Quoted: Stephen Ward, who heads the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said: ?Has there been an actual conflict of interest? I don?t find it in this case. What about the perception of a conflict? That is where I think some might see the relationship between him and the public relations firm and have some reason to doubt.?
Due to the enormous influence of social media, many schools are finding unique ways to attract more students to their Twitter pages. For example, a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus has promised to donate $1 to the school for each additional person who follows the institution on Twitter, or for each new “like” on Facebook, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
Quoted: Stephen Ward, a former B.C. professor and now the director of the Centre for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lambasted police for blaming the media for the riots.
Researchers say wireless access points could double as analysis tools that detect radio-frequency interference and automatically adjust to preserve the quality of Wi-Fi connections. Such upgraded devices could eliminate the need for separate, costly spectrum analyzers that discover interfering devices but do nothing to counter interference, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
A new business designed to help college students track and share social events on and around campus has launched at seven campuses in Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin this year and plans are to expand to as many as 300 schools.
The state Department of Public Instruction is requiring backers of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy to provide scientific research supporting the effectiveness of single-gender education to receive additional funding. The hurdle comes as university researchers are raising questions about whether such evidence exists. In an article published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers also say single-gender education increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism. Efforts to justify single-gender education as innovative school reform “is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence,” according to the article by eight university professors associated with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde.
Que Lan, a professor in the UW-Madison Department of Entomology, is an expert on mosquito biology. She grows research mosquitoes in her lab and credits the weather for few mosquitoes this summer.
Quoted: “The working age population and the child population are most vulnerable economically,” said Katherine Curtis, a UW-Madison demographer. “These are our working families with children, our early- and mid- and late-career workers.”
It?s national ovarian cancer awareness month, and while researchers at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center continue to make strides against the deadly disease, the key continues to be early detection.
A UW-Madison law group ? that clears those who?ve been wrongfully convicted ? is getting a big boost from more than a million dollars in federal grants. Until now the Wisconsin Innocence Project has worked on exonerating individuals following their conviction or appeal, sometimes after spending years wrongfully imprisoned.
Roger Clegg, president of the right-wing Center for Equal Opportunity, stood up at a downtown hotel last week to give a press conference on Affirmative Action in admissions policies at the UW-Madison. He jabbed a finger into a debate that has been festering not just on campus, but nationwide.
Bucky, it seems, has found himself in the middle of an old controversy made anew. Last week, the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity released two studies showing that in 2007 and 2008 the University of Wisconsin-Madison engaged in “severe discrimination” based on race and ethnicity. African American and Latino students, the report alleges, received preferential treatment over whites and Asians in undergraduate and law school admissions processes.
When this weekend?s Wisconsin Science Festival was in the planning stages, among the first to jump onboard were Madison artists and arts organizations. In its inaugural year, the festival is exploring the overlap between science and art. Says Laura Heisler, director of programming at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, “The arts people got it more quickly than the science people.”
Quoted: But Dennis Dresang, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor emeritus, said this isn?t the end of unions. He said that unions will instead enter a new, more efficient phase, which will likely include more lobbying.
On Tuesday, September 13, a mob of University of Wisconsin students overpowered the staff and swarmed into a room at the Madison Doubletree Hotel where Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, was giving a press conference on the release of two new reports from his organization.
Prohibition brought bad times to Madison: the first, and still worst, sustained violence the city?s ever known, cops in the Ku Klux Klan, even a dirty judge in hock to bootleggers. For more than a decade in the 1920s and ?30s, the criminalization of alcohol took a terrible toll.
The University of Michigan suspended its orphan works digitization project in response to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it and four other universities, including Cornell.
Quoted: Times sure have changed since manufacturing kept the state?s jobless rate at 3 percent, said Timothy Smeeding, a director at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A former UW-Madison finance major has come up with a way to help others afford college. He?s using social networks to fund a need-based scholarship.
Quoted: “When Wisconsin unemployment rates were at 3%, everyone was doing great, we were building SUVs and everyone was buying them,” said Timothy Smeeding, who directs the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We were manufacturing our pants off. But times are changing.”
UW-Madison is trying to help the public understand science this weekend not just through experiments and lectures but by linking the scientists at the Institutes for Discovery with their arts and humanities colleagues across campus. More than 85 public events, including performances, demonstrations, lectures and screenings, will be held as part of the first Wisconsin Science Festival starting Thursday and running through Sunday.
A dormitory at UW-Madison was evacuated Wednesday morning after a gas line was damaged at the construction site adjacent to the UW Natatorium. Students living in Bradley Residence Hall were evacuated from the building shortly after 11 a.m. while crews from Madison Gas and Electric repaired the leak. The portion of Elm Drive between Observatory Drive and the lakeshore path was also shut down.
