Wisconsin students stayed above national averages in test results released Wednesday, but a Journal Sentinel analysis of the data shows that the gap between black and white students was among the largest in the nation. In eighth-grade reading and in fourth-grade math, the gaps were larger than in any other state in the country.
A travel agency that lost a state contract to a firm owned by a major contributor to Gov. Jim Doyle was told by state officials that the two companies had tied in the public bidding process and that’s why final, head-to-head competition was necessary, an executive of the losing firm said Wednesday.
As tuition across the United States continues to outpace gains in financial aid, students’ chances of attending college and finishing with a degree increasingly have become liked to their families’ income, the College Board reported Tuesday.
….Sandy Baum, a College Board analyst, said the data shows that college completion increasingly is “not about academic preparation, it’s about money.”
There’s a new “E” in E-business: Engagement.
“Time is more precious than money,” eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey told the crowd attending the 8th annual UW E-Business Institute’s E-Business Best Practices & Emerging Technologies Conference Tuesday at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.
The conference aimed to get attendees to think about how to better understand the technologies their companies use.
Wisconsin is finally gaining some traction in the high-paying technology job world.
A report issued today by the Wisconsin Technology Council shows the state, while still lagging, is improving its standing among the 50 states when it comes to producing patents, creating high-tech jobs and investing in research and development.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has named four finalists for its Medical School deanship.
The new dean will succeed Philip Farrell, who has served for a decade. He announced last winter he will step down at the end of this year. All of the finalists are external candidates.
I WAS pleased to see that the Madison Sesquicentennial Commission has announced plans for a series of historical markers to be placed in various locations around the city.
There is a public meeting tonight, from 7 to 8:30 at the Madison Senior Center on West Mifflin, to get citizen input on who or what should get a marker.
….There should be a plaque where Stephen Babcock ate his first ice cream cone. … Where Leon Varjian and Jim Mallon planted their first pink flamingo. …
A legislative committee Tuesday ordered a sweeping state audit of the University of Wisconsin System’s employment policies.
The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted 9-0 to order the state audit bureau to review how the system manages employees. The bureau will examine so-called backup positions, which are jobs some workers have waiting for them if they are demoted. It also will review sick leave policies and identify any felons on the system’s payroll.
“Nail’s Tales,” the spiky new 48-foot-high Camp Randall Stadium sculpture, will not be erected this weekend as planned.
Donald Lipski, a UW-Madison graduate, had wanted to top off homecoming and the Camp Randall renovations in spectacular fashion.
But, he said, the piece just isn’t right yet.
Why do so many of us tell jokes about lawyers, and what does it say about our society? Marc Galanter, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School, began looking into the phenomenon about a decade ago and has now written a book about it, “Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture.” He spoke by phone recently with Journal Sentinel reporter Mark Johnson.
Observers are chewing on Donald Lipski’s new Camp Randall Stadium sculpture as if it were snaggle-toothed cob of corn. Many would prefer a manly steak or classy caviar rather than what appears to be a huge helping of sporty surrealism.
….Final judgments on the work will hold more validity when the piece is fully installed at the intersection of Breese Terrace and Regent Street. Originally scheduled for Saturday’s homecoming, the installation will be delayed at least a week due to a production delay.
UW-Madison graduate Donald Lipski’s new football-themed sculpture, “Nail’s Tales,” at Camp Randall Stadium was a cooperative project between the UW Athletic Department and Wisconsin Arts Board.
The Athletic Department gave Lipski information on the history of Camp Randall and requested a work “to celebrate the campus tradition of football,” but left the design otherwise open-ended, says Chris Manke, coordinator of the Wisconsin Arts Board’s Percent for Art Program, which commissioned the $200,000 artwork.
….What do you think? Send your reactions to SCULPTURE, The Capital Times, PO Box 8060, Madison WI 53708 or to tctlife@madison.com. We will publish a selection.
ANDY LATHROP was supposed to be back in Wisconsin by now. That was the plan. Maybe he’d have been with his parents in Menasha, or perhaps he would already have come back to Madison, to prepare for the spring semester at UW.
