Stephanie Kim Kaufman, age 37, of Madison, passed away on May 13, 2009. She was employed as a research epidemiologist at the Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
James Wilmoth Jondrow, 87, passed away in Raleigh, N.C., on May 12, 2009. The Jondrows lived in Madison for 42 years where Jim served as pastor-director of the University Presbyterian Church in for 15 years, then became an administrator of environmental research at the UW.
Gladys Grace Moran, 90, of Madison, died May 16, 2009. Gladys was employed by the state of Wisconsin for 28 years. For most of that time she worked as a technical typist and administrative aide at the United States Army Mathematics Research Center (MRC) on the UW-Madison campus.
Francesca “Francie” Marie (Wall) Weber, age 47, of Madison, passed away on Saturday, May 16, 2009. She worked many years at UW Hospitals in medical records and distribution and was currently employed at the UW-Health Family Practice in Belleville.
James Roger “Jim” Kennedy, passed away peacefully on Friday, May 22, 2009. Jim was an architect who worked for several architectural firms in the Madison area before joining the planning staff at UW-Madison campus in 1972. In 1989 he was invited to serve the University of Wisconsin System Administration as director, Bureau of Architectural/Engineering Services. He retired in January 2001.
Richard “Dick” Walter Heine, age 90, died on Sunday, May 17, 2009. From 1947 to 1984 Dick held UW-Madison faculty positions from instructor through professorships. He was an engineering department chair from 1964 to 1974 and initiated the change from metallurgical engineering to materials science and engineering in both course subject content and department designations.
Camilla Ruth Hanson, age 81, passed away peacefully on Friday, May 15, 2009. Camilla served for many years on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.
Carol L. (Burkeland) Haag, age 73 of Verona, passed away on Tuesday, May 19, 2009. After farming in Lodi and Black Earth for many years, she worked in housekeeping at UW Hospital for 24-plus years before retiring.
Steven L. Key died peacefully early on May 26, 2009. He worked for a time at the UW-Madison physics department.
States fund public colleges primarily based on how many students are enrolled. But a number of legislatures are considering policies that would link funding to whether students graduate. Lawmakers in Ohio appear likely to adopt a plan, introduced this year, that would base 100% of higher education spending on course and degree completion. Indiana is considering a similar but more modest proposal. And in Louisiana, the governor and Legislature have called for plans that tie 25% of higher education funding to student success.
Madison is the nationâ??s seventh-best city when it comes to stable employment, new career opportunities and presence of the â??creative class,â? according to a new ranking by Kiplingerâ??s Personal Finance, a money management magazine.
The magazine cited Madisonâ??s unemployment rate, which is lower than the national average; UW-Madison and state government, which account for 20 percent of employment in the metropolitan area; and the cityâ??s â??strong mix of tech and biotech firms.â?
Of all the seismological hot-spots around the Pacific Rim, none has been as well documented as the Nankai Trough.
“We have just a phenomenal record of earthquakes here,” says Harold Tobin from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
During a night of partying, college students can get rowdy. We’ve all seen it. Many of us have lived it.
They can be loud, obnoxious and, to delicately put it, forget their boundaries.
Irritating? No doubt. But should a university punish students for unruly behavior outside of campus?
If the behavior is serious and repeated, it should.
Those University of Wisconsin football fans who have criticized the school’s non-conference football schedules as soft and lacking big-name programs might want to sit down before they continue reading.
UW athletic director Barry Alvarez is working to get Notre Dame on the Badgers’ schedule, with 2012 through 2015 as the window of opportunity.
Two downtown Madison bars who faced non-renewal of their liquor licenses are safe for now, but the fate of a third bar is in the hands of the Alcohol License Review Committee.
Madison Avenue and Johnny Oâ??s, located next door to each other on University Avenue, will keep their licenses as part of a stipulated agreement reached between the Madison Police department and the barsâ?? owner, Jon Okonek,. It includes closing Madison Avenue from July 1 to July 30 of this year.
Madison’s Alcohol License Review Committee agreed Tuesday night to accept lesser punishments for two of three bars in lieu of liquor license non-renewal â?? the punishment originally proposed by police.
The agreements allow the Downtown bars Johnny Oâ??s Restaurant and Madison Avenue, both owned by John Okonek, to keep their licenses, while imposing several new requirements on them and suspending the liquor license for Madison Avenue from July 1 to 30.
A judge will decide next month whether to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the family of murdered UW student Brittany Zimmermann.
The suit accuses the Dane County of mishandling the 911 call Zimmermann made from her cell phone the night she was murdered.
Noted: UW Hospital has achieved Magnet Recognition status from the American Nurses Credentialing Center for excellence in nursing service.
The hospital joins 11 hospitals in Wisconsin, including St. Maryâ??s Hospital in Madison, that have been recognized by the center for recruiting and retaining high-quality nurses.
