Despite gloomy warnings about the unreliability of young voters, Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign continues to invest money and time in cultivating the campus crowd.
The latest sign is today’s rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which the campaign has been promoting for weeks as a key event for the Illinois Democrat.
More than 300 people were lined up to see U.S. Sen. Barack Obama at the Monona Terrace Convention Center before the doors opened this morning at 9:30 a.m. About 3,000 tickets had been sold before the event began, driven largely by a UW-Madison student campaign push.
Seven years ago, Jo Handelsman ‘s mother died after her body became resistant to the antibiotics that were holding her illness at bay.
Today, working in her lab on the UW-Madison campus, hardly a day goes by that Handelsman doesn ‘t think of her mother ‘s death and the frustrating and ultimately failed struggle of doctors to find drugs that would keep her alive.
Jin-Wen Yu, entering his 10th year in Madison, is the chair of UW-Madison ‘s dance department and director and choreographer of Jin-Wen Yu Dance. In his upcoming show, “Concert 10, ” Yu will showcase three of his old works and two new pieces in recognition of the past decade.
Safety must be the top priority as Madison prepares for its annual Halloween party on State Street later this month.
But Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Police Chief Noble Wray also need to get a handle on escalating costs.
In the last few years, UW-Madison has spent more than $300,000 to prevent and resolve allegations of illegal downloading and sharing of music by users of the university ‘s computer network, the UW ‘s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) estimates.
Included: Helen Blackwell, chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Colleges and universities raked in money by the billions last year. But their investing success now has a price â?? a movement in Congress to force the wealthiest schools to spend more of their money to keep down tuition.
Several cell phones rang simultaneously throughout a room at the College of St. Scholastica on Friday.
College staff members received an alert, sent seconds before, testing a new emergency notification system.
Expect the political fireworks to be audible all the way from Madison as the Wisconsin legislature convenes in special session Monday to deal with the state budget.
But itâ??s also possible white smoke will appear later in the week.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, have different expectations about what will happen in the sessionâ??s opening days, and how they might reach a budget compromise.
The University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, U.S., has honoured Nigeria’s Professor Louis Nzegwu for his service to the academia.
Nzegwu, who is a Professor of Marketing at the university, was alongside three other American lecturers awarded the “2007 Alliant Energy’s Underkofler Excellence in Teaching”.
Quoted: Anna Pidgeon, an avian ecologist in the Department of Forest Ecology and Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Their duties can sound ordinary until you look more closely: One dusts for footprints â?? of black holes. Another is a cartographer â?? using laser beams to map a rain forest. Another is an Internet repairman â?? who actually is restructuring the Internet to protect websites from hackers.
Collectively, they are among the “Brilliant 10” scientists and researchers identified in October’s Popular Science. The sixth annual issue, which lands on newsstands Tuesday, honors these bright young minds:
Helen Blackwell, 35; University of Wisconsin-Madison. Like a good librarian, she knows how to say “SHHH!” Only for Blackwell, the thing she’s shushing is bacteria. By using chemicals she has created, she stops bacteria from talking to each other, which then prevents infections.
MADISON, Wis. â?? When presidential candidate Barack Obama comes to town on Monday, the Democratâ??s support from younger voters will be on full display.
Obamaâ??s low-dollar fundraiser was originally scheduled for a downtown theater that can seat about 1,500 people. But tickets sold so fast that within days his campaign changed the venue to a ballroom a few blocks away thatâ??s twice as big.
MADISON, Wis. — Al Gore’s crusade against global warming won him the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shares with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on climate change.
A lot of the research done on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is part of that prestigious group, WISC-TV reported.
“This is definitely the wake-up call, and what’s concerning to the climatologists is the rate of warming that we’ve had,” said Jonathan Patz, an associate professor at UW-Madison’s Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Study.
Safety must be the top priority as Madison prepares for its annual Halloween party on State Street later this month.
But Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Police Chief Noble Wray also need to get a handle on escalating costs.
MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin will get in on the presidential political action on Monday as Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama comes to town.
More than 3,000 people are expected at the Obama rally.
