The House version of a federal economic stimulus bill would deliver more than $4.3 billion to Wisconsin over the next two years, under details of the bill released Friday.
That figure includes nearly $18 million for Madison schools and millions more for other local districts.
Decades before Sarah Palin was turning “Hockey Mom” into a household phrase, there was Madison’s Carol Marshall, a longtime supporter of city and UW-Madison hockey.
References UW Hospital and Clinics.
Gov. Jim Doyle has created a new office to oversee the massive distribution of federal economic stimulus money that is expected to flow to the state.
The Office of Recovery and Reinvestment also will look for ways to send the funds quickly to schools, local governments, and companies by speeding the regulatory process while still keeping environmental and quality standards, Doyle said.
Last semester, a man dressed as a FedEx employee burst into Kristopher Olds’ geography class, announcing he had a package for a student in the 70-person class.
It turned out he was no delivery man, but a marketer for the energy drink Red Bull â?? and the box was full of the product. Red Bull promoters hit up at least three classes across campus in a guerilla marketing campaign.
Although that scheme was unusually bold, college students are a prime target for such marketing techniques, experts say.
At UW-Madison, such solicitations are prohibited, unless the vendors get special permission from the university.
Derek J. Cripps, the UW-Madison dermatologist who developed the SPF rating system commonly seen on sunscreen bottles, died Friday in California after falling ill on a cruise, his wife said Saturday.
Cripps, 80, was born and educated in Britain but did his residency at the University of Michigan, said Eileen Cripps.
Surveillance cameras could capture ugly behavior near and inside Madison bars if a Downtown coalition’s ideas move forward.
The effort, begun last year and involving perhaps the broadest coalition ever to confront crime and violence Downtown â?? and the perception of it â?? includes Downtown Madison Inc., the city, UW-Madison, bar owners, police, the business community, neighborhood leaders and others.
Finding financial aid for college this year promises to be tougher than any final exam. The quest for money that begins for students and parents every January has taken on new urgency in 2009 amid fears that loans and grants will be scarcer than in the past due to the recession.
Quoted: Academic David Streckfuss from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in the US, who has studied the lese majeste law, believes there is no evidence to suggest the existence of an organised Republican movement.
Henry Weiner is a University of Wisconsin-Madison junior studying this semester in Prague, Czech Republic. Nate Juergens is a Macalester College sophomore studying this month in Rome, Italy.
On orders from their father (me) and mother (my spouse, Ann Juergens) they wrote emails about what they saw and felt an ocean away on Tuesday during Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Quoted: “I wrote a whole chapter in my book from those late-night memos,” said University of Wisconsin Professor Stanley Kutler, author of “The Wars of Watergate.”
Geron Corp. will enter uncharted territory when it begins the first federally approved human studies on an embryonic stem cell therapy, marking what some consider a major milestone in a field that’s still a long way from commercialization.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company plans begin testing a treatment using embryonic stem cells that could fix major spinal cord injuries in people.
Researchers Tell Morley Safer Red Wine Substance Resveratrol Could One Day Lengthen Lives
Noted: In one experiment, a group of rhesus monkeys is on a major diet. For nearly two decades they have been taking in a good 30 percent fewer calories than their well-fed brothers and sisters.
They are the centerpiece of a National Institutes of Health study at the University of Wisconsin on whether or not CR- calorie restriction – makes them healthier and extends their lives. To maintain their sterile environment, the 60 Minutes team had to suit up to visit them with Ricki Colman, the “project leader.”
The control animals are nearing the end of a typical monkey lifespan, about 27 years, and major differences in their overall health are becoming clear. The skinny monkeys actually look younger, their coats are shinier, and fewer have arthritis.
And the chunky monkeys? Many have diabetes, and a significantly higher number have cancer and heart disease.
Pound for pound, Colman says the lighter monkeys do better.
Dr. Richard Weindruch, who heads up the study, believes that calorie restriction turns on these monkeys’ genetic survival switch. A hungry life seems to lead to a longer life.
Gov. Jim Doyle has put the president of Madison Gas and Electric Co. in charge of figuring out how to quickly spend billions of dollars in federal economic stimulus money.
Doyle said Friday he understands Gary Wolter may have conflicts of interest in the unpaid position heading the new Office of Recovery and Reinvestment, especially since much of the money is coming for energy projects.
Wolter’s assistant will be Alan Fish, the vice chancellor of facilities, planning and management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the husband of Doyle’s chief of staff, Susan Goodwin. About 15 state employees will be assigned to work in the office, but there will be no additional spending on the effort, Doyle said.
