Nearly three months after the man convicted of fatally stabbing Joel Marino in his Madison home hung himself in prison, his cellmate has been charged with assisting in his suicide.
Joshua Walters, an inmate at the Dodge Correctional Institution, was charged Wednesday in the death of 20-year-old Adam Peterson. Peterson, who dropped out of UW-Madison several weeks before he killed Marino on Jan. 28, 2008, was serving a mandatory life sentence.
A Dodge County Correction Institution inmate is charged with assisted suicide in connection with the death of his cellmate, Adam Peterson, last January.
Dodge County District Attorney William F. Bedker filed criminal charges on Wednesday against Joshua Walters, 20.
Dodge County authorities said that the charges follow an investigation by the Dodge County Sheriffâ??s Department, with the assistance of the Dodge Correctional Institution, which was holding Peterson.
In the first American effort of its kind, universities and colleges in Indiana, Minnesota and Utah are starting pilot projects to make sure that degree programs in their states reflect a consensus about what specific knowledge and skills should be taught
Quoted: Another anthropologist, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison , said, “Our evolution has recently accelerated by around 100-fold.”
A key reason, Hawks said, is the enormous growth of the world’s population, which multiplies the size of the gene pool available to launch new varieties.
Big drops in the stock market are taking a toll on investors both young and old. In fact, retirement and college funds…. and the people who depend on them… are suffering similar fates: many had too much money in stocks and not enough in safer investments. For retirees, it often means going back to work. For college students and their parents, it means scrambling to find money, fast.
“I think the lesson to take away from this is, if you’re in a 529 plan and your children are in high school, it’s time to start moving your money into more stable value type of investments,” says University of Wisconsin financial specialist Michael Collins.
Noted: Some majors, however, are faring better than others, particularly “anything you need a credential to do,” says Leslie Kohlberg, undergraduate career services director at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Engineering majors posted a 2.3% increase in their overall average, now $58,438, while the average salary offer for those earning accounting degrees rose 2%, to $48,377.
UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn â??Biddyâ? Martin has proposed a new initiative to provide additional investment in the undergraduate experience at UW-Madison through a premium tuition applied only on the Madison campus. We support this initiative for the following reasons:
â?¢ We believe there are important investments that need to be made in undergraduate education on our campus. We believe these investments will boost the quality of the experience and student outcomes (which accrue over a lifetime) by more than the increase in cost.
The Associated Students of Madison partially endorsed the Wisconsin Initiative for Undergraduates Wednesday and resolved to create a shared governance committee to oversee the allocation of the funds if the initiative passes.
â??We are hemorrhaging faculty. Itâ??s directly impacting the quality of education,â? ASM representative Jeffrey Wright said. â??Somethingâ??s got to give. Students on this campus who can be giving more should be giving more.â?
While ASM supports the initiativeâ??s vision, the group has lingering questions about how the initiative will operate if passed by the UW System Board of Regents in May.
The Associated Students of Madisonâ??s Student Council voted Wednesday to partially endorse Chancellor Biddy Martinâ??s budget initiative to raise student tuition Wednesday.
The council decided on only a partial endorsement for the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates in an effort to ensure all students, as well as council members, fully understand the proposal before taking a permanent stance.
Don Gehrmann’s granddaughter was over to his house the other day, having fun on the computer, when she asked him to come look at a link she had called up on the screen.
Gehrmann, 81, is probably the most legendary Wisconsin athlete you don’t know. That’s because since Gehrmann retired from competition more than half a century ago, he has kept a low profile.
Even in his home off of Cottage Grove Road, the trophies and press clippings are downstairs. Yet the story they tell is worthy of trumpets: Don Gehrmann was one of the great runners in U.S. history, a world-record setter, a phenomenal miler who competed in the Olympics and won 10 Big Ten track titles while running for the Badgers.
There is a lot of quiet in the Lower 9th Ward, but this was different.
The only sound was that of a gentle breeze and a couple of volunteers picking up trash. Everyone else — the rest of the volunteers and two residents — was silent, looking out over the tranquil water of the Bayou Bienvenue Cypress Triangle.
UW-Madison students are involved in the effort.
Quoted: Andrew Reschovsky, a UW-Madison professor of public affairs and applied economics, said a problem could occur if so little money is withheld for taxes that taxpayers are subject to interest and penalties.
“Whether itâ??s going to have an important negative impact on many people, I suspect not,” he said. “Having a little more in your pocket now and spending it probably is a good thing.”
