A University of Wisconsin staff member was the victim of an attempted mugging near the southwest corner of Bascom Hall last Thursday night.
At 9:45 p.m., two men threatened the 51-year-old man, stating they had a weapon. According to UW Police Department, the victim said he did not see a weapon on the men and was involved in a struggle with the two men.
There’s about to be a new entrant in the college-ranking business: the Boeing Company.
The Chicago-based aerospace giant has spent the past year matching internal data from employee evaluations with information about the colleges its engineers attended. It has used that analysis to create a ranking system, which it plans to unveil in the coming month, that will show which colleges have produced the workers it considers most valuable.
Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good â?? healing, educating â?? and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.
It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of â??moral hazardsâ? â?? that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook donâ??t have to bear the cost and thus usually donâ??t think twice about it.
MADISON (WKOW) — UW Police tell 27 News a UW staff member was the victim of an attempted robbery Thursday night outside Bascom Hall.
The 51-year-old man says the two men who tried to rob him implied they had a weapon and took off after a brief struggle.
Madison, Wis. – After 35 years of producing soy sauce and related products in Wisconsin, perhaps it was no surprise that Kikkoman Corp. would choose Madison’s University Research Park as the site for its new research and development lab.
No surprise, that is, until you think about the range of global choices available to Kikkoman.
Q. Compact fluorescent light bulbs are supposedly better for the environment because they use less electricity. But they also contain mercury, which can pollute water. Are they still better for the environment?
A. While it is true that compact fluorescent lights contain small amounts of the toxic metal mercury, using them actually contributes less mercury to the environment than using regular, incandescent bulbs, said Faramarz Vakili, associate director of the UW-Madison Physical Plant.
Sangtae “Sang” Kim, a scientist from Purdue University with a background in the pharmaceutical industry, was named executive director of the Morgridge Institute for Research, the private part of a $150 million public-private research building under construction on the UW-Madison campus.
Kim, a professor of mechanical and chemical engineering at Purdue, will begin his duties as leader of the Morgridge Institute Oct. 1. The international search for a director took about a year-and-a-half to complete.
http://badgerherald.com/news/2008/09/12/asm_nass_in_hopes_of.php
Leaders from the Associated Students of Madison met with Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, this week in efforts to forge a relationship between the University of Wisconsin and the Legislature.
Nass has been openly critical of the universityâ??s leadership and has expressed concerns over the appointment of Chancellor Biddy Martin.
Northwestern may have gone Middle Eastern, but officials at the University of Wisconsin are not as eager to open â??brick and mortarâ? campuses overseas.
This semester, Northwestern University â?? based in Evanston, Ill. â?? opened a branch of its Medill School of Journalism and its School of Communications in Qatar. The university became one of more than a half-dozen U.S. colleges to open branches in the region.
The parents of slain University of Wisconsin junior Brittany Zimmermann have filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin Management, Inc. due to inadequate locks and doors at the apartment in which she was killed last April.
Zimmermannâ??s parents had filed a federal lawsuit against Dane County and the 911 Center earlier this year but dropped the case at the end of June with the agreement to file again in state court.
You know I never resist a chance to hype a story about the positive effects of gaming on youth. It is mostly because: (1) Non-gaming organizations are consistently warning us that games make our youth just a button-push away from becoming mass murderers; (2) My colleagues in the mainstream press rarely mention the positive angles of the gaming experience.
So, when I read a story on Wired magazine’s Web site about University of Wisconsin professor Constance Steinkuehler’s startling observations about her fellow gamers, it was a no-brainer to put it right at the top of this column.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin at Madison political scientist Charles Franklin said long lines – and tempers – could develop at the polls as voters who have done nothing wrong but got red-flagged anyway try to sort everything out.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison Linguist Anja Wanner.
Quoted: Luanne Von Schneidemesser, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and a WISC-TV political analyst.
MANITOWOC â?? Returning home last month to the town of Newton after a summer of exploration, 24-year-old Brian Backhaus looked much like the scrawny junior high school kid he’d been more than a decade ago.
Except, that is, for the wiry beard that had sprouted from his chin.
