The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved a 5.5 percent tuition increase for undergraduates Thursday.
That comes out to $617 at the UW-Madison.
College costs are rising faster than inflation. That’s tough news for families with students in college, but it’s turning out to be a good thing for some technical colleges in the state.
A long-awaited study of aging in rhesus monkeys suggests, with some reservations, that people could in principle fend off the usual diseases of old age and considerably extend their life span by following a special diet.
The results from one of the two studies, conducted by a team led by Ricki J. Colman and Richard Weindruch at the University of Wisconsin, were reported Thursday in Science. The researchers say that now, 20 years after the experiment began, the monkeys are showing many beneficial signs of caloric resistance, including significantly less diabetes, cancer, and heart and brain disease. â??These data demonstrate that caloric restriction slows aging in a primate species,â? they conclude.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is expanding its relationship with Google and its online book search.
The university began working with Google in 2006 to digitize documents and historical materials in the university’s collection and make them available online.
So far, about 200,000 works are searchable.
The new agreement would make even more books available and allow purchased access to view the entire text of a copyrighted book.
Could eating less extend your life?
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicates that it seems to work for monkeys.
A 20-year study of rhesus monkeys found cutting calories by almost a third slowed their aging and fended off death.
It backs up what scientists have long known about mice, worms and flies, that their lifespan can be extended by deep, long-term cuts in what should be normal consumption.
Scientists at U-W Madison say eat less, live longer and healthier.
It’s called “Caloric Restriction” and it’s nothing new.
“It’s been known since 1935 that a reduction in calorie intake can increase the lifespan of laboratory rats and keep them healthier for a longer period of time.”
The UW Board of Regents has approved a 5.5-percent tuition hike.
The Board voted for the increase at all four-year UW campuses during it’s meeting Thursday. System President Kevin Reilly says it will impact students at the UW-Madison the most, with a $617 tuition hike for the upcoming academic year. The UW-Milwaukee will see a $359 increase and other four-year campuses will see tuition jump about $280.
MENOMONIE, Wis. — A healthy University of Wisconsin System is essential to rebuilding the state’s economy. Yet glaring discrepancies in compensation for the faculty and academic staff who power
UW institutions in the state pose a serious threat to our future viability.
Let me explain: Wisconsin has three broad groups of educators who are paid with public funds: the K-12 teachers, those who work in the Wisconsin Technical College System, and the faculty and academic staff who teach for the University of Wisconsin System.
The secret to a disease-free long life may be simple, a new study says: Eat a third less food.
But for most people that is no easy task, so scientists have turned to monkeys to learn what a severely restricted diet can do.
The answer, from a 20-year study at UW-Madison: Monkeys that eat 30 percent fewer calories than normal are three times less likely to develop or die from age-related diseases at any given time than other monkeys.
University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduates from Wisconsin will pay $745 more during the next academic year, under a 5.5 percent tuition increase and new student fee rates approved by the UW Board of Regents on Thursday for four-year campuses.
That means in-state UW-Madison students will pay about $8,300 in tuition and fees annually. Tuition and fees at other University of Wisconsin System institutions will range from about $7,700 at UW-Milwaukee, or $398 more than last year, to $6,246 at UW-Stout, a $307 increase. Mandatory student fees, which pay for things like student unions and health services, vary by campus.
University of Wisconsin System officials said the budget approved by the Board of Regents Thursday will mean larger classes, cuts in student services, tighter reins on spending and an increase in tuition.
UW President Kevin Reilly said there’s no doubt the next several years “are going to be very difficult” on UW campuses.
The operating budget cuts $50 million in state aid, freezes salaries and requires eight days of furloughs for all UW System employees.
Guidelines approved by the board also direct campuses to slow down hiring and travel while they make plans to cut or merge unpopular or redundant academic programs.
Google will greatly expand its Google Library Project through a deal it has made to digitize 10 million books in the libraries of 12 universities.
The 12 universities are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the 11 universities in the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago. The deal expands the number of agreements Google has made with universities from 15 to 25. Two Big Ten members, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had already made independent deals with Google, which this arrangement does not supersede.
Quoted: Mason Carpenter, a professor at the Wisconsin School of Business and author of “Managing Effectively Through Tough Times,” said too many CEOs, execs and managers panic when times get tough.
The predictions are dire, the language grim: Looming shortfalls. Gathering storm. Disturbing mosaic.