Unlike most state employees, faculty and academic staff working within the University of Wisconsin System don’t have the right to form unions with collective bargaining powers.
Yet if ever there was a time when such an option might look appealing, it’s now.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced May 7 that he hopes to start filling the state’s massive $6.6 billion budget deficit over the next two years by rescinding 2 percent pay raises for non-union state workers. He also plans to make all non-emergency state personnel take eight days of unpaid furloughs in each of the next two years — which equates to another 3 percent pay cut.
Edgewood College business ethics professor Denis Collins is relaxing on the front porch of his two-story home on West Lawn Avenue, chuckling over the latest novel from Christopher Buckley.
Along the shady sidewalk, a pair of young mothers walk past pushing baby strollers. Nearby, a male cardinal whistles from a branch of a lilac in full bloom. It’s a classic Madison setting — one seemingly far removed from the world of corporate scandal, Wall Street rip-offs and double-digit unemployment that dominates today’s business headlines.
Their primary purpose is to serve the scholarly mission of the archive. But Michele Hilmes, director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, allows that three new online exhibits may appeal to an audience far broader than academics and researchers â?? including star-struck movie fans.
The center, a partnership of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, collects materials related to Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Three of the center’s collections are featured in the new online exhibits “The Papers of Costume Designer Edith Head,” “Radio Pioneers in Madison” and “Photos and Flat Graphics.” The latter is a collection of nine slide shows focusing on Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, The Ed Sullivan Show, Rita Hayworth, Gary Cooper and other files.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said seasonal activity means job postings and fewer notices from state employers that they’re laying off workers with no hope of calling them back.
The newest “Star Trek” movie deals with a subject close to my heart: interracial children.
As the mother of interracial children myself, I wondered how this fascination with dual parentage would play out. In the movie, it emerges not in the epic scope of interplanetary warfare, but in the figure of Spock, here situated as a biracial child coping with identity confusion.
Author: Leslie Bow is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine
A new study offers a ballpark projection of the Chrysler Kenosha Engine Plantâ??s effect on the local economy.
The report, commissioned by the United Way of Kenosha County, figures the auto plant supports 2,133 jobs, $154 million in wage and salary income and more than $203 million in total income.
It emerged late last week, as the wheels continued to grind in the bankruptcy process that calls for the Kenosha plantâ??s closure.
Steven Deller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of agricultural and applied economics, and Kenosha County UW Extension Professor Annie Jones created the estimate, using an economic impact computer modeling system.
Student loan defaults are at their highest rate since 1998, and likely will go higher. And though federal student loans offer some payment modification options, private loans are far more onerous, because even filing for bankruptcy rarely wipes out the debt. Congress might tackle bankruptcy law reform again this year, but it decided as recently as last year not to allow student loans to be easily discharged through bankruptcy filings.
Soon, credit won’t be so easy to get. Last week, President Obama signed legislation that restricts a number of controversial credit card practices, including issuing credit cards to college students. The law prohibits lenders from issuing credit cards to individuals younger than 21 unless they can prove they can make payments or get a parent or guardian to co-sign.
This week, a statewide coalition led by the University of Wisconsin and called All Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education will hold its first public forum in Wausau. Wausau is the first site of a planned six or seven meetings statewide. According to organizers, Marathon County was chosen in part because of the Building Responsible Alcohol Values and Options coalition, which has been working on the issue since 2003.
Quoted: “This book would be useful for art lovers and future historians to un-derstand the rich heritage of the ancient Anga (modern Bhagalpur). It will help them in understanding the importance of the idea of `history at your doorsteps,” said emeritus professor of history, languages and culture of Asia, University of Wisconsin (US), A K Narain. “We have managed to preserve some of these paintings and folklores associated with it at Bhagalpur Museum. Due to the lack of any institu-tional support, several artists associated with the art switched over to other professions,” Sinha said.
When President Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in March, many scientists hailed the move as a long-awaited boost for one of the most promising fields of medical research.
Quoted: “I think NIH has been hearing from many, many people how important it is to fix this,” said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin who served on Obama’s transition team. “I can’t say how they will do it, but I’m confident they want to.”
Quoted: Ed Friedman, a specialist in Asian international relations at the University of Wisconsin, was not optimistic. “The continuing development of nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them by North Korea … has large and dangerous consequences,” he said by email.
Judging from the TV ads for drugs that treat osteoporosis, you would think that the bone-thinning disorder is something only women have to worry about, and that men can simply ignore what Sally Field and other talking heads have to say about the disease.
You would be wrong.
Though osteoporosis is less common in men than in women, it still takes a toll on men.
It’s a painless illness in which bones become fragile and are more likely to break, and its first sign may be a fracture of the hip, spine or wrist.
The disease can progress silently, according to Neil Binkley, a physician and researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
The way to fight Alzheimer’s disease is to intervene decades before someone demonstrates symptoms, U.S. researchers suggest.
