Officials and business leaders from both Wisconsin and Japan gathered Tuesday to celebrate the opening of an innovative new Kikkoman research facility in University Research Park.
Gov. Jim Doyle, Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin and University Research Park Director Mark Bugher joined Gov. Akiko Domoto of the Japanese prefecture of Chiba and Kikkoman Chairman and CEO Yuzaburo Mogi to unveil the Kikkoman Research and Development Laboratory.
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5110/u-of-wisconsin-economics-department-faces-growing-demand
As more and more students decide to major in economics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, some are voicing concern about waiting lists for required upper-division courses, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.
WISCONSIN RAPIDS — Portable bleachers and about 700 extra meals are part of the Wisconsin Rapids School District’s preparations for Friday’s football game.
Officials are preparing for about 350 members of the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, which will perform during the game, at halftime and the band’s famed “Fifth Quarter” postgame song list.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison weather scientist Jon Martin admits he read the Farmer’s Almanac when he was young.
A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a “siege princess,” running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.
But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.
MADISON, Wis. — The Kikkoman Corp. made a major announcement about a research and development lab in Madison on Tuesday.
The company’s CEO, along with the Gov. Jim Doyle and University of Wisconsin Chancellor Biddy Martin, announced a research and development lab will be located on Madison’s west side in University Research Park.
Quoted: Dr. Eric Heilgenstein of UW Health Services in Madison says without disincentives or available treatment, it’s likely to become a lifelong habit. (Sixth item.)
Dozens of University of Wisconsin scientists will play a role as the world’s largest particle accelerator fires up today. You may have heard that the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland could bring about the end of the world, as it smashes two beams of protons together at nearly the speed of light. “The concern apparently is creation of a mini black hole,” explains UW Madison mathematician Terry Millar, who calls such concerns “not worth losing sleep over.”
As president of Vanderbilt University and four other prominent schools before that, Gordon Gee perceived an unhappy trend: Student-athletes were drifting away from the core of university life. They lived, ate and studied in a jock bubble.
Sure, most went to class. But they missed out on virtually every other important college experience, from studying abroad to Greek life.
Five years ago this week, Gee decided he’d had enough. At loggerheads with his athletic director, he summoned his top administrators and stunned them with the news: He planned to disband Vanderbilt’s athletic department, and fold it into the division of student life.
The government did the right thing by bailing out mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before their finances deteriorated any further, a UW-Madison School of Business professor says.
“If we learned anything from the savings and loan (crisis of the 1980s and 1990s), it’s that firms have incentives to take big risks if they’re near bankruptcy,” said Morris Davis, assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics.
It’s a simple economic problem: Supply is not meeting demand. The UW-Madison economics department is struggling to deliver enough course space as the major grows at a heady pace.
In the 1998-1999 academic year, there were 183 economics majors at UW-Madison. Last school year, there were 442.
Of all the advice parents give to children heading off to college, warnings about alcohol â?? and especially about abusing alcohol â?? may be the most important. At most colleges, whether and how much students drink can make an enormous difference, not just in how well they do in school, but even whether they live or die.
Every state has a minimum drinking age of 21, and the vast majority of college students are younger than that. Yet drinking, and in particular drinking to get drunk, remains a major health and social problem on campuses. Car crashes and other accidental injuries, sexual assaults, fights, community violence, academic failure and deaths from an overdose of alcohol are among the consequences.
A pass/fail grading system for first-year medical students could be instituted by the University of Wisconsinâ??s School of Medicine and Public Health if approved next month by a faculty committee.
A campuswide group consisting of key faculty members recommended the policy for a medical school faculty vote in late July, and two committees related to the medical school have already unanimously approved the measure.
Sixteen bike thieves have been caught red-handed as a result of the University of Wisconsin Police Departmentâ??s â??Bait Bikeâ? program.
Using GPS technology, UWPD officers leave locked and unlocked bikes around campus and wait for them to be stolen. When one of the bikes moves, UWPD is notified and an officer is dispatched to issue the thief a citation. The fine for stealing a bike in Madison is $406.50.
The University Bookstore is offering fair trade sweatshirts for the first time, kicking off sales last week.
The sweatshirts are produced by Fair Indigo, a local company from Middleton with a retail store at Hilldale Mall. The company says it ensures all factory workers are paid â??goodâ? wages and working in â??goodâ? conditions. The products are made using organically grown cotton, eco-friendly chemicals, dyes and no pesticides.
University of Wisconsin community members mourned Monday the death of three students killed in a car accident and remembered them as enthusiastic students who positively affected the UW community.