It’s estimated 80 percent of them will be students, reported WISC-TV.
There were no Deadheads at the Kohl Center Friday night, but there were plenty of grateful Bucky fans.
The UW’s “Night of the Grateful Red” gave fans a free sneak peak at this year’s UW men’s basketball team.
The event marks the Badger’s first official practice. Of course, there wasn’t a whole lot of practicing.
Wisconsin gets a look at a couple of presidential contenders this week. Today in Madison it’s Senator Barack Obama . UW political scientist Charles Franklin says the Democrat is a candidate with a problem.
Engineers, needed to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and sewers, could be hard to find unless more students start going into the field.
Concerns about an engineer shortage exist, even though the American Society for Engineering Education’s annual survey of more than 300 colleges shows that the number of degrees awarded has risen slightly every year since 1999. More than 74,000 graduates earned bachelor’s degrees in engineering last year, the ASEE reported.
Madison – Both houses of the Legislature are scheduled to vote on Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s revised budget Monday, but probably with opposite results.
In a surprise move Thursday, Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) announced the vote by his house on Doyle’s new budget – a spending plan Huebsch and many of his fellow Republicans plan to kill.
Arts fund raisers should have ready explanations for donors who want to know why culture groups need their gifts as much as social-service charities that serve the poor, writes Andrew Taylor on The Artful Manager.
Mr. Taylor is director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. He points to articles published in Good magazine and The New York Times, as well as commentary by former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich that question the validity of giving tax breaks for some types of philanthropy.
Quoted: Michael Pariza, director of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
MADISON, Wis. — Police on Thursday released new information to the public in a two-year-old sexual assault case in hopes of finding the attacker.
Police said a 22-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student was walking along a path at Division Street and Eastwood Drive on Madison’s East Side when she was jumped by a stranger and raped.
In 2005, a 22-year-old UW graduate student was raped while walking on a bike path alongside Eastwood Drive on Madison’s East Side.
Two years later, police haven’t made an arrest. Detectives said today they’re sure someone in the community knows who the suspect is, and detectives believe he could still be living in Madison.
As lawmakers gear up for a special session of the legislature on Monday, the details of the governor’s new budget are still unclear.
Black River Falls Republican Terry Musser says he still hasn’t see the plan, and he certainly can’t read the estimated “1700 pages” in an hour and then turn around and vote.
Governor Jim Doyle has been trekking around the state discussing some of the contents of his new budget plan. Musser, who is the Chair of the Veterans and Military Affairs committee, says Doyle is telling veterans groups that “extreme Republicans” want to dramatically cut veterans programs.
After the Virginia Tech shootings in April, the need for mass emergency alert systems has proved to be a priority among many universities across the nation.
Tech itself has integrated the VT Alerts system, an emergency notification system that sends messages via text and voice messages to non-VT phones, e-mails to non-VT accounts and instant messages through AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN. Students, staff and faculty may voluntarily sign up to be alerted by this system. Additionally, a siren system has been introduced to notify those outside on campus that there is an emergency situation.
The prominent affirmative-action critic Ward Connerly appears well on his way to getting up to five states to vote in November 2008 on ballot measures banning the use of racial, ethnic, and gender preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.
And, according to political analysts who monitor the states that are the targets of Mr. Connerly’s planned “Super Tuesday” on affirmative actionâ??Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahomaâ??he stands a very good chance of getting measures passed in all of them.
Q. Why do leaves change color in the fall?
A. Actually, many of the colors we see in the fall are always present, but normally they’re hidden from view, says UW Arboretum native plant gardener Susan Carpenter.
Sometimes, even the best motivational plot gets sidetracked.
Barry Alvarez, the former head football coach who turned around a once-morbid University of Wisconsin program, once brought in Jesse Jackson to speak to his Badger team before a game with Ohio State.
MADISON, Wis. â?? The most prolonged budget impasse in the country boils down to how much smokers should pay for a pack of cigarettes and whether hospitals should have to pay a new tax.
There are other differences between what Democrats and Republicans want, but the latest GOP proposal shows that the two largest are the cigarette and hospital taxes.