No, it’s not the economy, global warming or the sitcom industry. It’s the coming shortage of U.S. scientists and engineers, foretold for decades by corporate, government and education advocates. While there have been warnings for more than 50 years, a renewed push over the past four years has earned the attention of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Speaking to the National Academy of Sciences in April, Obama announced “a renewed commitment to education in mathematics and science,” fulfilling a campaign promise to train 100,000 scientists and engineers during his presidency. Only problem: We may not have jobs for them all.
Quoted: “There are five metatarsal bones (each related to a toe) and while 1 through 4 most often heal without issue, there is a 30-50 percent non-healing rate for 5th metatarsal fractures,” Dr. Ben Wedro, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin and a consulting onsite physician at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, said when discussing Yao’s injury.
Despite the rain, there was a bustle of activity and excitement Wednesday morning at the James Madison Park boathouse. It was the last day of a four-week adaptive rowing course and participants and volunteers were too busy setting up the boat shells to let a little rain slow them down.
The adaptive rowing group consists of 10 participants and approximately twenty volunteers. The participants have varying physical disabilities, including spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis and spina bifida, and most are in wheelchairs.
The course is a joint effort between the Mendota Rowing Club and the UW Adapted Fitness Program under the department of kinesiology. The collaboration is unique, Mendota Rowing Club coordinator Cayte Anderson said, because it allows UW-Madison students and faculty to assist the participants while other volunteers assist with rowing instruction. “We really couldnâ??t do it without each other,” Anderson said.
University of Wisconsin System students who live in residence halls and purchase meal plans could be hit with fee increases averaging $335 this year, budget documents show.
Some students said Wednesday the proposed hikes for student activities, services and room and board seemed excessive during a recession. But one national expert said they are a bargain compared to those in other states and will help pay for improvements.
A state lawmaker is attacking a five and a half percent tuition hike expected to be approved by University Wisconsin Board of Regents this week. Whitewater Republican Steve Nass is a member of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities.
Itâ??s an example of “arrogance” for UW officials to force a five and a half percent tuition hike on students in these troubling economic times. Thatâ??s the feeling of state Representative Steve Nass, a Whitewater Republican. “This is going to hurt middle-class families in particular because they are the ones whose sons and daughters don’t get grants. This is going to pound them.” The Board of Regents is expected to approve the increase tomorrow, raising tuition on the Madison campus about $620, to a total of $7300 a year.
University of Wisconsin-Madison sophomore swimmer Maggie Meyer was one of three swimmers to qualify for the ConocoPhillips USA Swimming National Championships at IU Natatorium in Indianapolis.
An Assembly committee took testimony Wednesday on whether University of Wisconsin System regents should be required to come from all parts of the state.
The Committee on Colleges and Universities is considering the bill that would require at least one member on the 18-member board to come from each of seven different geographical areas.
A proposal at the Capitol seeks to make sure the UW System Board of Regents represents all corners of the state.
There are currently no restrictions on where the 14 citizen members of the UW Board of Regents come from. As a result, state Representative Jeff Smith (D-Eau Claire) says ten of those slots are filled by people from Milwaukee and Dane counties, even though those areas only contain about a quarter of Wisconsin’s population.
UW-Madison will be able to expand its golf instruction thanks to a $45,000 grant, steered to the university by Edgerton native and professional golfer Steve Stricker.
The funds, distributed through the 2008 Ryder Cup Outreach Program, will allow UW-Madison to meet student demand for golf programs by adding eight more class sections over the next two years.
Quoted: UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri said the earwig, a distant relative to the cockroach, is at the top of almost everyoneâ??s most-hated insects list, just behind the Japanese lady beetle.
Geneva June Rusterholz, age 89, of Madison, died on Saturday, July 4, 2009. June worked as a cook at the University of Wisconsin cafeteria for more than 20 years.
This country is in the midst of historically significant discussions of some of the most complex and important issues of our time — economic stability, environmental protection, our role in the world to name a few. But we could make the argument that health care reform is the most important of them all, if for not other reason than without it we?ll not have the money for anything else. Of course we’ve been here before.
A new type of admissions index introduced Tuesday can help the USA’s graduate schools determine whether an applicant has personal attributes like resilience and creativity, which can’t be measured by standardized admission tests. And it’s just a matter of time before undergraduate admissions offices have a similar means at their disposal, says the testing company that designed the tool.
The University of Wisconsin campus is home this week to the Hip-Hop Institute.
More than 40 teachers and students from across the country are attending the event to learn more about the culture, practices and benefits of hip-hop.