Dear International Olympic Committee members:
We hope you have enjoyed your visit to Chicago, which would make a spectacular site for the 2016 summer games.
Please give the Windy City high consideration. And please know that Illinois’ neighbors to the north are very supportive and anxious to lend a hand.
Where asthma strikes, medical inhalers follow. Which got one disease detective thinking: Could asthma triggers be tracked via GPS technology?
Enterprising epidemiologist David Van Sickle at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to find out. He recruited four asthmatic undergraduates to carry around inhalers outfitted to relay location data when they were being used, via the Global Positioning System satellite network.
Quoted: Scott Craven, a wildlife specialist at the UW-Madison, has never seen that many loons at one time in Madison before, adding that the numbers could be as high as 100. He says theyâ??re probably just waiting for spring to thaw northern lakes.
U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl warned college students Tuesday to be wary of credit card marketing ploys involving free T-shirts, blankets and food, saying they can lead to mountains of debt.
Kohl spoke to about two dozen students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, touting a bill that would place new limits on credit cards for college students. He complained about direct-mail offers sent to students and kiosks on some campuses where companies offer freebies to students for signing up.
“Be very cautious,” said Kohl, a Democrat. “Don’t be enticed by a free sandwich or something. A lot of it is just plain common sense.”
After Biddy Martin gives her perspective on why the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates is necessary, UW students sound off on whether the proposal is right at this point in time. (Video.)
An estimated 80-percent of college graduates leave school with an average credit card debt of about $3,000. U.S. Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) says much of that debt is the result of predatory lenders taking advantage of uniformed students.
Kohl says credit companies have abused their powers in order to entice young people in to credit offers that are beyond their capacity to pay off. He points to interest rates that can quickly climb to as much as 30-percent and high credit limits that are completely unjustified.
The University of Wisconsinâ??s Undergraduate Initiative seeks to add a tuition surcharge on students from higher-income families to improve the quality and value of undergraduate education and put greater emphasis on need-based financial aid. Chancellor Biddy Martin has encouraged comments and dialogue with students and the community. In fact, thereâ??s an entire website dedicated to the initiative and an online forum where students are encouraged to share their thoughts and vote on the issues that matter most to them.
Itâ??s not something that Dr. Aliko Songolo, UW-Madison professor of French and Italian, but also African literature written in French, was expecting or even desired. In March, he had been informed that he had been named â??Chevalier dans lâ??Ordre des Palmes académiquesâ? â?? Knight in the Order of Academic Palms â?? by the French Ministry of Education. But once he received the honor, he didnâ??t mind having it at all.
While most of us born in the U.S. view Africa through an Anglophone lens, in part because of our long
history with Britain and the U.S. is predominantly an English-speaking country, it is French which is probably the more dominant language in Africa. â??French is the official government language of Congo as it is of some 20 African countries,â? Songolo said during an interview with The Capital City Hues. â??Ghana and Nigeria are completely surrounded by French-speaking countries.â?
Katherine May, dedicated nurse and respected educator, formerly of Madison, passed away April 2, 2009. Her last professional assignment was serving several years as a combined assistant director of Dane County Health Department and UW – Madison, College of Nursing faculty.
Gary M. Guitzkow, age 45 of Poynette, died on Sunday, April 5, 2009. Gary managed the UW Power Plant.
MTV has revealed the identities of the four freshmen who will appear in College Life, a new reality series that will follow the University of Wisconsin-Madison students and is scheduled to premiere Monday, April 13 at 10:30PM ET/PT.
Each episode of College Life will follow the students as they deal with their freshmen year, from dealing with academic pressures and homesickness to starting new friendships and romances.
In addition, College Life’s cast members will the ones who will be operating the MTV cameras — providing viewers with “an authentic and unprecedented” look at attending school, according to the network.
Quoted: “There’s not been any labour law reform here in decades,” said Joel Rogers, a pro-labour law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “You could describe the pace as glacial, if glaciers weren’t melting so fast.”
Each year Kyle Shatto and his egineering colleagues leave the Great Lakes Regional Conference empty-handed, but this year a 330 pound concrete canoe kept them a float.
“When we won, the other schools gave us a standing ovation,” Shatto said. “It was kinda neat to see the underdog win.”
The University of Evansville paddled their way to victory beating 16 other schools including 14 time champion University of Wisconsin-Madison, which held the title of concrete canoe champions.
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle lobbied on Monday for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Games and its plan to hold cycling events in his state.