In attendance were dozens of UW students, staff and faculty who shared stories to celebrate the lives of Rick Putze, Lindsey Plank and Dan Myers.
http://badgerherald.com/oped/2008/09/09/universitys_legislat.php
There is a disease infecting this university, and like many preventable diseases, this one could have been avoided.
The disease is faculty flight, and one cause is the toxic environment established by the state Legislature. For those of you unfamiliar with this phenomenon, the predominant symptom is an overwhelming urge for talented professors to gather all their possessions and move to universities where they will be appreciated.
As a member of the Executive Board of the Teaching Assistantsâ?? Association, I would like to address some misinformation from the office of state Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, which ran in the Sept. 8, 2008 article â??Baldwin, Democrats applaud teaching assistants.â? Nass spokesperson Mike Mikalsenâ??s assertions that the TAA has no business pushing for better working conditions for its members, that domestic partnership benefits are illegal and that such benefits are â??fiscally irresponsibleâ? arenâ??t simply misleading; they are blatantly incorrect.
Big Ten Conference Commissioner Jim Delany was exhausted.
It was Monday morning, Aug. 25, and he was on the charter flight that was bringing the USA Basketball team back from Beijing. A member of the teamâ??s executive committee, Delany was reveling in the Redeem Teamâ??s successful three-year pursuit of an Olympic gold medal.
But when the plane landed in Minneapolis, Delanyâ??s excitement was tempered by e-mail messages that came across his BlackBerry suggesting that the Big Ten Networkâ??s yearlong pursuit of a critical carriage deal with Time Warner Cable would not be as successful.
Noted: Last year, a meta-analysis concluded that 3.2 grams a day of CLA “produces a modest loss in body fat.” The analysis, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, pooled results from 18 studies to conclude that subjects taking CLA lost an average of two-tenths of a pound of fat a week more than those taking a placebo.
“It’s not a wonder drug to make fat melt away from the body in a few weeks and drop 10 dress sizes,” says study author Leah D. Whigham, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “What it is doing is resulting in a fat loss over time.”
There was less to celebrate on Labor Day 2008 for the working people of the state. The cost of the usual Labor Day barbeque – the food (and gas to get it) – is going up, while wages are not. And that’s for the folks who have a job.
Wisconsin has lost 24,000 jobs since last summer. Manufacturing jobs – some of the highest paying – have taken the biggest hit. We’re in the first sustained period of decline in our median wage since the early 1980s.
These data come from the newly-released State of Working Wisconsin 2008 (find it at www.cows.org) compiled and published biennially by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a policy institute housed on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The collective impression that the data leave is negative. And, bad as the news is now, it will probably get worse in the coming months. We are likely slipping into a new recession before we fully recovered from the last one.
Some Universities are taking a new stance on campus violence.
They’re telling students to fight back.
NBC 15’s Barclay Pollak has more on this story.
The main reason Candice Beach chose to begin her collegiate career at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is because she considers it to be a safe campus.
She says, ” Well just being here for the first week I haven’t seen any problems. I mean the people are all really nice here.”
Associate Athletic Director Vince Sweeney has a recurring dream concerning student section seating at Camp Randall. Itâ??s an Orwellian dream where students uniformly file into their assigned section, and since Big Brother is watching, students wouldnâ??t dare sit somewhere other than their assigned seat. Unfortunately, Sweeneyâ??s hypothetical euphoria is limited to la-la land. The reality is student seating is still a disasterâ??perfectly evidenced by last weekendâ??s student corral in the concourse outside the student section.
A new tracking system initiated by the University of Wisconsin Police Department is aiming to cut down the amount of bicycles stolen on campus.
â??Bait Bikes,â? launched in May, places GPS equipment on select bicycles around campus.
UWPD Officer John Deering followed University of Toronto Police officers in starting the program at UW-Madison.
Members of the UW-Madison community gathered at the Red Gym Monday evening to pay their respects to students who died in a car crash days before the fall semester began.
Lindsey Plank, 23, Dan Myers, 22, and Rick Putze, 22, were killed in a single vehicle car accident Aug. 27 on Midvale Boulevard.
Dean of Students Lori Berquam began the service with a reflection of the studentsâ?? lives at the university through a Power Point video.
Madison, Wis. – At this month’s World Stem Cell Summit in Madison, several nations and even a few states will boast they’re relying on public dollars to propel their cutting-edge research in human embryonic stem cells.
Wisconsin won’t be among them. Beyond the federal dollars allocated for basic research on approved stem cell lines, Wisconsin spends remarkably few tax dollars on breakthrough science that has won its researchers worldwide acclaim.