“The future of this disease is to intervene decades before someone becomes symptomatic. This analysis says you can save literally billions of dollars in long-term care costs if you can intervene at an earlier stage,” study co-author David Weimer of the La Follette School of Public Affairs said in a statement. “What you don’t know costs a lot of money when it comes to this disease.”
Outdoors lovers can go stargazing at Wisconsin state parks this summer.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s astronomy department’s annual Universe in the Park program got under way Friday night at Blue Mound State Park.
The program is set to run 38 times throughout the summer at state parks around Wisconsin.
College students who frequently drink to extremes and are inclined to be thrill-seekers are more likely to be physically injured as a result of their alcohol use, a new study shows.
U.S. researchers found that students who binged heavily on alcohol at least four days a month were five times more likely to be physically hurt than their peers. Male students who had at least eight drinks on each of these drinking occasions and females who had a minimum of five drinks on each of these occasions were considered “frequent extreme heavy drinkers” in the study.
Quoted: “I’ve never seen a parent flee in this manner from state-mandated medical treatment,” said Shawn Francis Peters, who teaches religion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law.
Quoted: “How is the greater good going to be served by putting kids in foster care?” said Shawn Peters, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who teaches about religion and the law. “However, a child has died and a person was found guilty. That is not something to be trifled with.”
Quoted: David Riley, a professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at-home fatherhood usually begins with families considering schedules, finances or other everyday issues. From there, attitudes evolve — and the economy is one real catalyst.
Quoted: But a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist says the problem goes back much further than the last couple of years.
Using statistical modeling, Chris Kucharik found that the northern quarter of the state has received 15% to 20% less rain from the decade of the 1950s to the decade ending in 2006.
“This doesn’t even include the drought years after 2006,” said Kucharik, an assistant professor of agronomy and environmental sciences.
Universities and colleges are “missing the mark” in their fight against binge drinking on campus, which a new study says leads to 500,000 injuries in one year in the U.S. alone.
The research suggests that blanket efforts, such as cutting down on drink specials at campus pubs, may not be enough to curb consumption or prevent alcohol-related injuries. Universities have to pinpoint the students who are most at risk and perform some basic interventions with them, said one of the study’s authors.
Despite some efforts, drinking on campus has remained a problem. An estimated 500,000 college students in the United States suffered alcohol-related injuries in 2001 according to Marlon P. Mundt, assistant scientist in the department of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author for the study.
Can poker make you sick? How can a few herbs make your Memorial Day barbecue a little healthier? Why has the world community failed to stop genocide? “The Why Files” takes on scientific questions great and small, on the Web and in a new book. (Answers below.)
“The Why Files” has been serving up weekly samplings of science on the Internet for 13 years, which is about as long as msnbc.com has been in existence. “When the Internet was a vast wasteland, we were lucky to get out in front,” said one of the site’s creators, Terry Devitt, director of research communications at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It was the tweet read â??round the world.
Last month â?? using only his mind â?? UW-Madison graduate student Adam Wilson composed and posted a message to the social networking Web site Twitter.
The telepathic tweet caused quite a stir. Within a few weeks, Wilson had more than 130,000 followers on Twitter, the most followers of anyone located in Madison.
Lawmakers protected state universities from further deep cuts Friday as they moved to try to fill a $1.6 billion hole in the state budget.
The move by the budget committee comes as Gov. Jim Doyle and lawmakers seek to impose cuts on schools, local governments and most other state agencies in response to falling tax revenues.
But Democratic lawmakers said they feared doing more harm to the UW System, which absorbed severe cuts in 2003 and isnâ??t receiving enough money in the upcoming budget to keep pace with rising costs.
The Legislatureâ??s budget committee has voted to cut $120 million from the University of Wisconsin Systemâ??s budget over the next two years.
The committee, however, also approved spending $15 million for a retention fund for high-demand faculty members and to pay for UW research initiatives in bioenergy, DNA and biotechnology.
Quoted: Dr. Darold Treffert, a former president of the Wisconsin Medical Society and one of the state’s autism research pioneers, believes both sides have some truth on their side.
“Some of the increase is no doubt due to what we call diagnostic creep, but beyond that there does seem to be a real increase,” said Treffert, who retired from active practice five years ago but remains a clinical professor at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “I’ve been out and about in the woods this spring and I’ve seen a lot of acorns in the woods,” said UW-Madison Professor Eric Kruger. “Oaks are mast (providing fruit for animals, etc.) seeders and some years they really live up to that reputation.”
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student who was threatened last year with deportation to Nigeria has graduated from the School of Pharmacy, but her future remains unclear.
Temitope “Tope” Awe, 24, made headlines in April 2008 when Immigration Customs and Enforcement planned to deport her and her family, even though she had lived in Milwaukee with her parents since she was 3 years old.