“On the East Coast I was eating rice and oatmeal, but then I couldn’t find gas containers for my stove,” said Backhaus, a third-year forestry student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Once I got out west, I started eating bread and dry cereal and lunch meat.”
Wisconsin School of Businessâ?? entrepreneurship program is one of the best in the country, according to a national survey published recently by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.
The Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at UW-Madison ranks 13th nationwide in the â??Top 50 Entrepreneurial Graduate Colleges in the U.S.â? out of more than 2,300 undergraduate and graduate schools surveyed for the list. The center stands seventh among public universities.
Former UW-Madison professor Sangtae Kim will become executive director of the new Morgridge Institute for Research, the university announced Thursday.
Kim, who is currently a chemical and mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, will assume his new role on Oct. 1.
UW System officials recently updated the set of guidelines university employees and student organizations must follow for campaigning on campus.
According to UW System spokesperson David Giroux, the system has compiled a list of references to policies, statutes and administrative codes about political involvement on campus to make it easier for students and employees to know what their boundaries are.
To the Graduating Class of 2009:
It is with utmost sincerity that I publicly apologize for my lapse in judgment that resulted in the highly-publicized event last semester. My inconsiderate actions have been a disservice to University administrators, the Van Galder Bus Company and our venerable judicial system. Most of all, I disappointed the very people that believed in my goals, trusted my credentials and elected me as class president; the student body. It is at this moment that I humbly ask for your forgiveness.
County, city and university attorneys met in Dane County Circuit Court Thursday to fight subpoenas against various officials in the latest lawsuit filed by the family of slain UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann, The Capital Times reported.
Zimmermannâ??s parents are suing Wisconsin Management Company Inc., who manage the property at 517 W. Doty St. where an intruder killed Brittany on April 2, alleging that unsafe living conditions contributed to her death. The Capital Times reported the lawsuit alleges the management company â??knowingly failed to provide adequate security to residentsâ? after Zimmermannâ??s fiancé Jordan Gonnering complained about the lack of secure doors and locks.
MADISON, Wis. — As Sept. 11 memorials occur all over the world, in Madison, the sentiment is no different.
It’s a history lesson outside the classroom for Alex and Ian Campbell, on Bascom Hill’s memorial for the victims of 9/11.
“They were just coming home from school today,” said Robert Kauffman, the boys’ grandfather, “And we thought, let’s have a little lesson on humanity, humility, and humbleness about this tragic event that happened.”
The boys are too young to remember what grandpa Kauffman remembers so vividly.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Ruth Olson. “It’s something that you’ve probably noticed a lot, too — that we don’t like making waves. We are a very polite group of people.”
MADISON (WKOW) — The University of Wisconsin Athletics Dept. admitted it didn’t handle the ticketing procedure very well at last Saturday’s home football game against Marshall.
“In trying to solve one problem, we created another,” said senior associate athletics director Vince Sweeney.
Quoted: Thongchai Winichakul, a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two dozen college presidents and policy experts defended the rising costs of tuition on Monday and argued against forcing colleges to spend more of their endowments.
But Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, who convened a round-table discussion on the subject, indicated that they would continue their effort to push universities to justify their tax exemptions by spending more of their endowment money.
About one in five UW-Madison students in last year’s freshman class were first-generation college students, according to a study released Tuesday by the university.
Those students are more likely to be from Wisconsin and tend to be poorer than other freshmen, the study found.
Quoted: UW-Madison dairy economist Bob Cropp.
The College Connection is a new program from Connections Counseling that augments traditional counseling by offering a schedule of free social activities to anyone who wants alcohol and drug free activities and a mentoring program that emphasizes friendships.
MADISON — Kikkoman Corp. Chairman Yuzaburo Mogi figures he has been to Wisconsin at least 200 times in the past 35 years.
So he was on familiar ground Tuesday when he dedicated his company’s new research-and-development lab at the University Research Park on Madison’s west side.
Mogi said he has high hopes that Kikkoman scientists and UW-Madison researchers can collaborate on new food and other products in coming years. The lab will open early in 2009.
