Young people are fleeing Dane County in record numbers, despite the area’s ranking as one of the top places to live, work and play in the nation.
A report issued today details the county’s “brain drain” problem and urges community leaders to focus efforts on retaining and attracting talented individuals.
A University of Wisconsin student was arrested Monday for allegedly running a drug operation out of his dorm room.
UW football player Marcus Randle El was formally charged today with one count of misdemeanor disorderly conduct for a skirmish with his girlfriend in a dorm room last week.
Randle El, 18, was arguing with the young woman in his room at Ogg Hall when he allegedly pushed her down, causing her to suffer some minor scrapes to her arms, the complaint says.
The University of Wisconsin women’s hockey team earned its first NCAA tournament bid and will face Dartmouth on Saturday in Hanover, N.H., with the winner of the one-game playoff advancing to the Frozen Four.
….Samuel G. Freedman, who will be in Madison Tuesday, speaking at the Memorial Union at 7 p.m., does not exactly tell his own story in his new book, “Who She Was.” It is rather a search for his mother, dead from cancer in 1974 at only 50, when the son was in college at UW-Madison, writing for the Daily Cardinal and pretending not to know his mother (in front of classmates) when she visited him on campus.
RICHARD NIXON went to China, but Stanley Kutler won’t be going to the Nixon Library – at least not to speak next month at a “Nixon as Commander in Chief” conference, which was canceled last week by the library’s executive director, John H. Taylor.
Several observers have suggested that the library got cold feet over the invitation to Kutler, an eminent Madison historian (and UW-Madison emeritus professor of history) who has been critical of Nixon and wrote a 1992 book about his tapes titled “Abuse of Power.”
University of Wisconsin police are looking for a suspect in connection with the sexual assault of a woman Thursday night in the UW Arboretum.
You’re going to hear a lot about sunshine this week, but it will have nothing to do with the weather outside. This is “Sunshine Week” across the country and, thanks to a proclamation by Gov. Jim Doyle, here in Wisconsin, too.
It’s a week that’s been dedicated to underscoring the importance of letting the sun shine on our governments, which, after all, belong to each of us.
Kevin Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, hasn’t taken a formal stance for or against a legislator’s proposal that the 13 two-year campuses in the system become satellites of the 13 four-year campuses.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s health services division has been publishing newspaper ads encouraging students to have emergency contraception – the so-called morning-after pill – on hand during spring break, a move that is rankling abortion critics in the state.
Quoted: James Sosman, associate director of the HIV care program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Norma Saldivar, an associate professor of theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When Katherine Lyall, the University of Wisconsin System president then, launched the four Economic Summits, she set forth the goal of closing the state’s gap in per capita income as the most important.
Wisconsin would spend just more than $1 billion over the next two years to construct new buildings and maintain current ones under the governor’s capital budget proposal. More than half of the money would go to projects within the University of Wisconsin System.
Freshman wide receiver / quarterback Marcus Randle El, suspended indefinitely earlier this week for violating the University of Wisconsin’s student-athlete discipline policy, will be allowed to participate in the team’s final eight spring practices, school officials announced Thursday.
Cat lovers outraged over a proposal to hunt stray cats in the state have left death threats for a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher and the La Crosse man who came up with the idea.
“Just know that (Joe) Skulan, 44, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Geology Museum, is not your garden variety science geek. This is a guy who dug a 14-foot 83 million-year-old shark skeleton out of a rancher’s field in Kansas and, more recently, unearthed the skeleton of a 3,200-pound rhinoceros from the ground on Picnic Point.”
UW-Madison’s director of trademark licensing, Cindy Van Matre, is featured.
Madison’s three hospitals are all expanding, and those who speak for them say that the busy market here justifies that growth. Not only is the total Dane County population booming, but the older population – which needs more hospital care – will be expanding at a frightening rate as the Baby Boom population ages.
The New Yorker magazine’s visit to the UW-Madison campus got up close and personal for 15 students in a political science seminar.
Hendrik Hertzberg, who had addressed a packed Memorial Union crowd the day before, had a chance for some give-and-take with students Wednesday in Ken Mayer’s seminar on election law. He was one of several New Yorker staffers who spoke in classroom settings this week.
Autistic youngsters may shy away from eye contact because they see even familiar faces as uncomfortable threats, according to brain tests at the University of Wisconsin.
The research deepens understanding of an autistic brain’s function and may lead to new treatment and teaching approaches.
State negotiators have rejected the latest overture from the Teaching Assistants Association in the longstanding effort to secure the teaching assistants a two-year contract.
Meanwhile, the state made the teaching assistants another offer, which TAA officials said was such a step back that they felt as if they were being punished for standing up for themselves.
