Slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann would not have wanted her final moments broadcast publicly, her parents have written to a Dane County Circuit judge in a letter released Monday.
In the face of a budget crisis, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin said the state’s flagship university will likely have to make choices that “won’t feel good to do but will make the university stronger.”
Martin made the statement at the first of three forums for University of Wisconsin-Madison students, faculty and staff to discuss the university’s future in a slumping economy.
Louise G. Comstock, age 86, passed away on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008. Louise worked as a radiologic technologist at University Hospital.
Craig Beane, age 86, passed away on Friday, Dec. 5, 2008, after a long and rewarding life. He was grateful for all that farming gave him and his family and served agriculture in many ways at local, state, and national levels. Craig and his family co-hosted the 1956 Wisconsin Farm Progress Days, opening their farm to about 60,000 people over three days. From this experience Craig and his family developed lifelong friendships and partnerships with UW-Extension and UW-Madison agricultural specialists. Holwis Farms became a practical research center for many trials and innovations. He was a founder and first president of the National Dairy Herd Improvement Association, Inc., and served on the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture’s Animal and Animal Products Advisory Committee under Secretaries Freeman and Hardin and on many advisory committees, including those for UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, USDA Forage Lab, and U.S. Senator Robert Kasten. The UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences honored Craig and Laura with an outstanding service award in 1971. He testified many times in Washington, advocating to establish the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center in Madison and the UW Veterinary School.
According to the warrant, a UW-Madison police officer spotted the car about 10 p.m. at Monroe and Spooner streets and recognized it as belonging to a man whose driver’s license was suspended.
Quoted: Political science professor David Canon, an expert on Congress at UW-Madison
UW-Madison students turned out in huge numbers for last month’s presidential election.
Yet only 6 percent of students took the time to vote on a plan to build a new campus student center two years ago.
Now a group of several hundred students is upset that the new building will cost $96 per student, per semester. Over a college career, that could total $800 or more.
The lesson — for voters of all ages — is simple: Local elections and referendums matter. They can even have more effect than state or national elections on ordinary people’s lives, services and expenses.
Wisconsin’s projected budget deficit is actually a large but manageable $1.25 billion — not the frightening $5.4 billion that has caused consternation at the Capitol and around the state.
That conclusion offers a useful, attitude-adjusting way for Gov. Jim Doyle, state lawmakers and taxpayers to approach the 2009-2011 budget.
It’s final exam week for thousands of University of Wisconsin students on campus.
For years, some students have quietly taken drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to help them focus and prepare for exams. The drugs are widely prescribed by physicians to help school children focus longer and perform better in school.
Some college students said it’s no secret that students use the medicines and get them illegally.
It was a snowball battle royale, a fight of the flurries, a snowy scuffle so scurrilous that UW-Madison police were called to the scene of the crime: the courtyards of Sellery and Ogg halls.
University of Wisconsin-Madison junior Rianna Hardesty learned she won the national “Next Year’s Model” contest as she walked to her Introduction to Buddhism class, providing an unusual clash of information: Earning a much-sought pop-culture prize, then studying a religion developed in the 6th century.
On the brink of a college student’s graduation, everyone â?? Mom, Dad, Great Aunt Sue â?? has one question: What’s next?
Now, UW-Madison is joining the chorus of voices by asking graduating students about their plans in an online survey.
It’s happening all over the UW-Madison campus:
Teams of sharply dressed students are showing up, often bearing PowerPoint presentations, to impress their professors and classmates with plans to save businesses, build potentially patentable devices and more.
These team projects supplement, and sometimes replace, final exams, which begin Sunday at UW-Madison.
Wisconsin’s projected $5.4 billion budget shortfall would at least double the number of unfilled state jobs if Wisconsin doesn’t get financial help from Washington, Gov. Jim Doyle told federal lawmakers last week.
Doyle testified before the House Appropriations Committee, chaired by Rep. Dave Obey, D-Wausau, about the need for a federal bailout for states facing fiscal challenges.