Look, I know Barry Alvarez wasnâ??t a math major at Nebraska, but there is one thing about the University of Wisconsinâ??s season-ticket numbers as announced by Alvarez that simply doesnâ??t add up.
In a press release last week, Alvarez, the athletic director, and Bret Bielema, his football coach, proclaimed themselves â??pleasedâ? that 94 percent of the general-public season-ticket holders for football have renewed for the upcoming season.
Q: Do birds ever or usually nest in the same nest from season to season? Do they ever nest in other birdsâ?? old nests?
A: Most small birds, such as songbirds, build a new nest each breeding season, although they often reoccupy the same territory or join the same colony, says Stanley Temple, emeritus professor of conservation in the department of forest and wildlife ecology at UW-Madison. Saving energy and resources can be important to a bird, he adds, which shows up in a number of recycling strategies.
The full-scale unveiling of a new online jobs tool for highly skilled UW-Madison alumni is set for August, after a successful test launch with about a dozen area firms finished up this month, organizers said.
“We got very good feedback,” said Mary DeNiro, vice president of marketing and communications for the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
Noted: If nearly 3,300 season tickets were left on the table by University of Wisconsin football fans for 2009, what happens next year when thousands of UW employees are feeling the effects of furloughs, salary cuts and, perhaps, layoffs? â?¦
Bad budgets are old news in the Sunshine State. While colleges across the nation are coping with the recession, public universities in Florida, a state with finances that resemble a Ponzi scheme, have spent years doing without.
Ask Paul Outka, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s highly regarded English department. But don’t call him on his office phone this fall. He won’t have one anymore â?? it’s among the latest victims of cost-cutting.
This year would break all the crystal balls in admissions. That much seemed certain months ago. After all, the statistical models that deans use to predict enrollment outcomes rely on historical data, but no moment in recent history had looked so hazy or so dire.
Amy B. Abrams pondered this last summer when she started her new job as the dean of admission and financial aid at Sarah Lawrence College. In her first year as a top enrollment official, she had to recruit students to one of the most expensive institutions during a recession. This task made sleep iffy, so Ms. Abrams kept a notepad by her bed. Often she woke at 3 a.m. and jotted down ideas â?? anything that might help her enroll enough qualified freshmen this fall.
Many scientists and other advocates of studies involving human embryonic stem cells had expected the pace of such research to quicken after President Obama signed an order in March easing restrictions on the types of studies eligible for federal funds. But some now are questioning whether proposed new ethical guidelines, which the National Institutes of Health released for comment last month, might have the opposite effect, The Washington Post reported.
Some faculty and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are concerned that expansion plans could hurt the university by moving academics away from the main campus to other locations, according to a recent survey.
But others said they support the initiatives, a central part of Chancellor Carlos Santiago’s ambitious plans to reshape the university.
UWM’s university committee recently surveyed 298 faculty and staff about the university’s master plan, which includes planned developments on the east side main campus, the planned engineering research complex in Wauwatosa, a School of Freshwater Sciences research facility at the lakefront and a downtown health research complex.
A proposal to allow illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition rates at UW schools will remain in the state budget.
The provision allows students who graduated from a Wisconsin high school to qualify for an in-state tuition break at any UW campus or technical college.
You can ride your bike through the solar system in Wisconsin this summer. Call it a combination of outdoor recreation and science education. Jim Lattis, director of UW-Madison’s Space Place, says Planet Trek utilizes the Dane County trials system to represent eleven major objects in the solar system, at a scale of 1-to-200-million.
Wisconsinâ??s same-sex couples are a big step closer to having their relationships recognized by the state.
The Legislatureâ??s budget committee voted 12-4 Friday for a plan allowing gay and lesbian couples who live together to form domestic partnerships and receive some of the same benefits as married couples.
Quoted: â??Weâ??re about to have a big problem,â? said Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin. â??Foreclosures were bad last year? Itâ??s going to get worse.â?
Noted: Those living near the yet-unopened Union South might be dealing with some noise at night from outdoor parties.
The Plan Commission approved a detailed plan for the new Union South on the UW-Madison campus that includes outdoor weddings, movies and other events that could draw hundreds of night-time visitors.
An outdoor dining terrace on the southern end of the five-story building has a capacity of 585 people. The UW says it could be used for a variety of gatherings including wedding receptions or other social gatherings.
Quoted: â??The change weâ??ve seen is a different kind of change. In fact weâ??ve seen the creation of a new kind of virus through the process of reassortment,â? said Christopher Olsen, a public health professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. â??The viruses weâ??ve seen emerge in pigs are a mixture of the classical swine flu, avian flu and human flu,â? he said. Experts also witnessed the emergence of a new subtype in 1998. â??Weâ??ve not been able to determine any specific reasons for why that began to happen,â? Olsen said.