A new program is being established in Wisconsin to help biotechnology companies take discoveries from the lab to the market.
The program is run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering and the Small Business Development Center. They will work with firms NeoClone in Madison, Catalent in Middleton and Invitrogen in Milwaukee.
Quoted: Donald Downs, a professor of political science and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one question sting operations raise is whether or not the people caught would actually have committed the underlying offense.
Can $400,000 buy UW-Madison a better campus radio station?
Former chancellor John Wiley thought so. Last year he earmarked an unrestricted grant to help WSUM move from its former location in the Towers on State Street. The station’s posh new studio is inside the newly constructed University Square multipurpose monolith.
The invitations have been sent through Facebook. The rules are set. Police and medical responders are ready to go.
When a whistle blows Saturday afternoon, University of Wisconsin-Madison students will begin pelting each other with snowballs in a fight they hope will go down in history.
The snowballs flew in barrage after barrage at UW-Madison, but Saturdayâ??s fight fell far short of the record that organizers hoped to achieve.
After two teams at the UW-Madison campus battled back and forth for about 45 minutes, organizer Mike Basak acknowledged the turnout was nowhere near the record for a snowball fight.
Numbers suggest certainty, and when it comes to campus crime, everybody wants answers. That’s what the Clery Act set out to reveal: How many rapes, burglaries, assaults? When? Where? Enacted nearly two decades ago, the federal law requires colleges to send the government lengthy reports each year, detailing their policies and tallying their total crimes.
But do statistics keep students safe? As campus security has become a national fixation, some scholars of the Clery Act â?? and officials who must comply with it daily â?? challenge the wisdom of producing timeand labor-intensive reports of dubious value. And they puzzle over a paradox: The law requires them to publish the numbers, but students and their families don’t seem to read them.
The snowballs were flying on the UW-Madison campus Saturday, but it probably won’t result in a world record.
Nonetheless, it was an amazing site to see on Bascom Hill. A UW student used a page on the social networking site Facebook to recruit students for the snowball fight of all snowball fights. He wanted to break the current record of most participants.
The students came prepared and excited. “I first heard about it in class, then the Facebook thing started, and you know, I loved watching that thing grow from the first few days from 200 to several thousand,” said student Jacob Sager.
A group of UW-Madison students braved the cold on Saturday to send a message to President Barack Obama.
They urged the newly inaugurated President to not forget his promise for change at the “Hold Change Accountable” rally outside of Library Mall.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison said it will use a new federal grant to combat violence against women on campus.
The school said the three-year, $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice will help in the fight against domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. UW-Madison has one of 21 projects to win the grant. The department received 131 applications.
While President Obama is promoting his economic stimulus package, some University of Wisconsin-Madison students are promoting the idea that Obama needs to live up to his many campaign promises.
Students gathered in downtown Madison Saturday for a peaceful rally calling on President Obama, Wisconsin state legislators, and new UW chancellor Biddy Martin, to fulfill their promises and bring necessary change directly into young people’s lives.
UW senior Alex Kalfayan wasn’t initially planning on joining the rally.
Governor Jim Doyle has tapped a leader from the private sector to head Wisconsin’s new Office of Recovery and Reinvestment. Also joining the new state office, which Doyle created by an executive order, is UW Madison Associate Vice Chancellor Al Fish.
The head of Wisconsin’s private colleges would like to put three student financial aid funds into just one pot.
Rolf Wegenke, Ph.D., President of Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (WAICU), says there’s a financial aid disparity between colleges within our state.
Although he believes the UW System, the technical schools and the private colleges need more financial aid overall for their students, Wegenke (pronounce) says the UW fund gets a much greater percentage, by a ratio of 10-1.
Jerome F. (Jerry) Saeman, age 92, passed away after a full life on Jan. 21, 2009. Upon retirement from FPL in 1980, Jerry was employed as an adjunct professor of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. There he worked in collaboration with industry and the university on wood-related problems, initiating work on improving the manufacture of composites involving wood fibers and plastics, and starting an ongoing series of international conferences on wood fiber composites.
Q: What happens when you throw boiling water into the air on a very cold day?
A: This is a great experiment to try at home, but just be careful not to burn yourself! For this to work, you need to have very cold and dry air.
It may be the first chicken coop to become a National Historic Landmark.