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Doyle said he told the International Olympic Committee inspection team that Wisconsin was the ideal location for the cycling competition. He cited Wisconsin’s well-regarded bike trails, high percentage of bicycle riders and the major bike manufacturers headquartered in the state, including Trek Bicycle Corp. of Waterloo.
“We have a great bicycle racing culture in the state,” Doyle told reporters on a conference call. “It really is a very good fit.”
Research studies get underway all the time in Wisconsin. But as far we can tell, only one will have asthma sufferers carry an inhaler with a GPS device attached to it.
A UW-Madison researcher is looking for fifty adults from around Wisconsin , who suffer from asthma. He wants them to attach a global positioning device ….about the size of a deck of cards– to the inhaler that the people use during breathing difficulties. David van sickle is a health scholar in the department of population health sciences. He says the study will try to map when and where the environment triggers asthma symptoms. (Fourth item.)
FEMA trailers will live in infamy.
Less notorious, but perhaps just as faulty, is much of the housing on Indian reservations in northern Wisconsin. Houses nicknamed the “chicken coops,” built in the 1970s by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), overheat in summer and freeze in winter. Split-level “matchbook houses” get moldy and have particle board siding that disintegrates. Much of the pre-fabricated housing, including trailers, went up from the 1950s through the 1970s and is seriously outdated.
“There are whole subdivisions like that, and there are long waiting lists for ‘chicken coops’ on some reservations,” said architect Lou Host-Jablonski of Madison’s Design Coalition, who has made it his mission to bring affordable, green, multi-generational housing to the reservations. And, just as importantly, he wants to teach tribal members how to build the houses themselves in order to create vocations.
Host-Jablonski was recruited for the project by Sue Thering, an assistant professor in the UW-Madison Department of Landscape Architecture who has worked in blighted communities in coal country and elsewhere, and was asked for assistance by tribal housing officials.
Q: How much water is there in the atmosphere?
A: Water is an exceptionally interesting chemical with many important implications for life on Earth and the circulation of the Earthâ??s atmosphere. It is the only chemical that naturally exists in all three of its phases (solid, liquid and gas) in our atmosphere.
The chance this week for visitors to the Wisconsin Historical Museum to make a pair of Bascom Hill pink flamingo sunglasses also provides an opportunity for someone on the Madison City Council to step up and finally do the right thing.
This fall will also mark the 30th anniversary of the original Bascom Hill pink flamingo prank, so the timing is doubly appropriate.
Quoted: The outcome could boil down to the very organized teachers union (WEAC) versus the disorganized groups of individuals who are critical of the state education establishment, according to UW-Madison Political Science Professor Charles Franklin.
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle is in Chicago to support the city’s bid for the 2016 Summer Games — and the plan for his state to host cycling.
A key part of the bid is how compact the games will be. Doyle said he told the International Olympic Committee inspection team that by 2016 he expects a high-speed rail system to link Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison, the site of the cycling venue. He said a trip from Chicago to Madison would take about two hours
Noted: The Faculty Senate also discussed Chancellor Biddy Martinâ??s Madison Initiative for Undergraduates, which proposes a supplemental tuition increase over the next four years to provide more need-based financial aid and increase academic resources available to students.
According to a university publication, UW awarded $5.7 million in need-based grants to undergraduates for the 2006-07 academic year, the lowest need-based financial aid of all Big Ten universities.
Martin said the practice of using tuition for financial aid is standard at other universities and thinks the initiative would help the university continue to provide high-quality education at an affordable price.
As church bells pealed, Claire Gillen, a Notre Dame freshman, stood on the stone steps of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, accusing this fabled Roman Catholic institution of sin and sacrilege.
â??Itâ??s a scandal,â? said Ms. Gillen, voicing outrage over the universityâ??s invitation to President Obama, a supporter of abortion rights, to deliver the commencement address here on May 17.
The state of Wisconsin has built a tremendous resource in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even when the economy slows â?? as it has in the past â?? our education and research continue moving us forward. Weâ??ve pushed the boundaries of discovery and given the state a value worth more than just dollars and cents.
But, weâ??ve faced financial shortfalls for several years. Budget restrictions limit what we can do and prevent us from keeping pace with the costs of higher education. We need to find new ways to provide a world-class education and compete on a national and international playing field.
Governor Jim Doyle helps make the case for Chicago to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The Governor met on Monday with members of the International Olympic Committee, which is reviewing Chicago’s bid to host the summer games. If the city is selected, Wisconsin would host several cycling events, such as a road cycling race that starts in Madison and a mountain biking course at Tyrol Basin.
UW-Madison is being honored for its efforts to encourage bicycling as a positive commuting option on and off campus.
