Neither Wisconsin’s economy nor its environment can thrive for long if the state continues to depend so overwhelmingly on nonrenewable, imported energy sources that contribute to climate change.
That warning should enlighten policymakers and voters as the debate accelerates over the recommendations from Gov. Doyle’s Global Warming Task Force.
Average scores on the ACT college entrance exam dipped slightly for the high school class of 2008 as the number of students taking the exam jumped by 9% compared to last year.
High school graduates’ average ACT scores held steady in Wisconsin last year and remained among the highest in the country.
The average composite score for Wisconsin students who graduated this year was 22.3 out of 36. That’s the same as last year and 1.2 points higher than the national average.
As in past years, there were large disparities among the races in Wisconsin and nationally.
Sixty-seven percent of graduates took the test in Wisconsin
Quoted: Ken Goldstein, head of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin, says it was strange to see a McCain “attack ad” during the Olympics opening ceremonies â?? especially since the footage used to deride Obama’s “celebrity” was of Obama being cheered in Germany.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison has lost a key environmental researcher to the University of Minnesota.
If this was an isolated case, it would be one thing. But this has happened before. And it will happen again as long as salaries for UW campuses do not keep up with peer institutions.
And it will keep up as long as there is wrong-headed anti-university actions taken by legislators from both political parties.
Was it the stained, aging carpet in the hallways, the sweltering heat and lack of air conditioning or the fight for sinks in the shared bathrooms each morning that kept reminding you, â??thereâ??s no place like homeâ?¦.â??â??
These days, students also have come to dread the stress of moving every year in a relentless search for housing that accommodates their needs.
A major new apartment project on the UW-Madison campus reflects the changing expectations students and their parents have for living arrangements that can enhance academic life and provide a transition into the professional world. As UW-Madison attracts a growing share of world-class intellectual talent, the bar is being raised on the amenities and housing options these savvy students are seeking.
New light has been cast on the selection process for a national, multi-million dollar biolab facility, which included Wisconsin. Documents obtained and reviewed by the Associated Press show that the favored site chosen for the lab ranked much lower than the Badger State and five others. Brian Bull reportsâ?¦(Audio.)
Getting a good job as a teenager can be difficult enough, let alone when the teenage job-seeker has a disability such as autism.
But thanks to a three-year study at-UW Madison, the issue is being examined with the intent of turning the problem around.
Project Summer, run by the Community Inclusion Unit at the university’s Waisman Center, aims to increase the levels of school, employment and community involvement for youth with a variety of disabilities.
Quoted: Morris Davis, a professor in the real estate and urban land economics department at the University of Wisconsin, disagreed that increases in home prices should always track increases in rents. Houses in desirable locations can be expected to appreciate, and he said the buyer has to pay upfront for the right to partake of that appreciation.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
To keep troops from being stranded and easily ambushed on the battlefield, the Army is working with researchers to develop tires for their Humvees that can better withstand roadside attacks. One such design comes from Resilient Technologies, LLC, based in Wausau, Wis., and the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison’s Polymer Engineering Center. With a four-year, $18-million grant from the Pentagon, Resilient is working to create a “non-pneumatic tire” (NPT) technology, called that because it doesn’t require air.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri said that recent discoveries of the insect in Ozaukee and Washington counties is a reason for concern — but not panic — in Dane County.
Wisconsinites have a higher risk of death than people living in southern states because we get less Vitamin D due to our lower exposure to the sun, according to a new study.
Albert Einstein College in New York tracked 13,000 people in their 40â??s for about nine years. Those with the lowest Vitamin D levels had a 26 percent greater chance of dying early than those with the highest levels.
Itâ??s not unusual for Wisconsinites to have Vitamin D levels in the low range, especially when itâ??s not summer. Neil Binkley of UW-Madison says Vitamin D deficiency is an epidemic in many parts of the world, including ours.
Right now, there are only about a dozen bilingual doctors serving Dane County’s estimated 40,000 Spanish-speakers.
That means many patients need help communicating with their doctor.
Until a decade ago, just about anyone could claim they were bilingual.