Madison – Gov. Jim Doyle’s revised state spending plan will include no new aid to local governments and will delay some tax cuts Doyle campaigned on in last year’s re-election bid.
Aides to the Democratic governor said he was dropping those and other proposals he had earlier championed in hopes of breaking a three-month deadlock over the budget. Wisconsin is the only state without a budget.
Quoted: Robert Hawkins of the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Physics professor Franz Himpsel of the University of Wisconsin. Mr. Himpsel sits on the scientific advisory board of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.
Public colleges and universities rely to varying degrees on state appropriations for their fiscal futures, and depending on the institution, they tend to engage in a range of lobbying and outreach activities proving their value to their states and citizens. But in an analysis of factors that determine levels of state support for higher education, researchers find that statewide circumstances â?? as opposed to variables under a collegeâ??s control â?? are the primary determinants of state spending.
â??[D]espite their efforts, institutional lobbyists may have limited impact in states with poor state economies, intense budget competition, and history of poor support for higher education,â? David J. Weerts, an assistant professor of higher education at Florida Atlantic University, and Justin M. Ronca, a research associate for the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, write in their paper, a modified version of which will be presented at a forum on the University of Wisconsinâ??s Madison campus today.
Quoted: Perry Kivolowitz, with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Computer Science Department, was the final witness called Wednesday. He testified as an expert for the state, indicating three of the 33 images in question in the case appeared to be digitally altered.
Dr. Eric Sandgren has in recent years become an outspoken counterweight to the animal rights activists whoâ??d like to see his and other UW-Madison animal study laboratories shut down.
An associate professor of experimental pathology in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences, part of the UW’s School of Veterinary Medicine, Sandgren is chair of two animal-use oversight committees on the UW campus. As such, he has sparred with expert critics who condemn experimenting on animals as cruel, inhumane and unnecessary.
Can a coaching legend break the state budget impasse?
Even though he wasn’t in the Capitol today for that purpose, Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez says the 14-week budget has come up in his talks with lawmakers.
Alvarez said everybody says it’s a tough, brutal fight.
MADISON, Wis. — Workers at Ingraham Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus said they continue to struggle with serious mold and air quality problems there, and on Wednesday university environmental health and physical plant officials met with staff to update them on progress and hear their concerns.
University officials met with a group of about 30 Ingraham Hall staff and faculty, and they heard about workers’ concerns and frustrations for two hours.
Microsoft’s new HealthVault project is a welcome innovation for consumers â?? and one that should not be a threat to electronic health records pioneer Epic Systems in Verona, a UW professor Patti Brennan said.
The Wisconsin Legislature is closing in on a record for stubborn ineffectiveness.
The state budget is now more than 100 days late, with no deal in sight.
I just spent the past week visiting several colleges â?? Auburn, the University of Mississippi, Lake Forest and Williams â?? and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed.
I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be. I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be.
Quoted: David Streckfuss, a Southeast Asia scholar who did a PhD on lese majeste and defamation in Thailand for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If youâ??re a candidate counting on those enthusiastic college voters, donâ??t. For some college students, getting to the ballot box can be as difficult as registering in that Nobel laureateâ??s honors seminar.
Turnout on college campuses has been depressed by some simple but strong barriers.
Madison – Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday that he would introduce a revised budget next week to try to spur stalled negotiations, as legislative leaders blamed the governor and each other for failing to pass a budget that is now 101 days overdue.
Quoted: Frank Tuerkheimer, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on Internet-related issues.
MADISON, Wis. â?? Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday he would try to force action on the overdue state budget by calling lawmakers into a special session next week.
Doyle said he would ask lawmakers to consider a plan on Monday that increases the cigarette tax by $1.25 per pack, starts a new tax on hospital profits and cuts spending across state agencies $430 million from his original proposal.
Despite Doyleâ??s call for a special session, lawmakers do not have to act. Democrats in the Senate said they were ready to pass Doyleâ??s plan as early as Monday but Republicans who control the Assembly dismissed it as a political ploy.