University of Wisconsin System officials promised Tuesday to take the first steps in December to rewrite disciplinary rules so that administrators can more quickly fire those convicted of serious crimes or to begin investigating someone accused of a crime.
As a deadly strain of bird flu spreads through Asia and into Europe, and public health experts warn of a likely human pandemic, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other Big Ten colleges are scrambling to prepare.
Wisconsin is doing a better job of nurturing the tools necessary for a vibrant, knowledge-based economy, according to a report to be presented today at the Wisconsin Technology Council’s Early Stage Symposium.
Dear Editor: With Madison’s annual Halloween Brawl bearing down on us like a Wisconsin and Southern freight train, I have a proposal that, while it would help eliminate some of the miscreants from State Street this year, would also prune down their numbers in future years.
To get to the point, I suggest that Madison use its shiny, new fleet of recyclable materials trucks to pluck troublemakers from the street.
Dear Editor: The budget is up for approval in Congress right now, and whether or not students know it, if approved, the budget will impact the amount of student aid received drastically.
The budget, as it is currently written, allows for $9 billion worth of cuts to student loan programs.
To protest this, a national call-in day will be held Wednesday at the University of Wisconsin.
Dear Editor: As a student at UW-Madison, one of the foremost public institutions of higher education in the country, I feel it is my responsibility to call attention to the potentially disastrous proposition currently before Congress. If the Higher Education Act is reauthorized with the current language intact, it will severely cut resources to higher education and therefore make college more expensive for millions of students.
Wisconsin’s projected budget balance for mid-2007 is about $55 million less than originally thought after tax collections came in slightly lower than expected, according to a new report.
The shortfall means the state has a smaller cushion should revenues or spending fail to meet expectations in the two-year budget that ends June 30, 2007. The state had projected a balance of $70.4 million at the end of the budget; the new projection is about $14 million.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s official anti-sweatshop panel wants the university to require apparel companies that make UW logo clothing to use union labor.
The nine-member panel, made up of students, faculty and staff, voted without dissent Monday to send the recommendation to Chancellor John Wiley. Students, who packed the room, erupted with applause after the vote.
The proposal is designed to encourage large apparel companies like adidas, Nike and Reebok to pay their workers better wages, assign them shorter hours, and improve their working conditions.
Wisconsin ranks 14th in first BCS poll of the season.
When a group of women approached Meg Gaines last year and offered to do volunteer fundraising for her pioneering patient advocacy program, Gaines said it was like “manna from heaven.”
The group is now gearing up to stage its second major fundraiser for the Center for Patient Partnerships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thursday’s “If the Shoe Fits” features, among other things, an auction of shoe sculptures created by local and national artists.
Madison hospitals have been planning and practicing for years exactly what they would do if a natural or human-made disaster struck the community.
And the coordinator of a regional hospital preparedness group says that hospitals in Dane County have been doing an outstanding job.
As liberals lean back and enjoy the spectacle, conservatives are fighting each other over the nomination of Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court, says Ann Althouse, a professor in the UW Law School.
Milwaukee-area businessman Craig B. Adelman never gave more than $1,000 to governors or candidates for governor, until his Adelman Travel company bid on – and won – the contract to book up to 40% of all out-of-state trips by state workers.
Four Madison researchers have donned green eye shades for a bottom-line look at programs designed to prevent juvenile delinquency: What’s their cost? What’s their yield?
UW-Madison scientists working with colleagues in Vietnam and Japan have discovered that an avian influenza virus from an infected Vietnamese girl is resistant to Tamiflu, the main drug officials had hoped to use to treat patents in case of an influenza pandemic.
The findings suggest that health officials, who have been stockpiling millions of doses of the drug to hold back a global outbreak and buy time to develop and produce a vaccine, should consider other options, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a professor in the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.
But Dr. Dennis Maki, UW-Madison professor of medicine and head of the infectious disease division at University Hospital, cautioned Friday that more tests would be necessary to determine whether resistance exists.
