Karyn Riddle, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, says research supports the idea that what children watch does affect them. She cited a study from Strasburger & Wilson that addresses children ‘s reactions to adult-themed media.
Bring on the zany costumes and good natured fun.
Just don ‘t freak out with violence or damage to property at this year ‘s Freakfest on State Street.
UW-Madison’s new Microbial Sciences Building, which will be formally dedicated this afternoon, is now the largest academic building on campus.
Thirty years ago, the first Halloween gathering on State Street began with an inspired spark: a bonfire that drew hundreds of people.
In the years since, the party grew large and wild, shriveled to next to nothing, survived cold and rainy weather, then swelled in size again â?? eventually spinning out of control â?? until authorities tamed it last year, gating off the street and charging admission to enter.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced today that he used his veto pen to let local governments raise property taxes by 3.86 percent this year instead of the 2 percent limit agreed to by lawmakers in the new two-year budget deal.
In a ceremony at UW-Madison, Doyle signed the budget and announced vetoes.
Quoted: Jonathan Foley, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied Lake Chad extensively and admires Gore’s work on climate change, said the primary explanation for the disappearance of the lake appeared to be regional climate cycles exacerbated by local irrigation practices.
In a longstanding tradition of debauchery, drunks, scanty costumes and excrement, the University of Wisconsin and the city of Madison, Wis., brace themselves for yet another Halloween on State Street. Just as moths to the flame are University underclassmen flocking to Madison to experience firsthand the heralded night of escape. This year, however, might bring obstacles to those underage drinkers looking for a riot or the perpetual nip-slip.
The Consortium for Educational Change and Prairie State College recently hosted a day-long workshop for PSC faculty and teachers and administrators from local school districts. The workshop was presented by Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the leading researchers focusing on the education of black children.
Ladson-Billings shared her expertise and insights about the historical, social and economic causes of the achievement gap. She emphasized the importance of the power of culture for supporting the education of all children.
Quoted: Dr. Michael Fiore, a University of Wisconsin professor of medicine who is also chairman of the federal Public Health Serviceâ??s guidelines panel on smoking cessation.
MADISON, Wis. — After riots and out-of-control partying at past Halloween celebrations in downtown Madison, the city made it a priority to create a fun and safe event on State Street for Halloween.
For the second year, State Street on Saturday night will become a huge, organized party. The changes allow for more crowd control, but some students said it comes at the expense of tradition.
MADISON, Wis. — City of Madison leaders and police are preparing Thursday night for Saturday’s annual Halloween party on State Street.
After the party’s success last year, officials said they are looking forward to the weekend and added that safety is their top priority.
In past years, some businesses along State Street have seen the worst of the Halloween celebration.
But, they are no longer worried.
Halloween is big event for UW Madison, especially for the businesses.
“It really works out well for us,” said Matt Geotsch from State Street Brats. “Not only do people want to spend money, but it puts us on the map as far as out of town people coming in. I helps our national recognition or at least mid wester recognition.”
As a proud alumnus of the University of Wisconsin, I bleed cardinal and white. I love our university and have worked tirelessly to make it even better, both financially and through my time and talent.
As much as I love this place, on football Saturdays, in and outside of Camp Randall Stadium, there is a part of life here that needs to change.
Q. On the periodic table of the elements, will there be any other man-made elements added?
— Submitted by Alan Canacasco, 7th grade, Sennett Middle School
A. Since starting his career, physicist Ralf Wehlitz of the UW-Madison Synchrotron Radiation Center has seen the periodic table grow by 13 elements, from dubnium at position 105 to the newest, heaviest element: number 118. And scientists are certain to create more, he says.
The Tenant Resource Center is not closing its doors. Ald. Brenda Konkel, who is the nonprofit’s executive director, calls a TV news report that raised this as a possibility “exaggerated.”
But Konkel says that, after losing nearly one-third of its $350,000 annual budget, her group’s finances are “not good.” The center has temporarily closed its toll-free statewide hotline, and reduced its office hours.
[MONTEVIDEO] Colombia, Ghana, Malaysia, Thailand and Uruguay are the top five developing countries likely to attract biodiesel investment because of their strong agricultural industries, relative stability and low debt, says a US study.
The analysis, ‘A Global Comparison of National Biodiesel Production Potentials’, was published online yesterday (24 October) in Environmental Science and Technology.
