To see if a mother’s touch might also cause sex-specific changes in rats’ brains, Anthony Auger at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues stroked baby female rats, giving them the attention normally reserved for males. They found that the number of oestrogen receptors in the hypothalamus of stroked females was lower than in unstroked females, and similar to levels found in males.
College students and other renters in Madison might better be able to discriminate between good landlords and slumlords if an idea from Ald. Eli Judge, 8th District, gains momentum.
Judge said he hopes to create the Web site ratemypropertyowner.com, where tenants would be able to gather information on prospective property owners from the people who would know best: other tenants. Judge is a University of Wisconsin-Madison senior whose district encompasses mostly dorms and student-rented apartments.
Diverse History in the Making: When Dr. Ned Blackhawk steps into the classroom, he never uses the term â??discoveryâ? when addressing the history of European contact with the indigenous peoples of this continent â?? and itâ??s not because he feels the pressure to be politically correct. â??I try not to use the term simply because it is so loaded,â? Blackhawk says. â??I prefer â??encounter,â?? which suggests multiple worlds rather than singular ones. We live in an amazingly diverse world. Our society has always been diverse.â?
As college admission deadlines wind down and families submit financial aid applications for next fall, freshmen in 2009 will be the first to start college clearly in the throes of the recession.
What this will mean for students and colleges is just beginning to be understood. But one thing is clear â?? now, more than ever, students and parents need to make every education dollar count.
Not listed are public schools including University of Wisconsin-Madison or University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; missing among private schools are New York University and George Washington University, the USA’s most expensive four-year campus.
Now a first-year student at UW-Madison, Marley Wheeler, remembers she once did not know how she would pay for her college when she was accepted.
She wasn’t a valedictorian, but she applied herself and was 19th in her class. Despite this, she still doubted she’d receive a full year’s scholarship when she applied to the L.H. Eckhardt Memorial Scholarship Trust, created by Chester Bible.
Dane County 911 Call Center officials said the volume of the recorded 911 call from made by a slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student sometime before she was killed in April could have been different from the actual call.
WISC-TV found that’s because recorded calls and those at dispatcher consoles can have different volume levels.
At issue nine months after the slaying of Brittany Zimmermann, 21, is why a former 911 dispatcher didn’t hear “sounds of an emergency” on the April 2 call from Zimmermann’s cell phone when police and others did hear sounds of a struggle.
Quoted: That can make it hard for doctors to decide on treatment and for experts to compare studies aimed at determining the optimal level of vitamin D in the blood. â??If you get your vitamin D level measured in the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic and the Timbuktu Clinic, it would be nice if it came out the same value,â? said Dr. Neil C. Binkley, associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin.
There are more than 20,000 new cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed in the United States each year. It remains one of the most difficult cancers to beat — only 37 percent of patients survive at least 5 years.
New research suggests that women might reduce their odds of ovarian cancer by maintaining a healthy weight.
Among all the uncertainty colleges face in this recession, they are sure of one thing: Families are feeling less than confident about their ability to pay for higher education. And many colleges are not sitting idly by.
Colleges are creating more student-aid programs or expanding existing ones. Others are offering students additional counseling or a grace period for paying their tuition bills. And even some that haven’t seen an increase in student need are preparing for one next year.
Because of the worst economic downturn since World War II, many state governments now expect revenues to fall in coming years â?? resulting in less public spending on higher education. Certain state-revenue reforms could moderate the effects of economic slumps on colleges. But higher-education institutions must also face reality and become more productive and cost-effective.
As state legislatures convene in the coming days and weeks, colleges will be battling to stave off large cuts, with governors in places like Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio asking public colleges to prepare for budget reductions of as much as 25 percent.
Most colleges have steered through the first jolts of the recession without resorting to layoffs, cutting employee benefits, or imposing across-the-board freezes on hiring. But the economic pain is afflicting campuses in many other ways, according to the findings from a new survey of chief business officers conducted last month by The Chronicle and Moody’s Investors Service.
Slightly more than one in 10 colleges had laid off employees, and another 26 percent were considering doing so, survey responses from more than 200 public and private four-year colleges showed.
Quoted: Director Jim Seward of the Nicholas Center for Corporate Finance and Investment Banking in the UW-Madison Business School is skeptical of the value of what he called the auto industry’s classic turn around management.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is taking advantage of its location to create a geothermal heating and cooling system for the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Geothermal systems use the earth’s mass and stable temperature to produce or absorb heat.
Building project manager George Austin said the institutes’ location between two lakes makes it ideal for such a system because there’s water moving under ground that will conduct heat and cooling well.