Quoted: Timothy Smeeding at the Institute for Research on Poverty, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the Journal Sentinel “the middle class is taking a beating.”
Quoted: The weight loss was necessary, according to Dr. R. Michael Hofmann, medical director of the Living Kidney Donor Program at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, because of the potential risk to Roberts, not her brother.
Last week, the University of Wisconsin paid almost $500,000 to the Alliance Defense Fund for violating the First Amendment rights of Badger Catholic, the Catholic student organization on campus. ADF has litigated a number of cases against the University of Wisconsin over the years challenging the unconstitutional abuses inflicted on students and student groups by its mandatory student fee system.
Legislation to prohibit the sale or use of body parts of aborted unborn babies for research purposes (Assembly Bill 214?/?Senate Bill 172) has raised the standard ire and arguments of University of Wisconsin researchers: Limit what we do, and we will threaten to leave the state and create a black hole in the Wisconsin economy.
Quoted: Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said that another factor is that a lot of white households, especially among baby boomers, were more heavily staked in the stock market, through retirement funds or other accounts. And Wall Street, though battered, has bounced back more quickly since 2008 than the housing market.
Interview with Wisconsin economist Menzie ChinnIf those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, then a Wisconsin economist warns that some of the solutions proposed for the nation?s economy would be a bad idea. He?s Menzie Chinn, and he?s the author of a new book called “Lost Decades: The Making of America?s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery”.
The director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project says his group will use $1-million in new federal grant money to speed up the process of freeing people who have been wrongfully convicted.
Enrollment of new students at graduate schools in the United States dropped slightly from 2009 to 2010, despite an 8.4 percent increase in applications. It was the first decline in first-time graduate enrollment since 2003, according to the Council of Graduate Schools, and came after a 5.5 percent increase the previous year.
In her fifth year in the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, it?s fair to say Sun Prairie native and newly named drum major Sarah Edlund?s passion for music has only gotten stronger.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison residence hall was evacuated for 45 minutes on Wednesday morning after a gas line was damaged and leaked in a nearby construction area.
The question surrounding Interim Chancellor David Ward?s term length recently surfaced as UW-Madison?s University Committee requested he stay an additional year. While the interim position is only allotted a single-year term during a search and screen process, members of the UW faculty argue Ward?s background, collegiate experience and national insight put him in the best position to lead UW-Madison through Wisconsin?s rocky political climate.
Five days after the Authors Guild filed suit against the University of Michigan for its plans to release hundreds of digitized ?orphaned? copyrighted books to faculty and students, the university halted the controversial project and admitted to committing a ?number of errors, some of them serious.?
Noted: Environmental studies/sustainability: Programs in environmental studies are spreading as energy, water, food, and climate promise to be defining issues of the century. Starting this fall, students at the University of Wisconsin?Madison can major in either environmental studies or environmental sciences, for example. Environmental studies is an interdisciplinary degree, requiring students to select among courses in food and agriculture, health, energy, biodiversity, climate, history and culture, land use, and policy.
The nation?s new patent law is going to help major corporations at the expense of the little guys, said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the UW-Madison?s Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “This, basically, is a big-business patent bill,” Gulbrandsen said. “It doesn?t benefit small business and individual inventors. And we?re in an economy where you want small businesses to prosper and hire.” President Barack Obama signed the America Invents Act into law on Friday, the first overhaul of U.S. patent law since 1952. Supporters said the law will make it easier for inventors to bring their products to market and will spur invention and create jobs. But Gulbrandsen, whose office turns discoveries in UW-Madison labs into patents, said he thinks the opposite will be true.
Even without any promotional push from the University of Wisconsin, Russell Wilson is already on the some Heisman radars.
A different picture of last week?s student protest over UW admissions discrimination emerged from my vantage point inside the Doubletree Hotel press conference room compared to that of the author of Monday?s letter “Student protesters wrongly called a ?mob?.”
Quoted: “This change in the policy has real implications for how people operate so we want to be a good community partner in that,” said Gabriel Javier, Director of UW?s LGBT Campus Center.
MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin football fans, lured by the promise of a big profit, have begun selling their tickets to next week?s game against Nebraska to fans of the rival team.
A Wausau East High School graduate and his parents are trading Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers for donations to a scholarship program at the University of Wisconsin.
All the campuses in the University of Wisconsin System will be banning concealed weapons. ?It?s long been effectively state law, that people were not allowed to carry any kind of weapon, a firearm or anything else, on any part of the university?s property,? said UW System spokesman Dave Giroux.