MADISON, Wis., Oct. 22 (UPI) — A U.S. study suggested that Thailand, Uruguay and Ghana might become the world’s leading producers of the emerging renewable fuel known as biodiesel.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies said biodiesel can be easily manufactured from vegetable oils and animal fats, making it one of the most promising, near-term alternatives to fossil fuels.
If you like to gamble on sports for money â?? whether it’s fantasy football leagues, tournament pools or Internet wagering â?? you can’t be a University of Wisconsin student-athlete, an employee of the athletic department or work as an overseer of UW sports.
If you like to gamble on sports for money â?? whether it’s fantasy football leagues, tournament pools or Internet wagering â?? you can’t be a University of Wisconsin student-athlete, an employee of the athletic department or work as an overseer of UW sports.
But that doesn’t mean gambling interests are exempt from having a presence at Badgers sporting events.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) â?? Thousands of University of Wisconsin students on a waiting list for the stateâ??s premier financial aid program should get money soon now that the long-overdue state budget has been passed, officials said Wednesday.
UW campuses notified the low-income students on Wednesday they will receive grants in the coming days.
â??This is extremely good news!â? UW-Parkside financial aid director Randall McCready said in an e-mail to hundreds of students on its campus in Kenosha.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) â?? J.B. Van Hollen says heâ??s a true-blue Republican. But his bridges with the GOP faithful could be smoldering.
Just nine months into his term as the stateâ??s attorney general, Van Hollen has taken a number of stances that run counter to traditional Republican philosophy.
MADISON, Wis. — The state Senate and Assembly approved a budget Tuesday night, and it has been sent to the governor’s desk.
In the Assembly it faced some opposition but eventually passed on a bipartisan vote of 60-39, with 23 Republicans voting to pass the bill and 10 Democrats voting against it.
In the Senate, the vote was strictly along party lines, passing 18-15 with all the Democrats voting for it and all the Republicans against.
Madison Area Technical College — MATC to most of us — is going great guns, now serving more than 43,000 students at its seven campuses and turning out graduates in many of today’s high-tech skills. Ninety percent of them take jobs right here at home.
More than 40,000 women will die from breast cancer this year. But, a woman’s chances of surviving the disease greatly increase with early detection.
Of course, you can’t learn about the warning signs if you don’t understand the language they’re written in.
One UW student is making the language of breast cancer understandable for Dane County Spanish-speakers.
Quoted: Kathy Christoph, director of academic technology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Lori Berquam, UW-Madisonâ??s dean of students.
Earlier this year, apparel manufacturer Adidas pledged to tackle worker abuse and embezzlement at one of its contracted factories in El Salvador. The Hermosa plant made official University of Wisconsin sportswear until it closed in 2005. As Brian Bull reports, opinions on how well Adidas has done vary… (Audio.)
Hermine Sauthoff Davidson, 97, died Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007, peacefully in her home in Madison. She was one of the first graduates of the University of Wisconsin Modern Dance program in 1932, guided by Margaret H’Doubler.
Walter J. Blaedel died Monday, Oct. 8, 2007, in Middleton, at Harbor House Assisted Living. Professor Blaedel taught in the Analytical Division of the UW-Madison Chemistry Department from 1947 until 1982.
Jeremi Suri looks locally and sees globally. And that lets him make novel connections between, say, the protest movements of the 1960s and superpower détente in the 1970s.
Traditional analyses of reduced tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union have examined the balance-of-power politicking between the two antagonists and their allies. But Suri’s first book, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (2003), argues that superpower diplomacy was also shaped by what was happening on the streetsâ??not only in Berkeley and Prague but also in Paris, Berlin and Beijing. Domestic disorder, Suri writes, makes heads of state more inclined to seek stability abroad.
Last year’s Halloween festivities on State Street were the first in several years that revelers weren’t dispersed by a plume of pepper spray. Credit for this went to the city, which fenced off State Street and charged an admission to offset the event’s roughly $1 million price tag, mostly for police.
Last year’s event, dubbed Freakfest, lacked the organic feel of Halloweens past, drawing a mere 35,000 people as opposed to the more typical 70,000. This year’s Freakfest aspires to be a more robust event, with three stages for entertainment and a costume contest.
Since 2002, more than 1,000 students from the University of Wisconsin Marathon County have used the UW Colleges Guaranteed Transfer Program, which ensures students with junior standing will be admitted to a four-year UW campus.