Eight lanes for $17,503. If that was a contractorâ??s bid on a highway project, the figure would be laughed off as too lowball to be serious. But weâ??re talking bowling lanes here, and $17,503 is the winning bid on the Union South bowling lanes. It was posted by United Bowling at 9:50:42 p.m. on Monday night, less than 10 minutes before the UW-Madison SWAP (Surplus with a Purpose) facility closed the online auction.
For that price, the winning bidder gets eight lanes, eight A-2 pinsetters with spare parts, 16 sets of pins, eight scoring consoles with CRT monitors, Brunswick Frameworx software, printers, a back-office computer, five stationary ball racks, a machine for cleaning balls and pins, four ball-return racks and lifts, six tables and 30 seats, manuals and a few other odds and ends.
Magnetic resonance imaging is increasingly being used to evaluate back pain, U.S. physicians say.
An article, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, predicts additional technical developments will allow MRI to provide even more useful benefits.
“The possibilities of magnetic resonance have not yet been realized. It is a rapidly evolving field. When we need tools to identify a possible herniated disk, the simplest type of imaging can be used successfully,” co-author Dr. Victor Haughton of the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics says in a statement.
Forbes.com has released its list of the 10 best cities to look for work in 2009, and Madison tops the list.
The publication looked at big employers in Madison, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison and jobs in the biotech and health care sector.
That’s good news for the University Research Park, where several companies are hiring despite a sluggish economy.
“The Research Park is doing very well. We’re growing. Our companies here in the park generally rely on the technologies that are spun out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus,” said Mark Bugher, director of University Research Park.
The University Research Park on the West Side has 115 mainly biotech companies and 4,000 employees.
The Madison Surgery Center on Park Street could soon offer abortions.
The UW Hospital is proposing to allow a number of UW Gynecologists at the center to offer an uncommon procedure, 2nd tri-mester abortions, which are performed on women between 13 and 22 weeks of pregancy.
UW hospital officials say they’re proposing this because a Madison Planned Parenthood doctor who performed 2nd trimester abortions recently retired.
The nation’s stock market is already in recovery and gross domestic product should begin to recover in mid-2009, University of Wisconsin-Madison Business School Dean Michael Knetter said today.
High unemployment, however, will linger through the year, he predicted.
Knetter told Milwaukee Rotarians during their weekly luncheon that the change in the presidential administration is part of the reason for the market’s rebound.
An arrangement between UW Hospitals and a Madison clinic to provide second-trimester abortions for women is raising questions.
State Senator Glenn Grothman says fetuses would be aborted five or six months after conception, according to allegations from the Alliance Defense Fund. The West Bend Republican says that’s something many hospitals won’t do.
For nearly the first half of this decade, former University of Wisconsin-Madison student Reed Rogala was raking in cash by bringing thousands of pounds of Canadian marijuana to Madison.
And when that business failed, he turned to making and selling glass bongs.
University of Wisconsin Hospital, its doctor group and Meriter Hospital are proposing to open an abortion clinic at their jointly owned Madison Surgery Center near Meriter, which anti-abortion groups say could violate state laws.
The clinic, which could open next month, at 1 S. Park St., would primarily offer second-trimester abortions, said UW Hospital spokeswoman Lisa Brunette.
Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire and University of Wisconsin have signed new agreements on polar research.
The agreements create two new entities regarding ice coring and drilling that are vital to polar research.
The first entity is the Ice Drilling Program Office at Dartmouth, with collaborations at UNH and UW. It will provide scientific leadership and oversight of ice coring and drilling funded by National Science Foundation.
Anti-abortion groups are condemning a University of Wisconsin plan to provide second-trimester abortions at a Madison clinic and questioning whether it’s illegal.
UW Health spokeswoman Lisa Brunette said its gynecologists plan to begin performing abortions for patients between 13 and 22 weeks pregnant at the Madison Surgery Center. She said the plan needs final approval from the center’s board, which could take action this month.
Noted: Madison has several things going for it. Not only is the University of Wisconsin a major employer, but the university’s research arm, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, has been fueling growth in the biotech, health care and medical-devices industries. The foundation provides grants and helps scientists affiliated with the university to patent new discoveries. It has aided Madison in becoming a regional hub for those industries.
Quoted: “The idea that you’re going to make a lot of money tearing down an old house to build a new one, that’s gone,” says Morris Davis, a real estate economist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has advised the Federal Reserve on the teardown trend.
More than half of teenagers mention risky behaviors such as sex and drugs on their MySpace accounts, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp’s (NWSa.N) MySpace do not realize how public they are and may be opening themselves to risks, but the sites may also offer a new way to identify and help troubled teens.