Today, Dane County’s translators are not just qualified, they’re certified through a ground-breaking program started by UW Hospital’s Shiva Bidar-Sielaff.
One of the largest solar lighting projects in the country is being tried out on the UW Madison campus.
Along a newly-built pedestrian path, 37 solar panels are perched on light poles. The path will give walkers and bikers a shorter, straighter option than the other twisted, time consuming route on the west end of campus. (6th item.)
UW Transportation planner Rob Kennedy says the solar path took 4 to 5 years to develop and build. Parking tickets helped fund it.
“It’s being paid for entirely out of program revenues; no tax dollars are going into it,â? says Kennedy. â??It’s already going to make a huge difference to pedestrian-friendliness on the west side of campus which has built in such a way that it’s hard for pedestrians and bicyclists to get around.”
Quoted: Norman Fost, a professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin.
Donald “Don” Christian Hunt, age 62, passed away peacefully on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008. Don Hunt served as a lecturer in the UW-Madison Ceramics Department in 2003-2004 and 2006-2007.
William D. “Bill” Skaar, age 71, of Fox Lake, passed away Friday, Aug. 8, 2008. He retired from the University of Wisconsin in 1993, following 33 years of employment.
Bicyclists traveling from the West Side to the UW-Madison campus now have an easier and brighter passage.
The new Campus Drive Pedestrian and Bicycle Path, which runs along Campus Drive from University Bay Drive to a network of sidewalks on Linden Drive, officially opened Friday.
Rental projects have become a popular choice for area developers as the struggling economy and housing market troubles continue to make some prospective home and condominium buyers wary of making purchases. A market study also showed “more than adequate demand” for more student housing near UW-Madison.
Dane County’s emergency dispatch center has kept incomplete and disorganized records of police complaints about its shortcomings, limiting its ability to prevent potentially life-and-death mistakes such as those that happened at the 911 center the day Brittany Zimmermann was killed.
Attention, bike thieves.
In a new program on the UW-Madison campus, university police are planting Global Positioning System satellite units on bikes to catch thieves in action.
This summer, police have arrested 16 people through the program.
When Aldo Leopold spoke on June 17, 1934, at the dedication of the UW Arboretum, he stood in the middle of two square miles of derelict farmland.
There was no rumble of traffic from the Beltline because the Beltline did not exist. To the south was nothing but more farmland. There were a few housing developments nearby but mostly the city and the Arboretum’s parent university were miles away across more fields and woodlots.
Here’s how Plymouth native and UW-Madison grad Beau Hoopman sums up his journey to the Olympics, which opens in China today: “Four years, countless hours of practice, thousands and thousands of miles rowed – all for five-and-a-half minutes.”
It’s that kind of no-nonsense attitude that drives so many of Wisconsin’s amateur athletes as they chase their dreams of Olympic gold.
“Did you see those awful jokes these students wanted to put in their magazine?”
“Filthy, weren’t they? What are college students coming to?”
Thus begins a self-parody printed in the late, great Octopus, the UW-Madison’s campus humor magazine. Those naughty, naughty students were writing jokes about sex … in 1928.
Q. How do maglev trains work?
A. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, which means maglev trains hover centimeters above a guide rail under the force of powerful electromagnets.
“It’s almost like being on an airplane. You’re just floating above the track,” says Giri Venkataramanan, an electrical engineering professor at UW-Madison.
A new exhibit, “The Art of College Humor,” opened last week on the UW-Madison campus and was the subject of a story in Friday’s State Journal.
As the story noted, the exhibit celebrates “the glory years of humor magazines on college campuses,” including UW-Madison’s own, The Octopus, which was published from 1919-1959.
Nick Gabel enjoyed UW-Madison’s Fun with Forensic Science camp so much it made him think about a career in the field.
“I think this camp has inspired me” to become a crime scene investigator, said Gabel, who will be a seventh-grader in New Glarus.
MADISON â?? The entrepreneurial spirit is rising at UW-Madison and other campuses, and not just among faculty and staff who want to start new companies.