The Governor’s use of UW students to make a point about the delayed budget draws a federal complaint.
The UW sent emails to students who applied for but have not yet received state financial grants due to the state budget impasse. The emails asked if the students wanted to appear with Governor Doyle at a news conference today to make an appeal for a state budget that would give them their grants.
A handful of UW students held up signs of protest during Governor Doyle’s Tuesday campus news conference on the state budget impasse, which included a student speaker, who had been approached to participate through university e-mail, from a confidential list of students eligible for financial aid.
“This is not a legitimate educational interest, recruiting people to stand with the governor at a press conference, while he launches into an attack on all Republicans in the state,” said UW-Madison student Mike Hahn of Wisconsin College Republicans. “It’s not a legitimate education interest.”
In late July, college officials lobbied successfully to defeat a U.S. Senate proposal that would have forced some institutions to buy computer tools to detect student music and video piracy. But the administrators were in no mood to celebrate: It was only a matter of time, they said, before the House of Representatives brought up a similar measure.
When Gov. Jim Doyle made plans to come to the University of Wisconsinâ??s Madison campus for a Tuesday press conference about the need-based Wisconsin Higher Education Grant (WHEG), campus officials sent an e-mail to students whose aid awards have been blocked by a statewide budget standoff to see if they might want to participate. â??The governor is looking for a few UW-Madison students who are WHEG-eligible for the 2007-08 year but who have not been awarded WHEG because they are â??wait-listedâ?? due to the budget impasse,â? says the e-mail, sent by the student financial services office to 33 Madison students identified as having received the grant in the previous academic year.
Representative Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) said UW-Madison officials had no business using state e-mail, to invite select students who were on a wait-list for a financial aid program, to a news conference with Governor Doyle.
In the e-mail from UW-Madison’s Associate Director of Financial Aid, students who received a Wisconsin Higher Education Grant (WHEG) last year but did not receive one this year are told “the Governor is looking for a few UW-Madison students…’wait-listed’ due to the budget impasse.” E-mail recipients were told, “you are under no obligation whatsoever to participate in this press conference.” Federal privacy law shields the names of the students who are WHEG applicants.
As the temperature drops and the daylight ebbs, Hannah Carey gets giddy.
“This is my favorite time of year,” the UW-Madison biologist said. “The magic is happening again.”
Carey is enchanted by hibernation, specifically the seasonal slumber of the 13-lined ground squirrel.
A UW-Madison researcher has identified another molecular change that could enable bird flu to become more dangerous in people.
If state funding support for UW-Madison remains uncertain or declines, one of the possible ramifications could be reducing the size of the incoming freshman class for fall 2008, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said.
“We’ll have to make the decision soon on whether to slow down admissions,” Wiley said in a recent address to the faculty senate. “That is always an unpopular decision.”
In January, Host-Jablonski started working on a three-year project to build straw-clay homes on tribal lands in the state. Sue Thering, a UW-Madison assistant professor of landscape architecture and a community development specialist for UW-Extension, is coordinating a partnership with several Native American communities in the state to create affordable, energy efficient housing through a grant.
Jean Feraca has long been one of culture’s gifts to the people of Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Public Radio host and poet brings a sense of decency and playfulness to airwaves often dominated by mean-spirited invective and her current “Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders” show is one of the few listeners will find anywhere that takes seriously the fact we all live in a wider world.
University of Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema’s voice cracked and he choked back tears as he announced at his Monday news conference that senior receiver Luke Swan’s career with the Badgers is finished following a torn hamstring suffered against Illinois on Saturday.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Verona – Most of the time, Nicholas Hitchon goes about his life undisturbed: driving to his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, meeting with his engineering students, pursuing his research, taking karate classes to work out the kinks.
But every seven years, like certain insects or Biblical events, a film crew arrives. They are cheerful, professional and relentless. In addition to following him everywhere for a week – up UW-Madison’s picturesque Bascom Hill, down to his karate class – they repeatedly “ram a microphone in my face,” as Hitchon grimly puts it, and ask him about his family life, his progress at work, his dreams and his disappointments.