The value of a follower on Twitter or Facebook can be nebulous ? unless you?re the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this month.
Mark Johnson and Bob Pulford, two names synonymous with U.S. hockey, were among the four men named Tuesday as recipients of the 2011 Lester Patrick Trophy for outstanding service to hockey in the United States.
Quoted: In the meantime, economists operate without a code of ethics. At the very least, it?s something journalists need to be aware of, according to Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: ?We?re trying to figure that all out,? said Jon Martin, professor and chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?We have a renewed sense of urgency and interest in this question after this horrible spring. Whether this is part of a larger cycle is very hard to discern simply because the record of actually counting these things and having reasonable statistics is not that long.?
Quoted: ?I think it is clear that the Republican party has shifted to the right, since 2001 when Governor Thompson was last in office,? said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at UW Madison. ?He may have a harder time selling some of the interest groups and activist groups within the party and outside the party, that he really is walking the walk and not just talking the talk, on this new, considerably more conservative Republican party.?
Donors who believe in social media have pledged $1 for each person (up to $50,000) who either friends the University of Wisconsin at Madison or its alumni association on Facebook, or who becomes a Twitter follower. Will Hsu, who graduated from UW-Madison in 2000 and is one of the donors, said that he views social media as “a powerful way for younger alums and current students to get connected and stay connected with the university.?
MADISON (WKOW) — The Dane County District Attorney?s Office says it will not file criminal charges against the Metro driver who was behind the wheel in a deadly crash in June.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (WKOW) — The University of Michigan has made serious mistakes in its legally challenged book digitizing project.
The former Bancroft Dairy that has been closed for a decade and eight South Side residential structures will be demolished as part of a redevelopment project to include a medical clinic, the city?s Plan Commission decided Monday night. The commission also recommended rezoning of the triangular parcel bounded by Fish Hatchery Road, South Park Street and Midland Street, vacating a public right-of-way segment on High Street that cuts through the parcel and a three-lot certified survey map of the subject property. The matter will go to the City Council next month. The proposed $25.2 million project would be a catalyst for significant change in the neighborhood and provide a transformational clinic to replace the Wingra Family Medical Center, said Al Fish, vice chancellor of facilities planning and management at UW-Madison. Fish said the goal is to begin operations at the new clinic within the next year.
Quoted: UW-Madison political science assistant professor Ryan Owens, who studies judicial behavior.
Prosecutors in Dane County say no charges will be filed in a deadly bus crash in Madison. A 58-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison librarian was killed June 22 when she was hit by the Metro bus turning a corner. The district attorney?s office reviewed reports from police, reconstruction investigators and the state lab in making the determination. Prosecutors say the bus had a significant blind spot that prevented the driver from seeing Maureen Grant in the pedestrian crosswalk.
A UW Madison professor has tackled the issue of costly textbooks head-on. Dr. Dr. Timothy Paustian is a UW professor who faced a dilemma ? more and more students who could not afford textbooks costing hundreds of dollars.
UW-Madison will pay nearly $500,000 in legal fees to Badger Catholic after the university lost a court battle with the student group. In September 2010, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the university violated the First Amendment by refusing to fund activities of Badger Catholic involving prayer, worship and proselytizing. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the university?s appeal this spring, ending UW-Madison?s appeal process.
The Wisconsin Innocence Project at the UW-Madison Law School has won more than $1 million in two grants. The project is a legal clinic that investigates and advocates on behalf of wrongfully convicted clients. The new funding will allow the program to continue and expand its work in cases where new DNA evidence and other evidence supports the individual?s claim of innocence.
Political cartoonists often exaggerate in their cartoons to make a point. I didn?t in this cartoon and that really reinforces the point. There are 35 figures in this cartoon and one of them, or about three percent, is African American. That is the exact percentage of African American students at UW-Madison.
A growing chorus of voices is calling for David Ward to remain as interim chancellor of UW-Madison for another year, a move that would delay the search for a permanent new chancellor until the 2012-13 academic year. After a committee of faculty leaders last week requested Ward?s one-year appointment be extended, governance groups for academic staff and students have also come out in favor of the extension. University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly said he is still listening to people?s opinions on the issue and needs to consult with UW Board of Regents leadership, but said he hopes to make a decision by the first week in October.
Colleges have done some strange things to get Twitter followers. To name a few: offering a free iPod, creating Twitter accounts for mascots, and promising a full scholarship to the applicant with the best 140-character essay.
Noted: The surge in the number of independent candidates represents a desire for peaceful transition away from authoritarianism and toward greater government accountability, said Edward Friedman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
