Noted: The main force behind the University of Koinadugu is a man who could have used it decades ago. Alhaji N’Jai managed to go to college in Michigan only after escaping his country’s civil war. Eventually he joined a post-doctorate program at UW-Madison. It was here, on the second floor of the Memorial Union, that he saw a display about the famed Wisconsin Idea.
“Straight then I said to myself ‘this is actually what we need in Sierra Leone,’” N’Jai says.
Noted: Among the dozens of authors scheduled to appear are several notable Wisconsin writers. They include journalist Stu Levitan, whose comprehensive narrative history, Madison in the Sixties, will be published in November; Madison Magazine columnist John Roach, whose second book of essays is titled While I Have Your Attention; and UW-Madison literature instructor Heather Swan, who wrote Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, a book about the honeybee population that won the 2018 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.
Story includes Sharon Morrisey, the recently retired University of Wisconsin Extension horticulture agent for Milwaukee County, and University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension nursery specialist Laura Jull.
Noted: Artists from the Art Department featured in cover story.
In 1896, the first women earned undergraduate degrees from UW-Madison. Now, 150 years later, Inside UW is celebrating the anniversary with a series that promotes the accomplishments of women associated with the university.
Noted: Coon didn’t shed her outdoorsy impulses while earning her master’s in acting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison or while apprenticing and acting for four years at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The current artistic director of the theater, Brenda DeVita, recalls that Coon could often be found lying on her back in the woods “just taking in the trees,” or swimming in the Wisconsin River. Onstage, Coon was “like a gazelle,” DeVita says. “She has an energy that fits the outdoors, that fits the space.”
And they lived happily ever after. That could be the title of the Mike Kelley and Kelly Auger story, a tale of high school sweethearts who survive college together and then marry and have a family. It’s storybook and true for the Pius XI graduates who just happen to be two of the best basketball players the school ever produced.
A seven-month review of the health and safety policies and procedures followed by the University of Wisconsin athletic department resulted in several recommendations from student-athletes and staff.
Apple won its appeal of a patent infringement case brought against the company in 2014 by the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. A federal appellate court in Washington, D.C., threw out part of the $506 million in damages originally awarded to the university by a federal court in Madison. It’s unclear how much has been thrown out.
With all of her necessary documentation, University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brooke Evans arrived at her polling place on Nov. 8, 2016, for the presidential election. For her, voting that day meant not only casting a ballot for the first female presidential candidate with a real shot of winning but having a voice in a society in which homeless people such as herself were marginalized.
Noted: Carl Sauer, his geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1947-49), suggested the career of Marsh for David’s doctoral thesis in 1953 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Since 1919, Wisconsin Hoofers— one of UW-Madison’s oldest and largest student organizations — has promoted outdoor recreation to not only the campus community but also the city at large.
Noted: Dixon on Wednesday was included in a group of 180 semifinalists for the William V. Campbell Trophy, which is given annually by the National Football Foundation to the nation’s top football scholar-athlete.
When Wisconsin and Nebraska meet Oct. 6 at Camp Randall Stadium, it will mark the 13th game between the proud programs, including the eighth since the Cornhuskers joined the Big Ten.
Noted: Leslie Orrantia, director of community relations at UW-Madison, will be presented with the Hispanic Achievement of the Year at La Movida’s 8th Annual Hispanic Heritage Luncheon.
Quoted: Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at UW-Madison, was with her students at the Dodge County Detention Facility on Friday morning when she learned about the first arrests. She says that day the jail — one of only two immigration facilities in the state — was unusually full, and by the end of the day the 250-bed facility was at capacity. With no room left at the Dodge County jail, she says immigrants arrested from Dane County were taken to the Kenosha County Detention Center. “It’s much more difficult for us to get there, and also for their families and attorneys to talk to them and meet with them,” Barbato says. “That was pretty disappointing.”
Noted: Kerwin and her staff are busy building the sanctuary on 17 acres of land, which consists of a concrete building and a couple of geodesic domes. Taking a break last week from constructing walkways for the monkeys to travel outside from their indoor enclosures, Kerwin said she decided while working at the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to someday open a sanctuary.
Quoted: Despite the shortage, housing in Wisconsin is particularly affordable right now, said Mark Eppli, director of the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The average cost of a house in the portion of the state that runs roughly from Fond du Lac to Green Bay in July was $157,000. The mortgage interest rate was about 4.5 percent, according to Eppli.
“In the state of Wisconsin, housing is really affordable (now),” Eppli said. “You need a job that makes $20 an hour; you could buy an average home in Appleton.”
If you’re wondering why your kid didn’t get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall, a record number of out-of-state freshmen may have something to do with it.
Noted: Future debt crises may be inevitable, but who pays the piper could mitigate the damage. So says a new paper by Dean Corbae (University of Wisconsin) and Ross Levine (University of California) presented at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, “Competition, Stability and Efficiency in Financial Markets” https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/sympos/2018/jh080818revised.pdf?la=en, which suggests banks operate more like partnerships, with senior executives having “material skin-in-the game, so that those determining bank risk have a significant proportion of their personal wealth exposed to those risks.”
Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison advertises that two of its specialized MBA programs, in operations and technology management and supply-chain management, were the first U.S. MBA programs to earn stem designations. Greg DeCroix, the director of the MBA in supply-chain management, told me in an email, “We are seeing very high-caliber international applicants these past few years—excellent academic credentials and great work experience—and we believe the stem designation has contributed to that.”
Noted: Prior to Actuant, he held product management and operational leadership roles at IDEX Corp. and Eaton Corp. Bockhorst earned a bachelor’s degree in operations management, marketing and human resources from Marian University and an executive MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As the sun sets behind Dejope residence hall, Aaron Bird Bear stands before a group of students seated around the building’s sacred fire circle, a gathering place and monument honoring Wisconsin’s Native American tribes. First, he greets them in Ho Chunk, the language of the mound-builders whose history in Madison dates back thousands of years. Getting no response, he tries Ojibwe, the language used for trade in the Great Lakes region; then French, the language of the fur trappers and missionaries who came to Wisconsin in the 1600s; and finally English, the language of the colonists and the Americans who attempted six times to forcibly expel the area’s indigenous people from their ancestral homeland.
Noted: After two years as an instructor at Long Beach City College, Warrington came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a one-year appointment and stayed for the rest of his long teaching career. Serigraphy, that is, silk-screen prints, began to replace his paintings by the mid-1950s although water-colors were to remain essential as preliminary studies for his prints.
The area drenched by more than 20 inches of rainfall covered more than three times more area in Texas and Louisiana during Harvey than in the Carolinas during Florence, according to an analysis by Dr. Shane Hubbard, a researcher from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin. “They were two quite different storms and really not even comparable in terms of the amount of water that fell, ” Hubbard said in an email to weather.com.
Is the University of Wisconsin seriously contemplating dropping athletics if NCAA schools are forced to pay athletes more than full cost of attendance? Of course not.
Noted: The students have to be eligible for Pell Grants, have at least a 3.0 GPA and a 19 ACT composite score, and be accepted by a university partnering with All-In: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette, Alverno College, Carroll University or UW-Madison.
Warrington Colescott, a printmaker and former art professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been described as a “social scold” and a “mad-dog attack artist” with a humorous and deeply humane side.
Noted: The findings of Charlie Trevor of University of Wisconsin–Madison and Anthony Nyberg of the University of South Carolina reiterates the negative impact of layoffs and indicates that downsizing a workforce by 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover the next year.
Quoted: Jerry O’Brien, the executive director of The Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence at UW Madison said it’s rare for a bankrupt company to come back under new ownership, but under the same name. “I’ve never heard of a store doing the Thursday through Sunday thing before so that will be exciting to watch from my point of view,” said O’Brien.
Q&A with Kathleen Bartzen Culver, assistant professor and James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at University of Wisconsin-Madison, about Poynter’s upcoming workshop, “The World Beyond High School: Covering Education Equity and the Future of Work.”
Noted: Altogether, that means our sense of touch can impact our buying decisions. But don’t take my word for that. Ask Joann Peck, a marketing professor at the Wisconsin School of Business; she’s one of the foremost experts on the study of haptic marketing.
Quoted: “If this is the best we can do, it isn’t good,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies poverty and economic mobility. “Things really tapered off this year, after a serious drop in previous years,” he said. “In terms of the boom, the party has lasted a long time, a lot longer than we thought, but not everybody is getting invited — people who are working several jobs, taking jobs without benefits, kids who are growing up in poverty. The fruits of the recovery are not being spread around evenly.”
Noted: A study by UW-Madison professor Ken Mayer released in 2017 found that the new law kept almost 17,000 people in Dane and Milwaukee counties from voting in the 2016 presidential election.
College campuses could have been closed, throwing hundreds of University of Wisconsin employees out of jobs across the state. But the University of Wisconsin System threw a Hail Mary instead, merging two-year colleges with four-year universities to shore up two-year campuses that were in a financial tailspin from declining enrollments.
Noted: And University of Wisconsin political science professor Howard Schweber points out that this is the first court in history in which every member had been a judge and none has held elective office. He also says that the court hasn’t had a justice who had represented a criminal defendant since Thurgood Marshall, who died in 1991.
Noted: The timing was certainly right, coming right after Sidran had compiled personal papers and artifacts for his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. “I had gone through all these tapes, so I knew what was there,” Sidran tells Billboard. “I knew where all the great stuff was, so it came together very quickly. I had literally hundreds of tracks to choose from. “
Quoted: “Usually the population starts to go down by the middle to the end of September, but that hasn’t happened,” said Lisa Johnson, horticulture educator with the University of Wisconsin Extension. “This year we got a bump.”