To derive embryonic stem cells, scientists must destroy an embryo. But new research might change that.
Quoted: Ed Jesse, professor and extension agriculture policy specialist for the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The discovery of a Vietnamese girl with a Tamiflu-resistant strain of the avian flu has raised concern about sole reliance on the anti-viral drug being stockpiled globally to fight a possible pandemic.
The report by an international team of researchers, including a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist, will be published next week in the journal Nature.
Wisconsin’s research prowess alone – much of it rooted in University of Wisconsin-Madison laboratories – won’t be enough to move the state from its second-tier position to the top of the biotech list.
The demand for University of Wisconsin men’s basketball student season tickets may have trickled down to help raise season ticket sales for the Badgers’ men’s hockey team this year.
Corbin Hunt, the UW assistant athletic director for ticket operations, ventures that some of the roughly 2,600 students who weren’t successful in their bid for men’s basketball tickets turned to men’s hockey, which has come close to selling out its student allotment.
Isabel Allende has lived in the United States for nearly 20 years, but it took the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to really make her feel like an American.
“Today I say I am American,” the Chilean writer told a full house at the Wisconsin Union Theater Thursday night, kicking off both the Wisconsin Book Festival and the UW’s 2005-06 Distinguished Lecture Series.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students overwhelmingly approved a referendum this week that requires workers at the Memorial Union and other organizations that receive student funds to receive a “living wage.”
The referendum was placed on the ballot by the Student Labor Action Coalition, whose members believed limited-term employees were paid too little.
Mentions the University of Wisconsin-Madison is among the leading licensing organizations in the United States, and will rank 10th or 11th in the world for the research quality of its biotechnology faculty in a yet-to-be-published Milken Institute study.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison defended the security of its nuclear research reactor on Thursday, calling an ABC News report that found “gaping holes” at it and other university reactors sensational.
Admission is free to a public lecture and symposium that coincide with this week’s 30th anniversary celebration of the University of Wisconsin women’s studies program.
It all began in 1975 with three courses, three instructors and 241 student enrollments. Today, the academic core remains, but about three dozen other courses have been added and enrollment has spurted to 2,000.
These classes are taught by 17 faculty, 29 affiliates and a dozen nonbudgeted appointees whose services are rendered free. The students will one day go on to become lawyers, social workers, arts administrators, architects — you name it.
The University of Wisconsin women’s studies program, among the first in the nation, celebrates its 30th anniversary this week. It is a story of growth and stability, myth shattering and issue awareness.
Dear Editor: The statue planned for near Camp Randall definitely needs to be rethought. Doug Moe is on the right track in his recent column. This should have been a cooperative project between the UW’s athletic department and the Wisconsin Arts Board.
The athletic department has designated this football season as “Celebrate the Legacy” of Camp Randall. This is printed on every ticket and is why the statue should be of a football player.
There are few people who can silence a crowd by the mere anticipation of their entrance.
The world’s richest man is one such person.
As 4 p.m. arrived Wednesday and his handlers’ actions made it clear that Bill Gates was about to enter Auditorium AB20 at UW-Madison’s Weeks Hall, a buzzing crowd of about 200 computer and biological sciences students and a dozen or so media types almost instantly went silent.
Even Bill Gates’ harshest detractors concede that he’s doing good in the world.
The $26.8 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses primarily on global health and the U.S. education system, and Gates does more than just give away his money: He gets involved, traveling to places like Africa, where AIDS is killing millions, and to the nation’s top universities, where he pumps computer science as a great career.
In a session with state media after his appearance at UW-Madison on Wednesday, Gates said his foundation has been getting involved in Avian flu, which some experts fear has the potential to become a pandemic similar to the flu of 1918 that killed 50 million people.
Bill Gates’ visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison was designed to fire up students for careers in computers. So how did they react?
The biggest buzz was over a device still in development that projects visual images onto a table top and allows them to be pulled into a mini-computer built into a cell phone or other small digital entity. After Gates’ talk, students clustered around the device as a Microsoft engineer explained it in more detail. Gates had done a quick demo of it during his talk, saying that it was still perhaps five years away from coming to the market.
