow making the world a better place. He graduated in 1973 with a degree in social work.
But Krupp never pursued a career in that field. Instead, he took a summer construction job with friends and has called Madison home ever since.
The Mann Scholars program has reached a milestone with two of its first recipients earning college degrees.
Wednesday night in the Memorial Union’s Great Hall, the high school scholarship program honored eight young people who hope to follow in the graduates’ footsteps.
The group from a campus religious center in Madison had gone to Israel and Palestine to see ways people in that conflicted region were trying to make peace. In the middle of their trip last week, they wound up just seven blocks away from a fierce gun battle in Ramallah between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians that left four of the Palestinians dead.
The group of 18 University of Wisconsin students was part of a service learning trip to Israel and Palestine known as Quest I-P, which is a project of The Crossing, an ecumenical ministry located at 1127 University Ave. just off the UW-Madison campus.
The University Club certainly looks clubby and exclusive, with gables, gargoyles and ivy-choked brick walls on an imposing Tudor-style building.
But the University Club is hardly private. It’s open to all UW-Madison faculty and staff, giving them access to an affordable fine dining experience at lunch. Starting today, though, the door is thrown wide open. The public is welcome to enjoy this campus gem through the summer.
There is strong evidence that a University of Wisconsin-Madison geneticist committed “serious professional misconduct” in her research, wrote Chancellor John Wiley, adding that if she had not already resigned, dismissal proceedings would have warranted.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Goodwin, an associate professor with tenure, had $1.7 million in two grants from the National Institutes for Health to study the sexual habits of worms. There were “irregularities” in three grant applications, a three-member investigative panel wrote in a report dated April 26. She resigned March 1.
….the prank is probably not good enough to make it onto the prestigious list of the “Top 10 College Pranks of All Time,” which can be found online.
It’s a fascinating list, and I am proud to say that a UW-Madison prank, from 1979, is honored as the fourth best college prank ever perpetrated.
The Isthmus Jazz Festival has shed its indoor confines to embrace the natural risks that befit an art form based on improvisation. Somehow this feels right, especially in a city that defines its urbane lifestyle and politics through its environmental realities.
After losing its access and time slot in the Overture Center, the city’s fortress of cultural control, Madison’s largest annual jazz gathering will now make music amid nature’s vagaries on the shore of Lake Mendota, with all its potential for pollution and storms or blissful, sparkling harmony. This weekend’s fest digs are the Memorial Union Terrace, 800 Langdon St.
Hollywood, meet Milwaukee.
Starting in 2008, Wisconsin will have some of the nation’s most generous tax incentives for the film industry under a bill Gov. Jim Doyle signed on Tuesday. Supporters hope the array of tax credits for companies that produce films, television shows and video games in Wisconsin will jump-start an industry that is virtually nonexistent here.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say they’ve found a way to measure the damage done by smoking in otherwise healthy-looking smokers.
They say using helium can measure small changes in the lungs, including the breakdown of alveoli, or tiny sacs in the lungs that move oxygen to blood. A commonly used measuring technique, tomography, was unable to measure those changes.
Police are doubtful that five men arrested after allegedly battering a man leaving a bar early Sunday are the same people who carried out a string of downtown batteries in recent weeks.
“It’s a completely different MO (mode of operation) than the other incidents,” police spokesman Mike Hanson said.
The 21-year-old victim in Sunday’s incident told police he was leaving Brothers bar, 704 University Ave., at about 3:30 a.m. when several men in a car began yelling obscenities at him.
University of Wisconsin campuses will start selecting students more in the manner Harvard University does. The hue and cry among many politicians: The dastardly UW administration is lowering standards.
Funny. The last I checked, Harvard still presided at or near the top of the college heap, despite having used the holistic approach.
A full tuition waiver for Wisconsin veterans attending the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical College System might result in tuition increases for other students and higher property taxes, higher education officials said Tuesday.
After U.S. Bank declined to sponsor a University of Wisconsin System sports conference, university officials pushed a U.S. Bank vice president to reconsider the matter, noting the hefty UW work the bank enjoys.
UW officials also explored pulling the conference’s business from U.S. Bank before a state contract administrator rebuffed them, state records show.
Former University of Wisconsin tailback Booker Stanley is back in jail.
Stanley, who faces three felony charges and several misdemeanor charges stemming from two incidents in the past 13 months, violated one of the conditions of his bail when he recently consumed alcohol.
We concede, as we’re sure the governor does, that embryonic stem cell research, despite its potential to relieve human suffering, poses a serious problem for some religious leaders and other Americans. They argue that because the research requires the destruction of embryos, it is wrong because a human life is sacrificed. We also believe that Archbishop Dolan and Bishop Morlino, as religious leaders, have every right to tell the governor they believe his position is wrong and ask him to reverse course. By no means does that violate the separation of church and state.
But we come down on the side of the governor. As he noted, the embryos involved are from unused fertilized embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise be discarded.
A university campus brims not just with academics but also with intrigue, sometimes of Shakespearean dimensions. Ask Paul Barrows, the University of Wisconsin-Madison vice chancellor demoted for improprieties. The court of public opinion found him guilty on all counts. Trouble is, exposed to the light generated by a real hearing, the allegations crumbled to dust.
Quoted: Kurt Squire, an assistant professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The Johns Hopkins University spent $1.375 billion for science, medical and engineering research in fiscal 2004, making it the top U.S. institution in research spending for the 26th year in a row, according to a National Science Foundation report. UW-Madison recorded $763 million in spending and ranked fourth. (Second item)
If life gives you kidney stones, make lemonade.
New research shows that lemonade is an effective ââ?¬â? and delicious ââ?¬â? way for kidney-stone-prone people to slow the development of new stones.
“When treating patients in our kidney stone center, we put everyone on lemonade therapy,” says Steven Y. Nakada, chair and professor of urology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Different methods of tracking Gov. Jim Doyle’s effort to reduce the state’s work force by 10,000 employees over eight years have produced conflicting views of his progress.
Though the governor is less than halfway to his goal as he nears the four-year mark, Doyle administration officials say the state is on track to meet the Doyle campaign pledge and warn against reducing the work force too quickly.
Most people believe increased educational opportunity for low-income Latino and African-American students is the key to a better quality of life in Milwaukee.
That’s why some support the school voucher program, essentially a taxpayer-supported affirmative action plan for minority students to attend private schools.
However, when attempts are made to incorporate more diversity in higher education, many of these same folks start to complain about racial quotas being used to create an unfair advantage.
Accolades and old football war stories about the Barry Alvarez years were the order of the night Wednesday as about 200 people gathered at the Milwaukee Athletic Club to honor Alvarez for his years of coaching and service to UW. Alvarez, UW’s athletic director, retired as football coach Jan. 2 after his Badgers defeated Auburn, 24-10.
The University of Wisconsin System came under attack Wednesday for changes to its admissions policies, with Gov. Jim Doyle, U.S. Rep. Mark Green and state legislators voicing disapproval.
Two Catholic bishops are asking Gov. Jim Doyle to oppose the use of embryonic stem cells at a time when he is touting the research as a major reason voters should re-elect him in November.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=427255
Two Catholic bishops are asking Gov. Jim Doyle to oppose the use of embryonic stem cells at a time when he is touting the research as a major reason voters should re-elect him in November.
The leader of a task force studying higher education reform options in the region said Tuesday that the group would not recommend a hotly debated merger of the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha and UW-Milwaukee.
Quoted: Stanley Temple, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