Florida’s Jeremy Foley is the highest-paid athletic director among public schools in college footballâ??s top division, according to contracts obtained through open-records requests. His $965,000 in guaranteed salary can grow to more than $1 million after benefits and bonuses. The University of Kansasâ??s Lew Perkins is second at $900,000, followed by the University of Wisconsinâ??s Barry Alvarez at $750,000.
Despite a massive federal effort to aid banks and boost the economy, lending has plunged in the last year. Home-mortgage volume and bank loans to big companies are down dramatically.
But the government’s response is expanding credit in at least one sector: higher education. Although the recession is weighing on colleges in many ways, the ability of students to get federal loans to pay tuition isn’t one of them.
As of Nov. 28, the federal government had guaranteed or made $65.2 billion in student loans for the 2008-09 school year, up 18.6% from the same time a year earlier. In contrast, lending for home mortgages was down nearly 38% through the end of November, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. A recent Harvard Business School study found a similar decline in loans to big corporations.
A new study shows that more than half of teenagers mention drugs, alcohol, sex or violence on their MySpace pages. Yet getting teens to clean up their pages is easier than many might assume, researchers say.
Many teenagers cleaned up their MySpace profiles, deleting mentions of sex and booze and boosting privacy settings, if they got a single cautionary e-mail from a busybody named “Dr. Meg.” The e-mail was sent by Dr. Megan Moreno, lead researcher of a study of lower-income kids that she says shows how parents and other adults can encourage safer Internet use.
Many teenagers cleaned up their MySpace profiles, deleting mentions of sex and booze and boosting privacy settings, if they got a single cautionary e-mail from a busybody named “Dr. Meg.”
The e-mail was sent by Dr. Megan Moreno, lead researcher of a study of lower-income kids that she says shows how parents and other adults can encourage safer Internet use.
U.S. researchers suggest brain scans may help predict how anxiety disorders patients react to drug therapy.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to use that eventually to determine what kind of treatment to provide to people,” lead author Jack Nitschke, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said in a statement.
One thing Barry Alvarez never had was a quarterback controversy.
He lifted the University of Wisconsin into position as one of the top college football programs in the country with a simple formula.
Get some huge guys to play the offensive line. Teach them how to block really well. Find a quarterback who won’t fumble the snap. Teach him how to hand it off. Sit back and watch a legion of runners tear up the Big Ten. Nobody really cared who played quarterback.
The union that represents a former Dane County 911 dispatcher accused of mishandling an emergency call from a slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student shortly before she was killed will appeal her three-day suspension.
A new medical study is linking the popular social network MySpace to some risky behavior among teenagers.
Researchers hope the findings of the study lead teens and parents to talk about personal information online.
“I don’t really use MySpace anymore because in high school, most people use Facebook,” said high school freshman McKenna Meuer.
But MySpace is a well-known place to log in and make new friends. The online social network has 250 million users.
The state Senate’s minority leader says the state needs to cut spending, but says that’s unlikely now that Democrats control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office.
Recent stem cell headlines are all about how adult cells can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which was recently hailed as the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2008. All of this attention to iPS cells and hardly a word about embryonic stem (ES) cells, which raises a question:
Teenagers often use social networking sites like MySpace to post intimate personal information they come to regret, as it lets future employers (or online predators) learn about sex activity and substance abuse. Enter â??Dr. Meg.â?
Mary “Jeanne” Gourlie, age 81, died on Jan. 2, 2009. Prior to retiring in July of 1988, Jeanne served as an advisor to students for the UW-Extension in Madison.
Football and men’s basketball players are averaging hundreds of points less on their college entrance exams than their classmates, according to a newspaper’s study of 54 public universities.
Many schools routinely used a special admissions process to admit athletes who did not meet the normal entrance requirements. More than half of scholarship athletes at the University of Georgia, Clemson University, UCLA, Rutgers University, Texas A&M University and LSU were special admits.
More than $1.5 million was raised in 2008 for need-based scholarships to the University of Wisconsin and Madison Area Technical College as part of a fundraising drive by the UW Credit Union.
Two researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison have published a study showing that America has a long history of (dare I say it?) multiculturalism. The researchers are Joseph Salmons, a German professor, and Miranda Wilkerson, a Ph.D. graduate in German.
Quoted: “Strictly on the basis of this video, it is impossible to determine whether the shooting was justified because the officer who fired the shot might have seen some imminent threat to his or others’ lives that the camera does not detect at that distance, angle and resolution,” said Michael Scott, a University of Wisconsin law professor, former police chief in Florida and co-author of “Deadly Force: What We Know.”