It’s a week-long event aimed at rethinking the genre, organizers said.
Gov. Jim Doyle defended his travel documentation Tuesday in response to a news report that concluded his travel records didn’t meet state standards.
“Nothing I do is secret or undocumented, as they claim,” Doyle said in a meeting with The Post-Crescent editorial board.
Noted: William Workman researched online dating as a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student and also taught classes on how to successfully date using the Internet through the Memorial Union’s Mini Courses, WISC-TV reported.
Governor Jim Doyle’s not saying if he’ll run for reelection next year…but if he does, he could face a stiff GOP challenge. That from UW-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin.
A committee of UW-Madison officials recently selected the five research themes and faculty leaders that will guide UW-Madisonâ??s new research facility, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
The institute, which is currently under construction on University Avenue, will focus on research intended to improve human health. The five selected areas of focus are epigenetics, tissue engineering scaffold research, health technology design, optimization of biology and medicine, and systems biology.
Human embryonic stem cells could be a step closer to wide use in human studies, thanks to a research-ready cell line developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The universityâ??s Waisman Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility and the WiCell Research Institute, affiliated with the university, have produced a cell line that meets the Good Manufacturing Practices required for research in people, the organizations announced this week.
Sixty-three percent of Wisconsin residents approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president, according to a UW-Madison Badger Poll.
The poll, which was conducted over a two month period from April to June, asked 593 Wisconsin residents about their views on the nation, the state and the economy.
Wisconsinites are not feeling good about the economy.
Most of the nearly 600 Wisconsin residents surveyed in a recent UW Badger Poll are not happy about the way things are going in the U-S. Overall, 73% are dissatisfied with the state of our country – only 24% are satisfied. Political Science Professor Katherine Cramer Walsh says people feel a little bit better about Wisconsin’s economy than they do about the nation as a whole.
Borrowing a page from FDRs New Deal, some colleges are putting more students to work this summer than usual. The goal: to make sure they can afford to come back in the fall. St. Johns University in Collegeville, Minn., created 80 full-time student jobs, most of them involving physical labor such as clearing trails or painting dorm rooms. The College of Wooster in Ohio has hired more than 200 students â?? almost triple the number it usually employs in summer â?? to do chores such as planting vegetables and washing windows.
Quoted: Beetles help by breaking down fallen trees, as well. â??They digest the wood and are valuable in terms of nutrient recycling,â? said Dr. Ken Raffa, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies the beetles. â??And they introduce micro-organisms that further break down the wood.â?
The genomes of 17 different ants, fungi and bacteria that eat through hundreds of pounds of leaf matter a year could ultimately lead to new techniques for making biofuels.
Scientists from the University of Wisconsin, the Joint Genome Institute and Emory University are sequencing the first-ever community genome, searching for clues to how what’s essentially a 50 million-year-old bioreactor operates.
Hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines, whose use in the United States had effectively been curtailed by the Bush administration, can be used to study disorders and develop cures if researchers can show the cells were derived using ethical procedures, according to new rules issued by the federal government yesterday.
Quoted: “I think it is a huge step forward,” said R. Alta Charo, an ethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “They are making it absolutely possible to move this field forward and fund the research in a responsible way.”
CROSS PLAINS â?? To Andrew Winterstein, fly fishing is about more than catching fish.
Itâ??s also about more than just getting out into nature.
To Andrew Winterstein, fly fishing is all about water â?? and the respect it deserves.
â??I share my angling passion and talk about some of the conservation issues. If someone is going to be an angler, that person has to understand, and care, about water resources,â? said Winterstein. a clinical professor in the Kinesiology Department at the University of Wisconsin, who teaches a two-week summer course on fly fishing.
Quoted: “From an engineering aspect, there is no justification – unless the winning company said I’m going to (have the contractor) put two more inches of asphalt on,” said Dr. Awad Hanna, chair of Construction Engineering and Management at the University of Wisconsin.
Police are searching for the suspect, or suspects, who murdered a University of Wisconsin Milwaukee student in the Riverwest neighborhood.
Nathan Potter, 21, was found shot near the corner of North Dousman and West Wright Streets, just east of Humboldt Boulevard. The shooting happened just after 1:00 a.m. Monday.
The Obama administration has lifted some restrictions on stem cell research. Scientists say the new rules will give them a lot more freedom to do research that could one day lead to better treatments for injuries and disease.