Students are also chomping at the bit to create their own firms, officials say, which is one of the reasons why the University Research Park is opening 10 incubator suites in a former manufacturing site on East Washington Ave. in the capital city.
UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley is predicting an â??explosionâ? of student-run companies. He says there has been a â??sea changeâ? over the past decade in attitudes of students, many of whom now want to run their own companies rather than work for someone else.
Quoted: R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin wrote in an e-mail.
MADISON, Wis. — Madison prides itself on the miles of bike paths that wind through the city and now one section of path is even “greener” than the others.
A portion of a bike path on the University of Wisconsin campus is becoming easier and brighter to get around — while going green in the process.
Quoted: Charles H. Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations of government experts and named Mississippi – home to powerful U.S. lawmakers with sway over the agency – as a top location for a new $451 million, national laboratory to study some of the world’s most virulent biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Mississippi’s lawmakers include the Democratic chairman of the department’s oversight committee in the House and the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is expected to approve money to build the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility at one of five sites being considered. The two lawmakers said they were unaware of the Homeland Security evaluation system that scored the Mississippi site so low.
The disclosure is the latest example of what critics assert is the Bush administration’s politicizing of government decisions, such as efforts to steer science over global warming at the Environmental Protection Agency and hiring and firing practices at the Justice Department.
“It is very suspicious,” said Irwin Goldman of the University of Wisconsin, a leader of the unsuccessful effort to build the lab in Madison. His community’s offer was among nine sites rejected even though the government scored it more highly than Mississippi’s. “We wondered how everybody else did. It’s interesting to know that we came out ahead of one that was short-listed.”
Quoted: Political scientist Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Reading a book with “quantum mechanics” in the subtitle makes me feel smart. Especially smart. Possibly smarter than anyone around me. I noticed this unattractive effect while reading “The Black Hole War” on a long airline flight, when I caught myself sneering at the beach-book passenger in the next seat.
Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.”
MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin-Madison student from China is wishing she was home to enjoy the Olympic festivities.
Yuli Na said her family and friends are thrilled with the games and although the world may be scrutinizing China right now, she thinks having so many people looking at China could open communication and promote understanding, WISC-TV reported.
WASHINGTON — Stepfathers make slightly better parents than married biological fathers, researchers found in a new study of at-risk urban families.
Lawrence Berger, the study’s lead author, cautioned that the findings applied only to so-called fragile families, defined as low-income urban families prone to nonmarital births.
Berger is an assistant professor at the social work school of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Prof. David Foster, director of UW-Madisonâ??s Engine Research Center.
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i49/49a00104.htm
Talk to the chief information officer at just about any American university, and he will probably say that his institution has bent over backward to help the Recording Industry Association of America curb illegal file sharing on his campus.
He will also tell you he’s angry.
The UW is working to improve diversity on campus starting with its faculty and staff.
Adin Palau is UW Madison’s recruitment manager. He filled a new position created six months ago to help recruit a more diverse workforce on campus.
Working while in school no longer means serving food at the Union.
A new UW program helps students pay for school and improve their resumes.
It’s called “RISE” – the Recruitment Initiative for Student Employees.
Harvard scientists say they have created stems cells for 10 genetic disorders, which will allow researchers to watch the diseases develop in a lab dish.
This early step, using a new technique, could help speed up efforts to find treatments for some of the most confounding ailments, the scientists said.
Harvard University scientists have made lines of stem cells, able to turn into any other cell in the body, from bits of skin or blood of 10 patients with genetic diseases including muscular dystrophy and juvenile diabetes.
The findings will help researchers decipher the workings of these diseases, enabling them to study what happens as cells that carry a condition’s genetic seeds develop and age. The lines will be made available for a “nominal fee” to researchers around the world, the Harvard scientists said.
Quoted: Zhongdang Pan, a professor of communication arts at the UW-Madison.
According to a new UW-Madison study, the prions that cause mad cow disease are not destroyed by conventional sewage treatment and could end up contaminating water and fertilizer. This may be of interest to folks ’round here, given that the state Department of Natural Resources has for the past few months been dumping the carcasses of deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) in the county’s Rodefeld landfill, from which leachate is pumped into the sewerage treatment plant.