The new head of the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee, state Rep. Kim Hixson, D-Whitewater, is a professor on leave from UW-Whitewater who is expected to offer a sharp contrast in approach from the previous chair.
He replaces Rep. Steve Nass, a Republican assemblyman from the same area and an outspoken critic of the UW System’s spending and priorities.
Noted: The 5,000 specimens in â??Insect Fantasiaâ? represent about a quarter of her collection; the installation, by Ms. Angus and two assistants from the University of Wisconsin, where she is associate professor in the environment, textiles and design department, took one week.
A former University of Wisconsin football player accused of making threats against athletic director Barry Alvarez has been ordered to undergo treatment after being found incompetent to stand trial at a hearing Friday morning.
Leonard Taylor Jr., 32, is facing charges of stalking and telephone harassment.
Quoted: Salt lowers the freezing point of water, said UW-Madison chemistry professor Bob Hamers.
Students who start classes at one college and transfer after just one year might harm their chances of graduating further down the road, according to University of Wisconsin System data.
UW students who began their studies in fall 2001 had a 68 percent graduation rate if they transferred from a UW college after two years, according to a report released by the UW System Office of Policy Analysis and Research.
University officials say there are no UW-Madison students studying in Gaza as Israeli air strikes rain down on the area.
But Jennifer Loewenstein, associate director of UW-Madison’s Middle East Studies Program, said she was supposed to be there. After living in Gaza for six months in 2002, Loewenstein said she has been back almost every year since.
When the legislature starts its new session, state Senator Pat Kreitlow (D-Chippewa Falls) says it’s obvious what priority number one will be: fixing the state’s $5.4 billion budget hole.
However, Kreitlow doesn’t think the deficit is really as big as has been advertised. He says the high number is essentially the result of a “Christmas wish list” from agencies throughout the state, which will drop as things are cut from the budget. Kreitlow also expects the deficit to drop the end of January, after the state gets its new revenue forecasts, trimmed down agency budgets and possible help from the Federal Government.
Wisconsin’s State Legislature convenes Monday morning.
The first session of 2009 will see Democrats controlling both houses and the governor’s office for the first time in 23 years.
“I think these are historic times,” said incoming Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan. “We have a $5.4 billion dollar budget.”
Q. Is it legal to use copyrighted music as a soundtrack in family movies?
A. Carrie Kruse, director of College Library at UW-Madison, says a concept called “fair use” allows the use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances, depending on four factors:
Mark Johnson’s past, present and, quite possibly, his future will collide Friday at the Kohl Center. Funny thing is, he won’t be around to see it.
Johnson’s present is the University of Wisconsin women’s hockey team, which is unbeaten and unanimously ranked No. 1 in the nation after 20 games (18-0-2
While sitting in his Dane County courtroom last week, I didn’t hear Judge Richard Niess give a single good reason in support of his decision to let local authorities continue to withhold the recording of murder victim Brittany Zimmermann’s mishandled 911 call.
As I’ve noted elsewhere (“Judge Backs Secrecy on Zimmermann 911 Call,” TheDailyPage.com, 12/22/08), Niess’ ruling was wildly at odds with his reasoning. He observed that local authorities have on this matter been completely untrustworthy, even in their arguments for suppressing the recording. Then, in a stunning display of pretzel logic, he came around to declaring that he had decided to trust them.
Eyewitnesses insist they saw a woman sitting innocently in a stadium aisle, unable to reach her seat in an overcrowded row as an Oct. 11 football game began at the University of Wisconsin. Police reports paint a picture of a woman kicking and screaming as she was about to be handcuffed, ejected and cited for violating Camp Randall Stadium policy regarding aisle blockage. That’s when things really got out of control â?? or were, in fact, controlled â?? depending on whose interpretation of events one chooses to embrace.
Quoted: Embryonic cells remain the “gold standard,” said Tim Kamp, co-director of the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Centre, and scientists say it is still far too early to abandon embryonic stem-cell research. But that could change in the years to come as this new field of research takes off.
Quoted: Lewis Leavitt, a University of Wisconsin pediatrics professor and an expert on the effects of war on children. “There are some children who can manage well and actually succeed, but as with any heavy burden, some people can’t handle it.”
Quoted: “It’s the body’s natural attempt to get rid of the booze,” said Susan Smith, a professor of nutritional sciences at UW-Madison. “The reality is it just happens with time.”
Quoted: “It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” said Susan Nitzke, chairman of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at UW-Madison. “But it distracts from how most children learn to like new flavors: people enjoying them as part of the daily routine.”