For many new students, the first-year college experience is an academic and social buffet, a dizzying array of activities and opportunities to herald the passage into adulthood. Not so for transfer students, a growing but largely neglected group whose needs are as varied as the circumstances that bring them to campus in the first place.
That’s starting to change.
Quoted: “They are meant to be used as add-ons controllers with ICS,” says Mark Moss, a pediatric allergist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. If LABAs are not combined with ICS, the risk of death increases, he adds.
Keith Agoada, 22, became interested in the idea of rooftop farming after winning the top prize â?? $10,000 â?? for his Sky Vegetables concept in the University of Wisconsin School of Business 2008 G. Steven Burrill business plan competition. He says that turning a profit is key.
â??We want the farm to have a financial feasibility,â? he said. â??The idea is to minimize the carbon footprint while maximizing the profit. Without economic viability, itâ??s hard to have adaptors.â?
The cost of getting a beer at a Gophers football game increased by several thousand dollars Friday.
In a rare split vote, the University of Minnesota Board of Regents approved a policy that will allow alcohol sales in premium, restricted seating of TCF Bank Stadium, among other venues.
Quoted: All the positive wishes sent out to Obama might be just the motivator he needs to close the deal. Or maybe not, says Dr. David Jorenby, a specialist in smoking cessation.
Gov. Jim Doyle met privately two days before Thanksgiving with the parents of a University of Wisconsin-Madison student whose murder remains unsolved.
Brittany Zimmermann was stabbed to death in her apartment on April 2, and police have yet to make an arrest.
Quoted: “Leverage matters a lot when you buy a house,” says University of Wisconsin economist Morris Davis, an expert on housing prices and rents. “We’re not going to go back to the days of only 20 percent (down payment) mortgages, but the days of putting nothing down are long gone.”
More and more companies are cutting back and unfortunately that means laying off workers, but today graduates at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse tried to put the fears of finding a job behind them to accept their diplomas.
741 students earned degrees during three different ceremonies at the University’s winter commencement Sunday.
Advanced parental age, of both the mother and father, may boost the risk of autism in their children, according to new study.
“What we found was that actually it’s both parents age, and when you control for one parent’s age you still see the effect of the other parent’s age, and vice versa,” said Dr. Maureen Durkin of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
Quoted: “The timing is horrendous,” said Steve Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He estimates the closure could cost Rock County nearly 9,000 jobs, with the plant closing affecting everything from construction to health services.
U.S. research at Cornell and UW-Madison may pave the way for a drug to cut the permanent damage caused by a heart attack.
The researchers found that blocking a specific protein in mice was enough to cut potentially crucial scarring significantly.
As the economic recession takes hold, public and private universities alike are facing budget cuts forced by state revenue shortfalls and declining endowment values. In response, chemistry departments are freezing hiring and trimming budgets for seminars and equipment; they also may have to reduce graduate student enrollment.
States have been hit hard by the recession, with some reporting revenue shortfalls of billions of dollars. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, could be looking at a cut of 10â??15% for 2009.
The budget cuts come on top of what has been a particularly difficult period for federal research funding, says UW Madison chemistry Chair Robert J. Hamers. He adds that the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which handles patent royalties and typically has funds available as a short-term safety net for faculty who lose funding, has also suffered from investment losses
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say they have started a groundbreaking study of financial aid involving nearly 6,000 Wisconsin college students.
The goal of the study is to learn more about how financial aid affects low-income students during college and beyond.
President Bush is leaving the White House with a mixed record on higher education.
His administration catapulted conversations about holding colleges more accountable for their performance into the national spotlight, and it pressed for some increases in federal spending on student aid and research.
Karen McDowell spent several days this fall dressed in a purple fish costume, holding a plastic spear.
Ms. McDowell, a network-security analyst at the University of Virginia, wanted to raise awareness about “phishing,” e-mail schemes in which con artists send messages to trick people into giving out passwords or other personal information. Ms. McDowell walked around high-traffic areas of the campus to get attention. “Sometimes I introduced myself as a fraudulent e-mail because many people don’t know what a phish is,” she said.