Aldo Leopold’s beloved getaway on the Wisconsin River near Baraboo has been officially listed as one of the nation’s historic sites. Known simply as the “Shack,” the converted chicken coop served as a weekend retreat for the famous naturalist and his family.
The city of Madison and University of Wisconsin-Madison officials have made little progress in fulfilling the goals of a plan a neighborhood group rolled out one year ago to cut down on alcohol-fueled crime and other disturbances Downtown.
Q: Are people attracted to people who look like them?
A: Yes, says Linda Roberts, a professor of human development and family studies at UW-Madison.
Madison landlord Dave Wood had to look no farther than his own eight rental buildings Downtown for examples of the need for his first-of-its-kind safety campaign for student housing.
Geron Corp. has spent at least $100 million on human embryonic stem cell research. Founded in 1992, it does not have any therapies on the market.
However, the company is considered the world’s leading embryonic stem cell developer thanks to its claims on several key stem cell technologies. Geron helped finance researchers at the University of Wisconsin who first isolated human embryonic stem cells in 1998. The company has retained exclusive rights on several of those cell types.
Madison – Lawmakers asked the University of Wisconsin Hospital to drop a plan to provide second-trimester abortions at a private clinic. Twenty-eight Republicans and one independent signed a letter to the hospital CEO, calling the procedure “barbaric.” Doctors at UW and Meriter hospitals have proposed performing the abortions for women between 13 and 22 weeks pregnant.
Though some people blame inadequate thinning of older trees by state forest managers, the study makes a “convincing case” that drought and pests are responsible, says entomologist Kenneth Raffa of the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
In a research milestone, the federal government will allow the worldâ??s first test in people of a therapy derived from human embryonic stem cells.
Federal drug regulators said that political considerations had no role in the decision. Nevertheless, the move coincided with the inauguration of President Obama, who has pledged to remove some of the financing restrictions placed on the field by President George W. Bush.
Madison Fire officials say a construction site accident is to blame for the gas leak that evacuated several buildings on the UW Campus Thursday morning.
Construction crews were on the site of an addition to the Bio Chemical Building on Babcock Drive replacing a new sewer when the water line broke around 11:00 a.m.
In almost the same breath in his inauguration speech this week, President Obama touted green technology and his desire for higher education to make changes to meet America’s evolving needs.
“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories,” he said. “And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.”
Colleges in Wisconsin want some of that stimulus money to help students.
There’s a call for more financial aid for all students who qualify for higher education, regardless of whether they attend a technical school, the UW system or a private college.
An apartment owner in Madison is taking safety concerns into his own hands — and his efforts are catching on.
Property owner Dave Wood said he is working to change the culture of a stereotypical renter. He said the idea is to get renters to think about protecting themselves and their property — both inside and outside their apartment.
Nearby roads and buildings have been reopened after significant gas and water main leaks on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus prompted authorities to evacuate people and shut down traffic on University Avenue, UW police said.
In the rogues’ gallery of microscopic infectious agents, the prion is the toughest hombre in town. Warped pathogens that lack both DNA and RNA, prions are believed to cause such fatal brain ailments as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and moose, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
An unexpected $20,000 had to be pumped into the University of Wisconsin-La Crosseâ??s textbook rental program to ensure all students had materials in time for Mondayâ??s start of the spring semester, officials said.
Bart Vanvoorhis, associate professor of psychology, said UW-Lâ??s textbook rental staff told him last week they couldnâ??t buy more textbooks, even though his spring semester psychology class was 14 books short.
â??It flabbergasts me that we could ever be in a position that this could happen at a university,â? said Vanvoorhis.
Patients with spinal cord injury will become the first people to be treated with human embryonic stem cells this summer in a move that marks a new chapter for science.
The first human study of the controversial technology, which is opposed by pro-life groups because it involves destroying embryos, will today be approved by U.S. regulators.
Thanks to Meryn Stol, for pointing me to what could be a world changing enterprise for food sourcing. As reported in World Changing, The Food Map, a project from two graduate students from University of Wisconsin, Madison, aims to shed some light on the U.S. food network. Currently in a very raw form, Food Map is using the example of two brands of mac and cheese to demonstrate how it would work on a larger scale.
Federal regulators have cleared the way for the first human trials of human embryonic stem-cell research, authorizing researchers to test whether the cells are safe to use in spinal injury patients, the company behind the trials announced Friday.
Embryonic stem cells are blank cells found in embryos, which have the ability to turn into any cell in the body.
Embryonic stem cells are blank cells found in embryos, which have the ability to turn into any cell in the body.