Based on a fresh report by a major Washington-based â??think tank,â? that’s precisely as it should be.
It’s a new way to catch bike thieves at colleges.
In May of this year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department began using GPS technology to track stolen bicycles. Sergeant Jason Whitney says despite most students — and their bikes — absent from campus for summer break, police still managed to capture several thieves due to the new “bait bike” program.
Advanced Cell Technology, which is struggling to raise money to stay in business, is not the only company pursuing blood cells.
James A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, the first person to derive human embryonic stem cells, was a founder of Stem Cell Products, a company formed to pursue making blood products from stem cells. The company has since merged with another he helped found, Cellular Dynamics, which is working on making cells to be used in pharmaceutical research.
John “Red” Laudin, age 85, of Mount Hope, Ark. and formally of Madison, peacefully passed away on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2008. After he and his family moved from Ely, Minn. to Madison in 1958, Red worked at the UW Physical Plant.
Khayrulla Ismatoullaev passed away peacefully on Sunday, Aug. 24, 2008, at his home in Madison. He taught Uzbek language and culture in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia at UW-Madison beginning in 2003.
Katherine B. Burris, age 92, passed away peacefully on Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008. She worked as a dietician at the University Hospital in Madison for many years.
Slowly but surely, tenacious Ogg Hall is coming down.
After clinging to life for longer than expected, the UW-Madison dorm that students lovingly disparaged for its small and austere rooms seems finally on a clear path to demolition.
Where once there were stacks of books at UW-Madison’s College Library, now there are big tables, littered with laptops and pizza boxes.
In the place of journals, there is a coffeehouse and cafe. And windows that were blocked by bookshelves now reveal an expansive view of Lake Mendota’s blue water.
This is the changing face of College Library, housed within Helen C. White Hall.
Dane County 911 Director Joe Norwick, who came under heavy fire following the center’s mishandling of a call from homicide victim Brittany Zimmermann’s cell phone, has resigned.
Norwick, 54, a 30-year veteran of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and former chief deputy, tendered his resignation Tuesday. Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk said Norwick indicated that stress was a major reason for his decision.
High pollen counts and little rain in late August mean it’s going to be a bad season for allergy sufferers.
But for those people who suffer from ragweed allergies, a new treatment is being tested at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
There will be no competition for the top grade among first-year medical students this year at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
That’s because the school is eliminating grades for first-year medical students in favor of a pass/fail system, a trend in medical education already embraced at Harvard, Stanford and the universities of Minnesota and Michigan, among others. The last three years of medical school will still be graded.
Hundreds of students attended the Multicultural Student Centerâ??s 27th Multicultural Orientation Reception Friday, an event consisting of fairs, a multicultural showcase and a dance.
The eveningâ??s theme was â??Mind, Body and Soul: Making Every Experience Count,â? to reflect the challenge â??to make the very most of your experience here while youâ??re at this campus,â? according to Candace McDowell, chair of the planning committee for the MCSC.
Watching what you eat really does help, at least if you do it through a camera lens. That’s the conclusion of a study of dieters’ eating habits comparing the effect of written food diaries with taking a snapshot of each meal.
Food diaries track food consumption during weight loss programmes, but now taking a snapshot of each meal is replacing the laborious task of writing down everything you eat. To see if photos might also prompt healthier eating, Lydia Zepeda and David Deal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told 43 people to record what they ate for one week in words and as pictures.
Quoted: Janet Gilmore, a University of Wisconsin folklorist, has studied Wisconsin’s fish fry tradition.
Quoted: Vivian Littlefield, former dean and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s College of Nursing.
MILWAUKEE — Jim Doing of Verona, Wis., shot an 80 Saturday in the first round of the U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship.
Not bad for an opera singer, especially one who struggled with his putter.
“I managed to three-putt twice from 2½ feet. I just could not make a putt,” said Doing, 46, who teaches music at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Byron Shafer, political science chair at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Morris Davis, a University of Wisconsin economist who focuses on real estate issues.
Quoted: Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor and constitutional scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Another study out this week in Nature Geoscience looks at the question from another angle, focusing on the long retreat of the vast ice sheet that 20,000 years ago covered much of North America during the last Ice Age. Led by Anders Carlson of the University of Wisconsin, a team combines geological records of the ice sheet with climate models of the most likely atmospheric heating to come in this century.
Quoted: “The official categories aren’t really the way people live their lives,” says Edward Friedman, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Wisconsin. “The Chinese state has an official set of categories and you shouldn’t take them seriously.”