Some 170 lobbyists for public colleges and universities met here last week to prepare for upcoming state legislative sessions and to discuss how to protect their institutions from severe budget cuts in a nationwide economic crisis.
The Higher Education Government Relations Conference, “Making the Case,” featured several sessions on how to frame higher education’s economic-development mission favorably for the public as well as state lawmakers.
An emergency test reveals UW Police now have it figured out after a system that could save lives was failing for too many people.
But they are facing a different challenge.
Instant information in the palm of your hand is a pretty valuable tool but it doesn’t do much good if the message isn’t getting through and the message can’t get through if the students don’t sign up.
Two homicides at bar close in recent months have bar patrons in downtown Madison a little on edge.
Justin Kaatz’s friend Juan Bernal was killed outside the Plaza in September, and another friend, Roynell Fuller, is accused of murdering a man outside the Crave earlier this month.
“I think it’s unnecessary. Juan Burnell, for instance, lost his life over a fight over a jukebox. That’s ridiculous,” said Kaatz at State Street Brats on Friday.
As the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s fall commencement nears, many graduates will be entering an unstable workforce in a slumping economy.
UW School of Business junior Ashley Chalmers, of Reedsburg, is like many students. She’s working hard to graduate, worried about what jobs will be out there for her, WISC-TV reported.
UW-Madison police leaders this morning said they were pleased with the results of yesterdayâ??s full-scale test of the universityâ??s new emergency text-messaging service â?? especially compared to the first one they did.
Albert M. Maier, age 84, passed away peacefully at his home on Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008. Albert farmed in the Mazomanie area until 1955, and then was employed by the University of Wisconsin until retiring in 1989.
Q. Are poinsettias really poisonous for your pets?
A. The belief that poinsettias are toxic to pets has been perpetuated for years, but the truth is that the plant’s reputation has been blown out of proportion.
While the milky substance in poinsettia leaves can be slightly irritating to an animal if eaten, causing drooling or vomiting, the plant isn’t deadly.
“The warning about poinsettias being poisonous is a highly exaggerated rumor,” says Sandra Sawchuk, a veterinarian at UW-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
Quoted: Sybil Pressprich, a senior counselor at the Adult and Student Services Center at UW-Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted an unannounced test Thursday of the new WiscAlerts emergency text messaging system for the second time in the current semester.
The 911 operator who answered the call from Brittany Zimmermann’s cell phone told her supervisor she heard background noise and voices, but the “scream” on the audio recording “didn’t register as a scream.”
UW-Madison graduate Jim Yeadon quietly broke ground in Wisconsin, trying to make sexual orientation “a non-issue” as he campaigned and served on the City Council.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
When University of Central Florida junior Nicole Nissim got stumped in trigonometry, she checked out what was showing on YouTube. Nissim typically scours the video-sharing website for clips of bands and comedy skits. But this time she wasn’t there to procrastinate on her homework. It turned out YouTube was also full of math videos. After watching a couple, the psychology major says, she finally understood trig equations and how to make graphs.
Quoted — Morris Davis, School of Business:
Leverage matters a lot when you buy a house,” says University of Wisconsin economist Morris Davis, an expert on housing prices and rents. “We’re not going to go back to the days of only 20% (down payment) mortgages, but the days of putting nothing down are long gone.”
Quoted: “You get greater improvement in lung function; you get less asthma attacks and less need for rescue medications,” William Busse of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the authors of the NIH guidelines, said about the long-acting beta agonists.
Those who have a brother or sister with a mental illness or a low IQ can be influenced by their illness, according to a new study, possibly putting them at higher risk for bouts of depression and other challenges during their lives.
Data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a 46-year report that includes 5,800 pairs of siblings, was used for the study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgia State University focused on 351 men and women who had at least one brother or sister with a low IQ (85 or below) or a mental illness that included a depressive or anxiety disorder. A group of 791 people who didnâ??t have a mentally disabled sibling acted as a control group.