World renowned hip-hop violinist Miri Ben-Ari and skateboarding sensation Stevie Williams are scheduled to appear here at tonight’s celebration of the opening of the first-ever Rbk concept store on a college campus.
Williams will kick off the party at 6 p.m. at Peace Park with a skateboard exhibition and Ben-Ari, the newest face of Reebok’s “I Am What I Am” campaign, will perform songs from her newly released debut album. Following the performances, students can check out more than 200 styles of footwear, Reebok performance gear and exclusive UW vintage inspired lifestyle apparel.
WisconsinEye, the nonprofit organization that aims to bring gavel-to-gavel TV coverage of the State Capitol into Wisconsin homes, is undergoing a management reshuffling as officials aim to get on the air by next year.
Tom Loftus, former Assembly speaker and U.S. ambassador to Norway, has taken over as the organization’s interim president.
Loftus succeeds WisconsinEye founder Jeff Roberts, who will remain the channel’s chief operating officer and a member of the board of directors.
About 100 University of Wisconsin-Madison students are expected to travel to Washington, D.C., to take part in the 10-year commemoration of the Million Man March.
This week’s event, the Millions More Movement, will take place on Saturday on the National Mall. Unlike the event 10 years ago, which was aimed at African-American men, this one is reaching out to people of all races and genders to promote peace, education, religious unity and an end to domestic violence.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students are voting on a referendum that would purportedly withhold student fees from the Memorial Union and other organizations unless they pay limited term workers a living wage.
Top UW administrators, however, are not so sure the referendum could be enforced.
There’s a move afoot over in the Capitol to exempt UW System researchers from an old state law that restricts public employees who start private companies from signing contracts with the university.
Bill Gates tried to sell University of Wisconsin students on the idea of a career in the software industry Wednesday, pulling out some of Microsoft’s latest high-tech toys to show how cool the work can be.
A state politician accused University of Wisconsin administrators Wednesday of “creating an obstacle” to the potential merger of two Milwaukee-area universities by selecting a candidate for dean of the UW-Waukesha campus.
Many Madisonians ditched their cars for bikes this summer as gas prices soared. But with the wicked winter looming there is another cost-effective option in the downtown area.
Quoted: Donald Nichols, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor.
Mentions a research project by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, commissioned by the state, that confirmed that the fathers were more likely to make court-ordered child support if they knew it would help their kids.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
New research from Stanley Dodson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that minute concentrations of antibiotics and other drugs, in a variety of combinations, can kill, disrupt, alter and disfigure the bodies and reproductive abilities of Daphnia, a small invertebrate considered a keystone of freshwater food chains.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist who specializes in polling.
Local leaders must do a better job leveraging government dollars to boost development such as the fast-growing biomedical research and business cluster at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Milwaukee County Research Park, an economic development advocate said Monday.
We and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have preferred that the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents had decided Friday to simply put aside plans by the UW Medical School to establish a school of public health in Madison and explore the idea of creating such a school in Milwaukee.
Instead, the regents settled on compromise. But by so doing, they not only applied some badly needed brake pressure to the UW Medical School proposal to rename itself the School of Medicine and Public Health but gave Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee a month to make their case that they need more resources to deal with Milwaukee’s pressing public health problems. And they should take that month to again try to convince the regents that one of those resources should be a school of public health in Milwaukee.
Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law stands in his way.
Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.
Gov. Jim Doyle and several state lawmakers want to change that by exempting UW System researchers from that law, which is designed to discourage state workers from privately benefiting at taxpayers’ expense.
UW Transportation Services and Community Car are expanding car-sharing services on campus. There is already one Civic sedan available at Helen C. White Library. New Prius hybrid hatchbacks are being added at the UW Hospital (Lot 79) and Biotech (Lot 20). Over the next 3-5 years, additional cars will be added to these locations, plus new locations will be added in other campus neighborhoods.