The League of American Bicyclists named the University of Wisconsin-Madison a silver award winner in its Bicycle Friendly Business program.
Steven G. Zelenski, age 64, died peacefully at home on Thursday, April 2, 2009. Steve was a clinical assistant professor in the UW Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry.
John C. Sine, age 60 of Madison, passed away peacefully at home, on Sunday, March 29, 2009. John worked for the University of Wisconsin Physical Sciences Lab in Stoughton for more than 20 years before retiring in 2005.
Ralph John Martens, age 87 of Madison, passed away on Wednesday, April 1, 2009. Ralph worked for the University of Wisconsin as a business administrator and accountant for 46 years, retiring in 1987.
Edward W. Furstenberg, age 79, died on Friday, April 3, 2009. Edward enjoyed a long career in public broadcasting that started at WHA radio in the early 1950s and ended with early retirement from WHA-TV in 1988.
Noted: There has been a national call for all medical colleges to increase class size by 30 percent, which the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine is gradually doing.
But to address the shortage more specifically, the school developed the Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine program.
Through WARM, the UW tries to identify students that may be a good candidate to work in a more rural setting.
“Some of that is coming from rural communities, some of that is students that really engage in community life and community support. Even back in their junior high and high school eras, we find that who really engages in the community, things like that will help predict who returns to rural practice,” said Dr. Crouse.
Quoted: Abrahamson took all the right steps to avoid third party groups getting involved, including raising a lot of money early and showing she was going to run an aggressive campaign, said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political science professor.
Television is usually way off the mark when it comes to showing the realities of organ donation. But a recent episode of “ER” was an exception, said one of the world’s leading transplant surgeons.
“It was quite realistic. It was quite good,” said Dr. Hans Sollinger, who will give a presentation on organ donation and transplantation Tuesday night in Menasha.
Jeanette Popp cried and gasped and tried to keep her trembling legs from buckling.
She could not stomach Christopher Ochoa’s courtroom testimony confessing to the rape and shooting of her 20-year-old daughter, Nancy DePriest, she writes in her memoir.
DePriest, a mother and restaurant manager, was robbed, raped, shot in the back of the head and left for dead in an Austin Pizza Hut in 1988. She died later in a hospital.
Ochoa, an El Paso native, confessed to the killing and spent 12 years in prison — but he didn’t commit the crime.
Ochoa, now a lawyer in Wisconsin, was released in 2001 through work done by the Wisconsin Innocence Project, a college course at University of Wisconsin-Madison, which investigates possible wrongful convictions.
On a spring weekend when winter makes a comeback, two events near the University of Wisconsin are trying to put a spotlight on homelessness and poverty.
In one event outside Memorial Union, students raised nearly $6,000. Besides the donations, organizers hope the Hunger Clean-Up will draw attention to a global problem.
“Poverty has been around for so long,” said Ranshi Mangalic, the chairperson for the Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group. “I feel like people forget about it, like it’s not solveable. It definitely is. We just have to prioritize and make sure we take legal action to solve it.”
Cat food could be the unlikely inspiration for important insights into multiple sclerosis and other afflictions of the central nervous system, scientists say.
While looking into why pregnant cats on a special diet of irradiated food began to have problems with movement, including paralysis and vision, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found that the felines’ nerve fibers had lost the fatty myelin insulation that helps signals pass along these axons.
Some UW-Madison engineering students say the proposed tuition increase for all undergraduates will hit them especially hard because they already pay a higher rate in the College of Engineering.
â??Itâ??s going to be a double whammy,â? said Adam Wright, a freshman from Green Bay who plans to major in nuclear engineering.
Consider the erotic potential between blogger and commenters.
The blogger is boss, a salon host with wit and whip. Certainly a blogger thrives on commenters â?? who wants to declaim to an empty e-room? But letâ??s be clear: blogger, sovereign; commenters, courtiers.
Thatâ??s why the bloggerati pounced gleefully last week on the news that one of their own had fallen in love with a commoner, er, commenter.
Reader, she is going to marry him.
Ann Althouse, 58, is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who blogs about politics, law and cultural whatnots in a sharp, occasionally ribald tone. She admires Rush Limbaugh, voted for George Bush in â??04 and Barack Obama in â??08. She attracts derision and applause from 500,000 monthly visitors.
Q: How fast does a hummingbird fly?
A: There are at least 330 species of hummingbirds and they are found only in the Americas, mostly in Central and South America. The smallest hummingbirds are the size of large insects. The worldâ??s most diminutive bird, in fact, is the male bee hummingbird of Cuba, which is 2 inches long and weighs less than 2 grams.