Gov. Jim Doyle has presented members of President-elect Barack Obama’s economic team with a list of nearly 1,800 projects in Wisconsin that could benefit immediately from an infusion of federal money.
The projects include constructing passenger rail lines connecting Chicago and major cities in Wisconsin, converting state power plants from coal to other fuel sources and addressing deferred maintenance on state buildings.
Quoted: “Investment in infrastructure will have a longer-term payback in increased output because we’re increasing the nation’s stock of capital (but) there is a substantive debate over the size of this long-term impact,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin.
The operator who mishandled a 911 call from a slain college student’s cell phone said she didn’t know why she didn’t hear a scream or sounds of a struggle, according to records released Thursday.
New University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin said Thursday she would replace the school’s No. 2 official, the latest personnel change in her short tenure.
“I am building my own team,” Martin said as she announced that Patrick Farrell would leave his job at the end of the semester.
Gov. Jim Doyle said he’s cautiously hopeful that Congress will approve a federal stimulus package for the states.
At a Milwaukee news conference Thursday, the Democratic governor said questions remain about how the money would be spent and monitored. But he said congressional leaders understand how much people are hurting.
The dispatcher accused of mishandling a 911 call from a slain college student’s cell phone said she doesn’t know why she didn’t hear a scream on the call.
“If I heard the initial ‘scream,’ it didn’t register as a scream,” dispatcher Rita Gahagan said during a personnel interview in April.
New University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Biddy Martin speaks about her first semester at the school and her plans for the future.
When the frightening story about Barry Alvarez and one of his former Wisconsin Badgers football players first came to light, I have to admit that my sadness and sympathies were divided.
I felt terrible for Alvarez and his family, whose lives were threatened in a series of telephone messages left at Alvarez’s campus office in recent months.
To know there is someone that angry, that willful, that violent in your life has to shake you to the core.
Researchers at UW-Madison are conducting the state’s first, long-term comprehensive study of the effects of need-based financial aid on college studentsâ?? success.
The Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study includes 6,000 Wisconsin residents enrolled at each of Wisconsin’s 42 public colleges. All participants have received a federal Pell grant, which are distributed based on a family’s income. (Seventh item.)
As snow falls steadily, Steve Glass leads a visitor across rutted marshland to two 250-foot radio transmission towers â?? one built in 1973, and its newly installed replacement.
“This is not the way a marsh should look,” says Glass, the Arboretum’s land-care manager. “This looks like a plowed cornfield.”
What will it take, he’s asked, for this section of marsh, in the UW Arboretum’s southeast corner just off Martin Street, to recover? “A long, long time,” he answers.
Provost Patrick Farrell, who has served in his position since April 2006, will return to the College of Engineering faculty at the end of the semester, university officials announced Thursday.
â??Pat has provided the university with steady leadership over several years and with continuity during this semester,â? Chancellor Biddy Martin said in a statement. â??He is a talented administrator, and I am very grateful for his service to the campus.â?â?¨
A Dane County judge Wednesday ordered the release of documents withheld since May related to the Brittany Zimmermann homicide and mishandled 911 call but wants to hear from law enforcement officials before deciding whether to release the call itself.
Patrick Farrell will no longer serve as University of Wisconsin-Madison’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, the university announced in a statement Thursday.
Farrell, who was appointed provost by former Chancellor John Wiley in April of 2006, plans to return to the College of Engineering faculty at the end of the fall semester.
Three studies published this week that assessed public views toward nanotechnologyâ??the study, manufacture and manipulation of the infinitesimally smallâ??show that people are generally in favor of the technology, but have some reservations based on religious and culture differences. Study participants also questioned whether those engaged in nanotechnology research could be trusted to control its use.
Column about UW-Madison alumnus Peter Parker, who came up with an invention that would put an end to driveways being buried by snowplows. The competition was the 1996 Schoofs Prize for Creativity in the UW-Madison School of Engineering.