A Dane County judge on Tuesday ordered Wisconsin wide receiver Quintez Cephus to stand trial on two counts of sexual assault.
Noted: Some insurers could opt to exit the market for health insurance sold directly to individuals and families, said Justin Sydnor, a professor of risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Story references a new working paper by Justin Sydnor and other researchers about the “gap between intentions and actions.”
Quoted: “Governor Walker has indicated that (this year) is going to be a challenging year for his campaign and for his party,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “The headwinds he faces might be why Walker’s style of campaigning is somewhat different in this election cycle.”
Quoted: “I think this perfectly illustrates the fundamental transformation we’re seeing in how we all communicate, and in how researchers study that communication,” University of Wisconsin communications professor Dietram Scheufele told BuzzFeed News. In the past, scholars could study newspaper articles without buying a subscription or asking for a stream of electronic articles, for example, but in an age of social media, access to data has become more fraught.
The UniverCity Alliance project is starting its third year trying to connect local communities to the brainpower of UW Madison. We talk to the director of the program about what they’ve accomplished and what the project will look like in this next year.
Noted: Radesky and co-author Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison first recommend that parents step back and think about their relationship with their phone. Instead of using it as a stress reliever, take deep breaths and go for a walk. Instead of withdrawing into a phone to avoid difficult family interactions, purposefully engage with others and potentially confront issues. Instead of losing track of time, be aware of attention hogs and notice how much time has passed when checking e-mail or social media.
Noted: The singer, rapper and producer (who goes by his first name) is halfway to earning an art degree at UW-Madison, where he is also working toward a certificate in Afro-American studies. The outspoken campus activist released an excellent album in February, Dequadray! A Black Sitcom, and is currently writing and experimenting with new songs while carving out a path in Madison as a queer, black artist.
UW-Madison alums will be the focus of Cinematheque’s “Spotlight on Documentary” series, Sept. 6-7.
Noted: The company, founded in a dorm room at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010, has become a real player in the online food-ordering business across the United States. EatStreet connects diners in more than 250 cities to more than 15,000 restaurants.
“If you’re a millennial, you came of age during this boom and bust,” said J. Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ”You saw firsthand that it’s harder to get a job, pay raises, buy a house. It’s just harder to be economically independent when you can’t change jobs or get the kind of income like previous generations could.”
When Barry Alvarez began building his first coaching staff at Wisconsin, his list of candidates included plenty of familiar names.
Wisconsin moved up one spot to No. 6 in the Amway coaches poll on Tuesday. UW (1-0) remains the second-highest Big Ten team in the poll, behind No. 4 Ohio State.
University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Robert Fettiplace this week will receive a gold medal from the king of Norway, a share of a $1 million science prize, and take his place in the running for a future Nobel Prize.
Noted: A new paper by Dean Corbae of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ross Levine of the University of California, Berkeley, presented at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, suggests an elegant solution to this dilemma: Regulators should push banks to become more like partnerships. Putting senior employees and executives first in line to bear losses would reduce the damage from crises by tempering their willingness to take bets with skewed risk profiles. The problem is not competition itself, but the effect of competition when bankers are playing with other people’s money.
Noted: But a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research shows this may not be the case. The paper by Justin Sydnor, an associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Chenyuan Liu, who is pursuing a doctorate the University of Wisconsin-Madison, finds that at companies offering both a HDHP and a low-deductible plan, selecting the HDHP typically saves more than $500 a year. “High-deductible plans often have much lower employee premiums,” Sydnor said.
Quoted: Emily Stanley, a professor at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology, says the potential for flooding in the Madison area is nothing new. But she and other scientists warn that climate change could make severe storms — and, by extension, flooding — more common.
“What’s different is double-digit inches of rainfall in such a short period of time,” she says. “When you add the water really, really quickly, it’s like if you eat Thanksgiving dinner in five minutes. It doesn’t feel the same as it would if you ate it over the course of a few hours.”
Noted: Born in 1942, Harry grew up on a farm in Manitowoc County. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics at UW-Madison, he served in the Army as an intelligence special agent in Panama’s canal zone in the 1960s, a tense time as Panama pushed back against American control of the canal.
Noted: Story includes comments from Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, Noah Williams, an economics professor, and Tim Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics.
Noted: Dague’s LinkedIn profile features a photo of him standing next to a private plane. He earned his law degree from Marquette University in 1990 after earning a bachelor’s degree in economics and psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
New businesses account for nearly all net new job creation. That simple fact, supported by research from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, cuts through all the political rhetoric about building a growing economy, the holy grail of every state or region. Unfortunately, the Milwaukee area has lagged in most measures of entrepreneurial activity in recent years, falling to 33 out of 40 in the most recent rankings from Kauffman, which conducts research and advocates for entrepreneurship.
Fourth-year Wisconsin Badgers head coach Paul Chryst has plenty of things to keep him awake at night, from higher-than-usual fan expectations to recent sexual assault allegations directed against several players.