Wisconsinâ??s ruby-throated hummingbird, the only kind that makes its home here, is known to beat its wings up to 200 times per second. But the non-hovering flight speed of the small birds, according to UW-Madison zoology professor and hummingbird expert Robert Beiweiss, depends on the species and their foraging strategies.
Passers-by on Library Mall on Saturday afternoon were greeted by an energetic group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students and community members standing amongst their homes for the night â?? large, colorful appliance boxes.
The potential snowstorm did not deter them from participating in the fourth annual Box City sleep-out, aimed at raising awareness about homelessness in Madison.
Quoted: The situation is a reflection of just how difficult storm water can be to regulate, according to experts. The quality of storm water ordinances and their enforcement is uneven in Wisconsin because regulation is mostly left up to local communities, said Ken Potter, a civil engineer with UW-Madison who is an expert on storm water management.
Whatâ??s the difference between setting fire to a balloon filled with helium and one filled with hydrogen? (One produces a fiery explosion).
How does it feel to hold a cockroach? (â??A little tickle-y,â? according to 9-year-old Alexandra Hei).
What happens when you freeze a racquetball in liquid nitrogen and throw it against a wall? (It shatters).
The e is italic and lower-case. It hovers over the shallow vee of an open book, as if floating up off the middle pages. Smaller than a thumbnail, this icon appears with 19 titles in the spring 2009 University of Wisconsin Press catalog. It represents the availability of a title in digital ebook format. It also signifies the opportunities the UW Press is pursuing amid the contractions and growing complexities confronting the book-publishing industry.
“We’ve been going through this really big transformation of our publishing model,” says Sheila Leary, who assumed directorship of the press last June after 2½ years as interim director. “It used to be that for some books we’d publish simultaneous cloth and paper editions.” After a few years of working with companies like Netlibrary and ebrary to meet research and university libraries’ growing appetite for ebooks, Leary says, future editions will be paper and ebook or cloth and ebook.
State Rep. Steve Nass is asking the University of Wisconsin System to review the conduct of UW-Stevens Point Chancellor Linda Bunnell in the wake of a report that she failed to tell police immediately that she had caused a car crash on the UW-Madison campus.
Bunnell was in Madison to attend Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget address and, in a car registered to the UW Board of Regents, hit a parked car and proceeded to the event without notifying police.
Nass said the crash and other behavior by Bunnell, including dissastifaction among students and the school’s fundraising arm, warrant review by UW System President Kevin Reilly.
As students from the state’s private colleges lobby legislators for more financial aid, one lawmaker sees things differently.
Republican Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) says “it’s not surprising that young children who know nothing about life” want more money. He says the kids should be happy with what they’re already getting.
“Quite frankly, it’s unconscionable, as people get laid off or being told they have to take cuts in pay, for Governor Doyle and certain members of the state legislature to increase scholarships by 40% in two years!”
UW athletic department officials released a copy of a canceled check to 27 News as verification the transfer of a moped from Cindy Alvarez to a football player was a sale, and not a gift, but the copy deletes the name of the check writer.
27 News had made repeated requests for a copy of the cancelled check without redaction of the check writer’s name, after a moped dealer told 27 News the moped had been a gift from UW athletic director Barry Alvarez’s wife to the player. A UW official acknowledged such a gift would be a violation of NCAA rules, but said the transaction was a sale.
A legislative leader is backing a controversial tuition surcharge for UW-Madison students.
State Senate President Fred Risser says the University is hurting and needs the money. The Madison Democrat says Chancellor Biddy Martin’s plan to impose higher tuition costs on families making more than $80,000 a year seems to make sense. He says taxes are often based on the ability to pay, so a similar system may work for higher education.
A U.S. Army officer has been hired to be the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s military historian thanks to a gift from the late author Stephen Ambrose.
Ambrose donated about $500,000 to the university before his death in 2002 to endow a professorship of military history.
The historian who wrote “Band of Brothers” and other books named the professorship in part for his mentor, former UW-Madison professor William Hesseltine.
David Maley left his internship at Lehman Brothers last summer figuring he would be back on Wall Street in a glamorous investment banking job once he graduated from Colgate University in May. Now Lehman is history, and Maley is moving instead to a Cleveland suburb to start a management training program at an industrial supply company. Considering the job market, he’s just fine with that.
For many college students in the class of 2009, the post-graduation job hunt has turned into a quest for a rewarding Plan B â?? or in many cases Plan C or D.