The tests could begin by summer, said Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of the Geron Corporation. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the trials, which will use human stem cells authorized for research by then-President George W. Bush in 2001.
The patients will be those with the most severe spinal cord injuries, called complete spinal cord injuries.
Nearly one-quarter of Wisconsin lawmakers asked the University of Wisconsin Hospital on Thursday to back off a plan to provide late-term abortions at a private clinic.
In a letter to Hospital CEO Donna Katen-Bahensky, 28 Republican senators and representatives and the Legislature’s one independent called second-trimester abortion a barbaric procedure that kills viable babies.
Robert Mayer Bolz passed away Jan. 19, 2009, in Madison from pneumonia. Bolz was active with the University of Wisconsin, serving on the board of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, University of Wisconsin Foundation, the Vilas Trust, and Boards of Visitors of the College of Engineering, Ophthalmology Department, Business School, and Max Kade Institute.
Avis H. Levin, age 83, passed away peacefully at her home on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. Avis worked in various departments on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was especially proud of her work in the Bacteriology Department laboratories of Drs. Winston Brill and Jack Pate. She then went to work at UW Hospital in the Transplantation Service in the tissue typing lab under the watchful eyes of Dr. Folkert Belzer. She finished her career with many years spent in the State Laboratory of Hygiene until her retirement at age 65.
Jenny Alexander passed away on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009. Jenny worked as a research associate and instructor in educational psychology at UW-Madison during the 1980s.
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow talked about challenges the campus will face, particularly concerning expected state funding cuts, during an all-university address on Wednesday.
Gow used a line from President Franklin D. Rooseveltâ??s second inaugural address â?? â??We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disasterâ? â?? to helps explain the road ahead.
â??It reminds us that we canâ??t just wait and hope that the problems will go away, we have to take action now to get ready,â? Gow said.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease expert at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, said people normally don’t think of peanut butter when they think of salmonella, but its ingredients make it very susceptible.
Quoted: And having good business sense is as important to building that practice as practicing law, said Ralph Cagle, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Gov. Jim Doyle’s program promoting college attendance may do little for those who need the most help without more tuition aid, according to a study released Wednesday.
The Wisconsin Covenant program should include state-funded scholarships for low-income students to improve their college attendance and completion, according to the study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers. The study suggests Wisconsin model its plan after a successful program in Indiana.
President Barack Obama must act to address a “crisis of confidence” in the financial markets in order to help pull America out of the recession, UW-Madison Business School Dean Michael Knetter told business executives at an economic forum in Milwaukee today.
Knetter said Obama also must act to restore the publicâ??s faith in the economy, while continued action by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department is needed to prop up banks in order to keep them lending.
A portion of University Avenue was blocked near Camp Randall around the noon hour as firefighters battled a fire on a truck containing waterproof materials.
The Madison Fire Department said a box truck at a construction site at 333 N. Orchard St. and University Avenue ignited. Firefighters saw 10-foot flames when they arrived.
In a biotech laboratory close to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Bloomsbury, London, Professor Geoffrey Raisman, is researching a treatment for spinal cord injury using adult stem cells. This week, with no brief for Republicans or Democrats, he has been pondering the presidential inauguration celebrations with serious misgivings. He believes that the new presidentâ??s pledge to fund human embryonic stem cell Âresearch could have a detrimental effect on the future of his work.
Ten years ago in a tiny, underequipped laboratory in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Professor James “Jamie” Thomson, an embryologist, extracted the first human embryonic stem cells from an embryo. Thomson was part of a community of scientists who had been pursuing the “philosopher’s stone” of embryonic stem cells with slender resources and huge determination for a decade. Last year, at a conference in New York City calling itself the World Stem Cell Summit, it was projected that the market for stem cell clinical products could reach $8.5bn within a decade.
Wisconsin is facing a shortage of primary care physicians, especially in small towns and in the farm country.
It’s an alarming trend that could impact healthcare for decades to come.
Amy Romandine is a first year medical student at the UW School of Medicine. She’s wanted to be a doctor nearly as long as she can remember.
In a year of political change, college freshmen were more plugged into current events than they have been since 1968. A record proportionâ??35.6 percentâ??said they discussed politics frequently during the last year, according to the latest installment of a long-running survey of freshmen.
Madison Police are searching for a man who they say exposed himself outside a sorority house last weekend.
Saturday night, two UW-Madison students told officers they spotted a man outside their sorority house on the 100 block of Langdon Street, “performing an act of sexual gratification outside of their window.”