But, it turns out, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about!
It has been a long road, but one goal of the UW-Madison Dairy Science Department is now reality. The newest addition to UW-Madisonâ??s dairy facilities dedicated to serving Wisconsinâ??s and the nationâ??s dairy producers, was officially dedicated last week on location in Arlington.
â??It has been a relatively long journey for our department and college,â? noted Ric Grummer, Dairy Science Department chairperson. But the department now has an elite facility for research to prove that it is the premier dairy science department and school in the country.
The new facility is located on Badger Lane outside of Arlington. It includes a parlor and two freestall barns that are all specially geared to foster research projects in an environment that closely resembles a typical dairy operation today.
Locking a bike is routine for UW graduate Carrie Lorig, but one night this summer, it still wasn’t good enough. “I was just really devastated because that’s how I get around town, and I really love my bike,” said Lorig. She said she locked her U-lock to itself because the bike rack at the downtown grocery store she visited was full.
“A lot of my friends, there was a lot of bike stealings after that,” said Lorig.
There are other students with similar stories of victimization and frustration.
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison police are taking extra steps to keep bikes safe from thieves.
A special GPS device has helped police catch at least 18 thieves since May, according to UW police.
The police leave what they call bait bikes around camp
Every year hundreds of bicycles are stolen on campus. Very few of these bikes are ever recovered and even fewer arrests are made. But a new program created by the UW Police has changed all that.
“It was actually stolen out of my basement in my apartment,” said Shawn Vesely. “I was pretty upset. I was wondering where my bike went. Who came into my house and took it.”
Stories like this are all too common as bicycles are one of the most stolen items on the UW Campus. But, University Police may have found a way to make sure your ride home doesn’t ride away.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association will continue to allow beer advertising during broadcasts of college games â?? in spite of mounting opposition from college presidents and athletic directors â?? and will allow CBS Sports to go ahead with plans for a fantasy football league using the names of actual college players, the Associated Press reports.
David John Fritzke, age 38, passed away unexpectedly of natural causes at his home on Sunday, Aug. 3, 2008. At the time of his death, David worked through the Greater University Tutoring Service, instructing foreign students in English.
A state that has experienced historic floods and the announcement of a major plant closing could use some good news. Perhaps it’s found in the steady growth of Wisconsin’s biotechnology industry.
High schools and colleges are steering students away from cars to save money on gas, save the environment and promote physical fitness.
This fall, Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., is offering freshmen free mountain bikes, helmets and locks in exchange for a promise not to bring a car to campus. The $300-per-student cost is funded by private donations.
MADISON â?? Gov. Jim Doyle, a longtime opponent of building new nuclear power plants in Wisconsin, said today he was open to studying that possibility.
But Doyle was quick to repeat his oft-used line that no nuclear power plant has been built in the country in 30 years and Wisconsin would not be the first place one goes up.
Quoted: Max Lagally, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: Max Lagally, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that the new approach is useful because it allows the use of conventional technology to create the circuits.
Quoted: Gypsy moths start their lives as orange-yellow egg masses attached to trees, buildings, lawn furniture or any other place a mother moth finds convenient, according to Chris Williamson, UW-Madison turf and ornamental specialist.
MADISON, Wis. — A 359-unit apartment project in University Square officially celebrated its opening Wednesday with the installation of a 500-ton elephant from India named “Lucky.”
That’s the same name of the luxury apartment building owned by developer Steve Brown, who just struck a settlement agreement with the City of Madison over a dispute regarding access for disabled persons involving hundreds of regular use apartments.
State budget woes and a rocky economy have shaken public colleges and universities in recent years. One of the most noticeable shudders, however, has been a pervasive “brain drain” at some state institutions that face competition for their best faculty members from more prosperous institutions, both public and private.
Public colleges and universities are now girding themselves to win this war for tenured talent. Chief academic officers, deans, and department heads at those institutions are using specific incentives, careful nurturing, and, of course, cold hard cash as weapons. And they are also making hard decisions about whether some offers are worth matchingâ??and about the longer-term consequences of this faculty arms race.