The program is ideal for students who eventually want to attend schools such as UW-Madison, said Whiz Beck, UWMC associate dean and director of student services.
Because students frequently start their research on Google instead of campus libraries, university librarians are taking the unique step of putting copies of their library books online, courtesy of the Google Book Search Library Project.
For instance, Google this spring began scanning 500,000 of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s 7.9 million library holdings, including collections on American and Wisconsin history, medicine, engineering and genealogical materials. Once the materials are scanned, people can read the universityâ??s public domain books online for free. For copyrighted books, Google will show a few lines of text and provide links to find the material in libraries or for purchase in online stores.
Quoted: Patricia McConnell, an animal behaviorist and professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that “much that informs our relationships with dogs right now is an emotional connection,” which is “not to be demeaned…
Madison, Wis. – Every state budget debate produces winners and losers among the politicians – Democrat and Republican, executive and legislative. It’s just as certain that some policies prevail over others, and some stakeholders fare better than others.
Winner: The University of Wisconsin System. The folks in Van Hise Hall didn’t get everything they wanted, but it was more than half a loaf. The budget included $32 million in new financial aid and backs the system’s plan to increase enrollment, which should improve access to higher education in Wisconsin at a time when the â??knowledge economyâ? needs more skilled workers. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s $8.4 million engineering campus also survived the budget negotiations.
Regardless of his address or job description, Kentucky assistant basketball coach Tracy Webster has always been adept at building relationships.
Whether serving as the head freshman coach and varsity assistant at Verona (Wis.) High School, or working at the University of Illinois as an assistant coach under Bruce Weber, the former Thornton Twp. and University of Wisconsin star has always been able to connect with the players he recruits and coaches and his colleagues in the coaching fraternity.
Quoted: David Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and president of the Long Term Care Institute, a nonprofit group.
Quoted: Volker Radeloff, an associate professor of forestry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin System was facing a serious funding shortage just a week ago, when it seemed as if the state would never have a budget. Officials had been talking about tuition surcharges, students being left without financial aid, and the possibility of campuses shutting down for the spring semester.
However, a deal expected to gain approval from lawmakers today has many UW officials breathing a sigh of relief. Spokesman Dave Giroux says the simple fact of having a budget allows them to set aside all of the contingency plans that had been in the works because of a projected $150 million shortfall.
MADISON, Wis. — The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) continues its war on illegal music downloads on college campuses, including those in Wisconsin.
Since March, the RIAA has sent 128 pre-litigation settlement letters to University of Wisconsin students accusing them of copyright infringement.
Tuition and fees at public and private universities have risen this year at more than double the rate of inflation, with prices increasing faster at public institutions, the College Board said in reports released yesterday.
Longtime UW-Madison Health Services executive director Kathleen Poi will retire Nov. 9, to be succeeded on an interim basis by UHS director of prevention services Susan Crowley.
On a day when the UW football team clobbered Northern Illinois 44-3. UW Police said they ejected 37 spectators from the game at Camp Randall Stadium. That’s 17 fewer than from the last home game against Michigan State on Sept. 29 and 62 fewer than the Sept. 22 night game against Iowa.
For most Americans, mosquitoes are just pesky nuisances that interfere with barbecuing, camping and other outdoor activities. But in some parts of the world, mosquitoes can be a serious, even deadly, scourge.
Each year, at least one million people worldwide die due to mosquito-transmitted malaria, according to the World Health Organization. From 350 to 500 million malaria cases are contracted annually. Mosquitoes also carry other diseases like dengue fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, West Nile virus.
“Half of the world population is in a risky area,” said UW-Madison insect physiologist Que Lan. “It is very devastating.”
Quoted: Ken Zeichner, associate dean of the UW-Madison’s School of Education and former director of that school’s student teaching program.
As Don Urbanek lay in a hospital bed, his pain from terminal cancer eased by medication, he expressed a wish: to visit his son’s ranch in Oklahoma before dying.
“We will do whatever we can” to make that happen, nurse practitioner Kathleen Murphy-Ende said, as a social worker stood nearby.
The delicate moment seemed typical for hospice, the medical specialty that focuses on the end of life. But Urbanek wasn’t a hospice patient. He was receiving palliative care, a related but different service provided in a new unit at UW Hospital.
With the state budget finally wrapping up, Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, needs to jump-start a legislative committee to oversee state computer issues.