Gov. Jim Doyle’s proposed state budget is balanced on more than $304 million in new tax and fee increases, according to figures released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
….Doyle’s budget calls for more than $14 million in tax cuts, including $10.2 million in increased deductions for families and individuals paying college tuition.
A bill that could change the way new power plants are financed in Wisconsin – and save money for customers paying for those plants – could be voted on as soon as today by the state Senate. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Robert Cowles (R-Green Bay), would guarantee utilities a set rate of return every year for 30 years, instead of the traditional rate-setting approach used by the state Public Service Commission. To some, the new approach represents an indictment of the leased-generation concept employed for Wisconsin Energy’s new power plants and for the Madison Gas & Electric Co. plant being built on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Say what you will about the quality of its basketball this season, but the Big Ten conference continues to ride high in other areas that are crucial for a conference to succeed. It draws lucrative TV deals, favorable television time slots, attracts huge crowds and it didn’t have to reinvent or restructure itself to do it.
Near the end of a trip with a missionary group building a church in a remote part of Haiti, Richard Anderson felt a gentle tug at his sleeve. One of the Haitian clergy politely asked the American visitor to take a look at another project that the villagers were considering: a college.
Federal restrictions on stem cell funding are forcing states to choose between pursuing such research on their own or risking the loss of jobs, revenue and highly sought-after scientists, state biotechnology leaders said Wednesday.
…Television networks have been pressing Nielsen Media Research, Inc., the company that measures TV audiences, to quantify college campus viewing for years, without success…. Meanwhile, colleges, wary of opening the gates to outsiders conducting research on their students, have been leery of providing access….
(From The Wall Street Journal, reprinted in the 3/9/05 Capital Times print edition)
Autistic children and adults are typically reluctant to make and keep eye contact with others — part of their general lack of social or emotional connection. A new study suggests a basic reason for this: The eye contact overstimulates a part of the brain that processes fear and emotion, and people with autism learn to limit their eye- and face-tracking as a result.
(This article from The Washington Post is about research done by professor Richard Davidson. It was published in the 3/9/05 Capital Times print edition.)
Madison’s principal downtown advocacy group is stepping into the political arena and endorsing City Council candidates for the first time.
….Downtown Madison Inc.’s 460 members include representatives from the business community as well as such entities as the city of Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“….The story traces Davis’ growing up in Chicago and his move to New York, where he got a room across the street from Birdland. He got a job playing bass behind Sarah Vaughan. He came to Madison in 1977.”
The NCAA the other day released its first “academic progress rate,” a sort of report card on the academic achievements of each of the university athletic departments.
The whole idea behind the APR is to encourage – no, force – the member schools to do a better job graduating their athletes.
Mike Wilkinson is as consistent off the basketball court as he is on it. The University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team’s 6-foot-8 senior forward shrugged his shoulders after it was announced that he was a consensus first-team All-Big Ten Conference selection Tuesday.
Along with their checkbooks and program schedule, those going to order tickets for the Wisconsin Film Festival might want to bring some patience with them.
With no option for ordering tickets online this year, all ticket requests for the immensely popular festival by phone, fax or in person must go through the festival box office at the UW Memorial Union. That’s meant some long waits for patrons, sometimes more than 90 minutes during the first couple of on-sale days.
The Democrats incurred such large losses in the 2004 election because voters were more concerned about terrorism than the economy, said New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg in Madison on Tuesday.
Hertzberg was here as part of the first day of The New Yorker magazine’s College Tour. New Yorker writers and cartoonists will be on campus today and Thursday. His appearance, entitled “The Next Four Years,” came before more than 1,000 people in the packed Great Hall of the Memorial Union.
Former University of Wisconsin basketball player Boo Wade was put on 18 months’ probation today and ordered to get domestic violence counseling as a result of his failure to complete the county’s First Offender Program.
And new information filed with the court showed Wade was involved in physical abuse of several other women.
Freshman UW football player Marcus Randle El has been suspended from the team after his arrest Monday for domestic battery. Randle El, 18, was arrested at about 12:50 p.m. at his dorm room at Ogg Hall and booked into the Dane County Jail. He was released after someone paid his bail at at 5:30 p.m.
Randle El can appeal his suspension. Until he is reinstated, he is ineligible for spring practices, which start Saturday.
The demolition of Ogg Hall and the construction of its replacement comes before the Board of Regents for approval later this week.
UW-Madison planners are seeking authority to spend $35.9 million on building a 615-bed residence hall at the corner of Dayton and Park streets, greenspace and a pedestrian mall.
The Rev. Al Sharpton compared George W. Bush’s re-election a few months ago to a shell game in New York’s Times Square where con artists separate tourists from their money.
“George Bush and Karl Rove engaged the public in a three-card political monte game last year,” Sharpton told a revved-up crowd in a near-capacity Union Theater Monday night during his Distinguished Lecture Series “sermon.”