In the grand scheme of things, news reports that Gov. Jim Doyle and his staff are not always submitting receipts with their travel expenses is mild, indeed, to the types of headlines being written about the nation’s governors these days. Thank goodness he’s not resigning before his term ends, hiking on a secluded state trail or auctioning off a US Senate seat to the highest bidder.
Quoted: Jeremi Suri, E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at UW Madison, says we now know that McNamara had deep misgivings about the conflict. “I would say historians have very mixed view of Robert McNamara.”
Quoted: â??There’s no mosquito that is infamous for the ones that are causing worse reactions. It could be as I said the ones that are messing with people are ones that haven’t seen in awhile,” says Phil Pelletteri, an entomologist at UW-Madison.
Everyone else has to carefully document their business travel expenses.
So should Wisconsin’s governor.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, with help from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and a UW-Madison journalism class, reported Sunday that Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his staff failed to properly account for their travel expenses nearly three quarters of the time in 2007 and 2008.
Federal regulators on Monday set new rules for government financing of stem-cell research. The rules will allow such work if a review panel determines that couples gave the necessary â??informed consentâ? for the use of their embryos. Scientists will get the chance to demonstrate to the review panel that older cell lines, created during the past decade and crucial to continuing research, meet this ethical standard.
Arthur Kelman, age 90, passed away on Monday, June 29, 2009. In 1965 he came to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to assume the chair of the Department of Plant Pathology. Despite an extremely demanding schedule, he taught the basic undergraduate course in plant pathology for many years.
A state agency has tentatively approved a University of Wisconsin System plan that would give campuses flexibility in implementing a mandatory furlough order.
Gov. Jim Doyle had ordered 16 unpaid furlough days for all state workers over the next two years to help close a $6.6 billion state budget shortfall.
His plan specified the dates of four furlough days per year.
But UW President Kevin Reilly said some of the days could conflict with class schedules.
Quoted: “The better you make the automation, the more difficult it is to guard against these catastrophic failures in the future, because the automation becomes more and more powerful, and you rely on it more and more,” said John D. Lee, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said governors across the country, including Doyle, are seeing their popularity levels fall as they face difficult budgets during the country’s steep recession.
Quoted: Charles H. Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said the stimulus could yet haunt swing district Democrats if unemployment continues to rise well into next year.
Quoted: In a recent paper, Mr. Danziger and Maria Cancian, professor of public affairs and social work at the University of Wisconsin, argued that because of changes in the economy, in the population and in social policy, economic growth per se did less to reduce poverty than it used to. Specific efforts to raise low-end wages, support working parents with child care and tax credits and raise education levels will be vital to reducing poverty, they said.
Gov. Jim Doyle’s travel records show the governor and his staff failed to properly account for 145 travel expenses over two years, according to a newspaper report published Sunday.
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The report, a collaboration between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism class, said Doyle and his staff did not supply travel receipts nearly 75 percent of the time in 2007 and 2008.
Tuition would rise more than $600 at UW-Madison under a proposal released Friday to increase tuition at the four-year schools in the University of Wisconsin System.
Tuition would remain unchanged at the systemâ??s 13 two-year colleges.
The recommendation by UW System President Kevin Reilly needs approval from the Board of Regents, which is expected to vote on it Thursday when it meets to approve the annual operating budget.
Beth Dumont, a fourth-year UW-Madison graduate student studying evolution and genetics, spends much of her time admiring the intricate internal architecture of mouse cells through a microscope.
Recent UW-Madison chool of Music graduate Ben Luedcke was figuring out how to balance his summer lawn-mowing business in Milwaukee with his directorship of a Madison church choir when he heard the news: The universityâ??s longtime summer vocal ensemble had been nixed.
Tuition would increase about $300 at most of the four-year schools in the University of Wisconsin System and remain unchanged at the system’s 13 two-year colleges under a proposal released Friday.
The recommendation put forth by UW System President Kevin Reilly needs approval from the Board of Regents, who are expected to vote on it Thursday when they meet to approve the annual operating budget.
It sounds like something from a science fiction movie: Sensors are surgically inserted in the brain to understand what you’re thinking. Machines that can speak, move or process information â?? based on the fleeting thoughts in a person’s imagination.
But it’s not completely fictional. The technology is out there. A researcher in Wisconsin recently announced the ability to “think” updates onto the Twitter website. Locally, researchers at Washington University have developed even deeper ways of tying humans and computers together.
Long for the melancholy tune of the lute or the majestic sound of the sackbut?
A weeklong festival featuring early music will be held on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus starting Saturday.