The committee has not met in years — even though an audit six months ago recommended reviving it.
After all this time, it looks as if the Legislature will vote on a budget today that Gov. Doyle will sign.
That ‘s such a relief we might be forgiven if we were to ignore the pesky little fact that the budget rests on a bed of funds that are extorted from one segment of the state ‘s residents and stolen from another.
The brokers seeking to solve the state’s budget problems have found one major point of agreement â?? push many of them into the next budget.
The 2007-09 budget agreement approved by a legislative committee Monday would leave a potential shortfall of $892 million in the 2009-11 budget, according to the Legislature’s budget office. The budget, which is 114 days late as of this morning, is expected to be voted on and approved today by the full Legislature.
Nearly 25,000 people applied to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall, the largest application pool in the university’s history. More than half were admitted, and 6,000 freshmen enrolled, the third-largest entering class in recent school history, admissions director Rob Seltzer said.
In studies of Buddhist monks, Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, found that activity in areas of the brain associated with self-focused rumination decreased among adept meditation practitioners. The findings suggest that mental training can alter our propensity to second-guess ourselves.
MADISON, Wis. â?? The property tax bill for the typical Wisconsin home would rise $98 over the next two years under the long overdue budget plan that moved toward completion Monday.
A median-valued home of $170,305 would see its bill go up an average of $80 during the budget year that ends June 30, 2008, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. The 2.9 percent increase would make the bill $2,814, the agency says.
Last month, a bird known as a bar-tailed godwit took flight from Alaska and headed south. A day later, it was still flapping its way over the Pacific. An airplane pilot would have a hard time staying awake after 24 hours of flight (the Federal Aviation Administration allows pilots to fly just eight hours in a row). But the godwit kept flying for an additional week. After eight days and 7,200 miles, it landed in New Zealand, setting a record for nonstop flight.
â??If they spend so many hours flying,â? said Ruth M. Benca of the University of Wisconsin, â??where do they find the time to sleep?â?
Quoted: Giulio Tononi, a sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Baltimore, Md. – It’s easy to understand why individual legislators or even the Legislature as a whole would be miffed at the University of Wisconsin. Multi-million-dollar computer system flopsâ?¦ Lecturers who peddle unpopular conspiracy theoriesâ?¦ Administrators accused of bizarre behavior â?¦ and complaints about rising tuition and declining access.
But it’s sometimes hard to understand why those same lawmakers can’t look past their legitimate short-term concerns and take a longer view of the value of the university to the Wisconsin economy.
MADISON, Wis. — Organizers behind Freakfest 2007 have announced new performers and stage times for this weekend’s event.
Freakfest is scheduled to begin on 7:30 p.m. on Saturday on State Street in downtown Madison. Frank Productions, the city of Madison and the University of Wisconsin ASM are organizing the event.
The way most experts see it, â??ignorance is at the root of conflict over science,â? write two communication scholars, but many â??ignore the possibility that their communication efforts might be part of the problem.â?
The authorsâ??Matthew C. Nisbet, an assistant professor of communication at American University, and Dietram A. Scheufele, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madisonâ??say that for too long, scientists have clung to the â??popular scienceâ? model, which puts the news media in charge of educating the public about science that is controversial, such as embryonic-stem-cell research.
The Recording Industry Association of America is continuing its war on illegal music downloads on college campuses, including those occurring in the U-W system. Brian Bull reportsâ?¦
Ron Dayne’s name already graces the facade at Camp Randall Stadium and no one has worn his No. 33 since he played his last game for the University of Wisconsin in the 2000 Rose Bowl against Stanford.
But Dayne’s number will be officially retired by the UW athletic department during the final home football game against Michigan on Nov. 10.
This school year, UW-Madison has already dealt with two reports of men with weapons on campus.
Buildings were locked down and searched, and both incidents ended without injuries.
But an unpublicized incident this week raises questions about how well the university and larger community deals with the issue behind the Virginia Tech campus shootings: student mental health problems that threaten others.
Regent Street, the bustling but worn corridor between Camp Randall and the Kohl Center, may get a face-lift, more shops, tall buildings and a parking garage.
After nearly a year’s effort, a special committee is nearly done with the first-ever streetscape and design guidelines for the Regent Street corridor and neighborhood to the north, a 160-acre mishmash of small shops, chain stores, houses, offices and parking lots.