University of Wisconsin students launched a three-day hunger strike this morning, trying to draw attention to spiraling tuition costs that they say threaten to price low-income residents out of an education.
The protesters are calling for Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature to roll back tuition to 2003 levels, before they raised it 37.5 percent.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is throwing a rock concert to celebrate the world’s oldest stone.
A piece of zirconium silicate some 4.4 billion years old and no bigger than a grain of sand will appear on stage next month with the New York band Jazz Passengers, who will use rocks as percussion instruments and use recordings of rock strikes on a synthesizer keyboard.
Demand for educated workers is rising and presenting the best job market for new college graduates since before the 2001 recession. But campus career counselors warn it’s still no cakewalk for the class of 2005.
For the second time in 28 days, a University of Wisconsin football player has been suspended for violating the school’s student-athlete discipline policy. Freshman wide receiver / quarterback Marcus Randle El was suspended indefinitely from all practices and games, UW officials announced Monday. Randle El, 18, was arrested and faces a battery charge for his alleged role during a fight in a campus dorm.
The debate over the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha’s future is prompting the college’s dean to warn that a merger with UW-Milwaukee would hurt students who need extra help getting into college.
Mentions that some University of Wisconsin-Madison students, staging a hunger strike in the Capitol to protest tuition increases, said they should not be asked to pay the sales tax on any music, movie or other materials they download from the Internet. They noted that Doyle’s budget would increase in-state undergraduate tuition next year by 5% to 7%.
Quoted: UW-Madison economist Donald A. Nichols.
Job prospects are improving for students earning master’s of business administration degrees, said Blair Sanford, director of MBA career services at the UW-Madison School of Business.
Sanford cited UW-Madison employment data, along with a new survey of 57 business schools conducted by the MBA Career Services Council, the association for MBA career services professionals.
Just so nobody gets the wrong idea, Evelyn Howell is a big supporter of wind farms and the push for alternative forms of energy. She is, after all, an ecologist in the Department of Landscape Architecture at UW-Madison.
UW-Madison police found a man dead in a men’s restroom in Van Vleck Hall Friday morning. Police said the call came in at 9:48 a.m. They responded and found the 66-year-old man had no pulse and was not breathing.
University of Wisconsin researchers have confirmed the usefulness of a non-invasive test that identifies people at increased risk for heart disease.
James M. Stein, co-director of UW Health Preventive Cardiology, presented the study results Sunday at the American College of Cardiology Annual Scientific Sessions in Orlando, Fla.
A quick, inexpensive test that measures cholesterol in the skin without the need for drawing blood can detect heart disease in middle-aged people, according to a study presented Sunday by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
Quoted: James Stein, a cardiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s smaller than Noah’s ark, but it does sit seven stories up, at least for now. It’s a handmade, 13 1/2 -foot, Maine peapod-style wooden rowboat. University of Wisconsin-Madison students and boat builder Josh Swan are building it in the seventh-floor woodworking studios of the campus’ Mosse Humanities Building.
A computer network consultant who evaluated bids for a $116 million state project ended his government work in the midst of final contract negotiations to work for SBC – the firm that had landed the huge deal two months earlier. UW officials have had major concerns with the project since its inception because they believe it gives too much control to the telecommunications firm. Instead, they wanted to have state employees manage at least part of the network.
The I-94 corridor connecting Madison and Milwaukee is not only 70 miles of concrete enabling us to get back and forth in just a little over an hour but a main artery along the “IQ Corridor” that stretches through Wisconsin from the Twin Cities to Chicago. Wisconsin’s ability to flourish and grow depends in part on our ability to remove any old blockages in this artery and cooperatively leverage the strengths of our two cities.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive a $15 million donation to help build a research complex on campus. The donation is the single-largest grant from the Oscar Rennebohm Foundation of Madison.
The national economy will perform well this year, but Wisconsin’s will perform better, about 100 people attending the semi-annual Economic Outlook conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were told Friday. “We are in the sectors that are doing well,” said Donald Nichols, a UW economics professor and an expert on the state’s economy.
The Oscar Rennebohm Foundation is giving $15 million to help build a research complex on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Gov. Jim Doyle was planning to announce the donation today at the university.
Next week, the contents of the New Yorker magazine will burst off the page and onto the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
The “New Yorker College Tour,” running Tuesday through Thursday both on and off campus, will bring some of the magazine’s well-known reporters, columnists, critics and cartoonists to town with a schedule that reads like the octogenarian magazine’s table of contents page.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is expected to renew its apparel contract with adidas, giving the company six more years to outfit Badger athletic teams.
The proposal, which comes before the Board of Regents next week, would provide the teams with $900,000 worth of shoes, equipment and apparel in the first year of the contract. It would increase incrementally to a value of $950,000 in the sixth year. The current annual value of merchandise from adidas is $825,000.