Quoted: “The downsizing-turnover relationship suggests a sad irony in that employees are laid off by companies that may subsequently find themselves understaffed,” write the study’s authors, Charlie O. Trevor and Anthony J. Nyberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Attempting to lose weight at this time of year can be trying. With the days getting shorter and a marked change in the weather, most of us react as squirrels – instinctively, we want to bulk up for winter, stuff ourselves with carbs and settle down for a long snooze.
A new report says that the best way to curb your calorie intake is the so-called “flash diet”. The University of Wisconsin-Madison revealed last week that would-be weight-watchers who took pictures of their food before tucking in responded to the visual food diary by eating less; the thought of taking a picture of four scoops of Rocky Road ice-cream was a powerful disincentive to eat it.
The stereotype of remote and impatient stepfathers not wanting anything to do with their new wife’s children has been debunked, as a US study reveals stepfathers often make better parents than biological dads.
Stepfathers should be recognised as just as nurturing and caring as biological parents, says Stepfamilies Australia spokeswoman Dolla Merrillees.
Sociologist Lawrence Berger, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, surveyed more than 2000 mothers in at-risk families for his study. Published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the study found stepfathers were more inclined than natural fathers to agree with the parenting philosophy of the mother, had higher levels of engagement with the children and were more co-operative parents.
Quoted: Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied the path of modern students through what she calls “the complex educational pipeline.”
MADISON, Wis. — Two entities synonymous with Wisconsin will continue their partnership through 2013.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Athletics Department is extending its marketing deal with Culver’s restaurants and will allow the restaurant to continue product giveaways and special events like Punt, Pass and Kick, a youth football program.
The Prairie du Sac-based chain, which was founded in 1984, and the state’s largest university have had marketing deals for the past eight years.
Having a legal drinking age of 21 reduces but certainly does not eliminate the likelihood of teenage alcohol use. This is where the rest of us must play a role. A colleague and good friend drove her son to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to begin his freshman studies a few years ago. After a loving embrace, she began the journey home. Within a few hours her son had toppled from the second floor of an apartment due to alcohol and suffered severe brain damage. He now functions at a very basic level and can never continue his studies.
Whether we are parents, friends, siblings, co-workers, store merchants, etc., we have the opportunity to help our young people make good lifestyle decisions. If young adults are not legally able to consume alcohol, are they “missing out”? What they won’t experience are the harmful health issues, the embarrassing situations, the hangovers and the potential for injuries or death.
The history of University of Wisconsin-Madison seems readily apparent in buildings like the Red Gym and Memorial Union, in the effigy mounds that are visible on campus or in grand open spaces like Library Mall. But what we can see is only part of the story. Daniel Einstein, program manager of UWâ??s Lakeshore Nature Preserve, loves the places that are hidden and the tales they tell.
“History is not just about the long ago past â?? it informs everything about our present lives and the possibilities for our future,” says Einstein, who works for the universityâ??s department of facilities, planning and management. “There is no escaping the past. Our lives today are a consequence of everything that has preceded us.”
Quoted: Katherine Cramer Walsh, a political science professor at UW-Madison whose courses include “Political Psychology” and “Citizenship, Democracy and Difference.”
http://badgerherald.com/news/2008/09/08/uw-oshkosh_to_pledge.php
While the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh announced last week it will provide as many fair trade products as possible to its students, UW-Madison is not currently moving in the same direction.
UW spokesperson John Lucas said the chancellorâ??s office has been encouraged to look at purchasing fair trade products, but it would be a â??stretchâ? for such a large university to move in the same direction as UW-Oshkosh
MADISON, Wis. — While Badger fans cheered on the football team Saturday, the student section in Camp Randall was less crowded at kickoff than the rest of the stadium.
Many fans start tailgating early before the game, but students tend to keep on partying through the beginning of the game and miss kickoff, which has university officials concerned.
“We think, partially, it’s a fashionably late thing, but we also believe that they’re valuing the drinking rather than being at the game early and supporting the team,” said Kipp Cox, assistant dean of students in charge of student advocacy and judicial affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Embattled Dane County 911 Center Director Joe Norwick resigned, five months after the mishandling of an emergency call from the cell phone of a murder victim led to intense scrutiny of 911 Center operations.
It might seem cheesy, but do you have an ice cream named after you?
This has been Chancellor Biddy Martin’s first official week on the job at UW-Madison. University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly says it didn’t take the former Cornell University provost long to adjust to the community in the capitol city.
Officials with the UW Arboretum are about to unveil an ambitious plan to stem the tide of more than a half-billion gallons of stormwater that every year floods the 1,260-acre property, washing away valuable restored prairies, spreading invasive plants and undoing a heritage that reaches back nearly 75 years.