Mentioned:
“University of Wisconsin researchers reported that when 16 Tibetan monks meditated inside an fMRI machine, the images showed “brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.”
Story includes scans from Richard Davidson, director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior
Quoted: University of Wisconsin historian Thomas C. Reeves identifies the Enlightenment as a secular religion in which human pride (for Christians the most grievous of the seven deadly sins) has been transformed from vice to virtue.
Quoted: Kenneth Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who tracks political advertising
MADISON, Wis. — It could open the doorway to a whole new world or at least a new understanding of it.
The world’s largest atom smasher is now up and running in Europe — thanks in large part to the ongoing work from University of Wisconsin scientists and engineers.
How does mass form? Are there other dimensions out there? Those are some of the big secrets UW staff and other scientists worldwide are hoping to unlock now that the world’s largest particle accelerator is up and running underground near Geneva, Switzerland.
With a new director on board, the University of Wisconsin La Follette School of Public Affairs is headed toward program expansions and the possibility of building a new home by 2013.
UW public affairs and economics professor Carolyn Heinrich is replacing Barbara Wolfe as director of the school. She said her top priority is to raise private funds to support current graduate students and attract top students to the school and find the school a new home with more space for students and staff.
University of Wisconsin senior Elizabeth Yurish was feeding elephants in Tsitsikamma National Park, South Africa, while thousands of miles away, fellow UW senior Erica Efron attempted to navigate the narrow medieval streets of Prague, Czech Republic.
Every year, thousands of students stuff their backpacks, grab their passports and hop on a plane to begin what many consider the â??adventure of a lifetime.â?
Quoted: Diana Hess, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in the School of Education.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or a slurp of coffee by its cup.
Recent research might yield the latter advice, especially. A taste test showed that the feel of a cup can affect how tasty people find the beverage within it, especially those who have a “high need” for touch when it comes to assessing products.
A need-for-touch scale was developed by Joann Peck, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. People with a high or low need for touch fall either above or below the midpoint on this continuous scale. When high need-for-touch people can’t touch products, they become frustrated and lose confidence in their judgments of products, Peck said.
Quoted: Kurt Squire, assistant professor of educational communications and technology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Quoted: Barry Gerhart, management professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Compensation.
Quoted: UW-Madison Dairy Economist Bob Cropp
This is a rare exercise in idealism for me
My co-editor, Sam Clegg, will likely roll his eyes as he reads the bleeding-heart liberalism gush from my pen onto an editorial page once heralded (no pun intended!) as a bastion of right-wing thought. There might be a snide reference in the online comments section to the river of tears that will soak the tie-dye shirts and salt the free-range eggs and vegetarian-fed bacon of many a Madison liberal as they read this article over breakfast.
The beast that killed our baseball team is back. And this time, itâ??s coming for your beakers.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, or Title IX for short, was designed to reduce gender discrimination in public schools. It decreed that nobody could â??be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination underâ? any federally-funded educational program on the basis of sex.
Seven years later, the day-to-day lives of most University of Wisconsin students rarely include more than a passing thought of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But when walking up Bascom Hill today, it could seem as if not a moment has passed since that morning.
University of Wisconsin School of Business Dean Michael Knetter apologized for calling UW tuitionâ?cheapâ? Wednesday, after being quoted in an article printed in the Wisconsin State Journal Tuesday.
Knetter said his remark was not meant to be â??insincereâ? to those families who find the tuition at UW expensive.
Although UW-Madison School of Business Dean Michael Knetter told a womenâ??s leadership organization Tuesday the school undercharges for its tuition, he clarified Wednesday he is sensitive to the financial struggles many students face.
â??When I said UW-Madisonâ??s tuition was underpriced, I meant it in relation to both the in-state tuition rate and the economic opportunities created in other Big Ten institutions,â? Knetter said in an interview. â??I specifically did not mean it in relation to all students and all families attending the university.â?
The University of Wisconsin admitted to mishandling the seating of the student section at last Saturdayâ??s football game against Marshall, causing several students to miss part of the first quarter.
After the student section of Camp Randall Stadium was still not filled by the start of the second quarter of the game, many angry students blamed the UW Athletic Department, saying security prevented them from getting to their seats on time.
It’s all doom and gloom in commercial newspapers these days: buyouts, layoffs, and fleeing advertisers. But most student newspapers seem to be doing just fine.
“We’re not experiencing a problem,” said Kevin Schwartz, general manager at The Daily Tar Heel, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “There’s no advertising downturn for us.”
An experiment which scientists say could change the way we see our universe is underway in Switzerland, and researchers right here in Wisconsin have a big part in the project!
Sridhara Dasu is an associate professor of physics at the UW Madison and says, “What this experiment does is to create conditions close to the time of the big bang.” The Large Hadron Collider fired up Wednesday morning in a 17 mile tunnel, 300 feet below Switzerland and France where protons will soon be made to collide near the speed of light. Dasu says, “It’s not that we’re doing something new on the surface of the Earth. The new thing is that we’re creating it in a laboratory conditions that can take a picture, but these events have been happening all the time in Earth.”
Amid a wave of complaints about Robert Felner, a former University of Louisville dean who is now under federal investigation, administrators supported the embattled dean and even bankrolled a lawyer to defend him from faculty critics. While the universityâ??s president and provost have recently apologized for backing Felner for so long, details emerging from the controversy show a broken grievance process at Louisville that many say favors administrators and leaves professors unprotected from retaliation.
Quoted: Thongchai Winichakul, a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The latest in healthy, soy-based foods could someday sprout from a lab here in Madison.
Japanese dignitaries came to University Research Park on Tuesday to dedicate the Kikkoman USA Research and Development Laboratory, to be created at the MGE Innovation Center, 505 S. Rosa Road.
The lab will be Kikkoman’s fourth worldwide and the first of its kind in the U.S.
UW-Madison undergraduate students are not paying enough for the quality education they’re getting here, School of Business Dean Michael Knetter told a women’s leadership organization Tuesday.
“We dramatically undercharge for a (UW-Madison) degree,” said Knetter. Of the Big Ten schools, only the University of Iowa charges less than UW-Madison for state resident undergraduate tuition and fees last year, a comparison by UW-Madison officials shows.
History’s most ambitious science experiment was scheduled to begin this morning on the Swiss-Franco border in Europe in a giant underground particle smasher called the Large Hadron Collider.
As is true of many scientists, Terry Millar, UW-Madison’s associate dean for physical sciences, can hardly contain himself when he starts talking about the groundbreaking nature of the knowledge that could come from the 17-mile, $8 billion loop of steel and magnets and seven-story particle detectors.
Raphael “Ray” Krantz, age 90, of Pine Bluff, passed away peacefully on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008. He last worked for UW-Provisions for 16 years prior to his retirement.
Soon after I transferred to this campus, I heard talk of a large, puzzling organization. While walking to class, students behind tables tried to convince me to come to this organizationâ??s kickoff, promising me new experiences and opportunities. However, it was not until I got involved in ASM that I began to truly understand the meaning of this mysterious acronym.
The Associated Students of Madisonâ??s Constitutional Committee put together a timeline and recommendation delaying a vote on the newly restructured constitution Tuesday night.
The committee told the Student Council the vote should move from the expected fall election date to a special election in February 2009.
Construction on State Street, originally scheduled to finish Friday, will continue one more week, but buses will run and restaurants will be able to operate outdoor seating starting Saturday.
Representatives from City Engineering, Speedway construction company and the Business Improvement District made the decision during their weekly meeting Tuesday morning.
The UW-Madison Department of Economics is currently struggling to provide economics majors with the classes needed to graduate and prospective students with necessary resources.
â??The number of people who are interested in getting an economics degree has exploded over the past 10 years, and that has happened at a time when we have had constrained resources,â? said Gary Sandefur, dean of the College of Letters & Science.
UW-Madison students can register to vote at their campus addresses without facing consequences for registering in locations away from their hometowns, despite recent controversy over the issue in other states.
Virginia Tech students were discouraged from registering to vote when local election officials issued two statements last month incorrectly warning them against registering at their college residencies, according to The New York Times.
