Wisconsin is doing a better job of nurturing the tools necessary for a vibrant, knowledge-based economy, according to a report to be presented today at the Wisconsin Technology Council’s Early Stage Symposium.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s official anti-sweatshop panel wants the university to require apparel companies that make UW logo clothing to use union labor.
The nine-member panel, made up of students, faculty and staff, voted without dissent Monday to send the recommendation to Chancellor John Wiley. Students, who packed the room, erupted with applause after the vote.
The proposal is designed to encourage large apparel companies like adidas, Nike and Reebok to pay their workers better wages, assign them shorter hours, and improve their working conditions.
n the 1967 movie “The Graduate” Mr. McGuire gave new college grad Benjamin Braddock “just one word” of advice:
Plastics.
In a similar scene last week Bill Gates gave UW- Madison students his advice on the right future to pursue:
Software.
A university committee wants UW-Madison to stop doing business with apparel companies unless those companies agree to buy at least a portion of their goods from union factories.
OCONOMOWOC – Turning Wisconsin into a national biotechnology center may not be a pipe dream, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon, an official of the Milken Institute said Friday.
“It is unrealistic that in the next 10 years, Wisconsin would be in the top 10,” Ross DeVol, director of regional economics for the Santa Monica, Calif., economic think tank, said in an interview.
For newly minted undergraduates to professionals already waist-deep in their careers, there’s no shortage of area MBA degree programs to suit a prospective student’s tastes or busy schedule.
And that’s as it should be, said UW-Madison Business School Dean Michael Knetter, who called occasional allusions to “the demise” of the MBA entirely “premature.”
Quoted: Ed Jesse, professor and extension agriculture policy specialist for the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mentions the University of Wisconsin-Madison is among the leading licensing organizations in the United States, and will rank 10th or 11th in the world for the research quality of its biotechnology faculty in a yet-to-be-published Milken Institute study.
There are few people who can silence a crowd by the mere anticipation of their entrance.
The world’s richest man is one such person.
As 4 p.m. arrived Wednesday and his handlers’ actions made it clear that Bill Gates was about to enter Auditorium AB20 at UW-Madison’s Weeks Hall, a buzzing crowd of about 200 computer and biological sciences students and a dozen or so media types almost instantly went silent.
Even Bill Gates’ harshest detractors concede that he’s doing good in the world.
The $26.8 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses primarily on global health and the U.S. education system, and Gates does more than just give away his money: He gets involved, traveling to places like Africa, where AIDS is killing millions, and to the nation’s top universities, where he pumps computer science as a great career.
In a session with state media after his appearance at UW-Madison on Wednesday, Gates said his foundation has been getting involved in Avian flu, which some experts fear has the potential to become a pandemic similar to the flu of 1918 that killed 50 million people.
Bill Gates’ visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison was designed to fire up students for careers in computers. So how did they react?
The biggest buzz was over a device still in development that projects visual images onto a table top and allows them to be pulled into a mini-computer built into a cell phone or other small digital entity. After Gates’ talk, students clustered around the device as a Microsoft engineer explained it in more detail. Gates had done a quick demo of it during his talk, saying that it was still perhaps five years away from coming to the market.
World renowned hip-hop violinist Miri Ben-Ari and skateboarding sensation Stevie Williams are scheduled to appear here at tonight’s celebration of the opening of the first-ever Rbk concept store on a college campus.
Williams will kick off the party at 6 p.m. at Peace Park with a skateboard exhibition and Ben-Ari, the newest face of Reebok’s “I Am What I Am” campaign, will perform songs from her newly released debut album. Following the performances, students can check out more than 200 styles of footwear, Reebok performance gear and exclusive UW vintage inspired lifestyle apparel.
Students in Introduction to Programming started off their Wednesday discussion section with the usual exam review, but with a knock at the door, Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates stepped into the room to give a surprise guest lecture.
Gates was met with awe from the class of 14 as he lectured about the future of the software industry, which was followed by a question-and-answer session from the students.
The surprise visit was orchestrated by mtvU’s popular “Stand In” series, where celebrities make surprise visits to college classrooms and stand in to teach.
A class of Introduction to Programming students was on its best behavior Wednesday after Microsoft founder Bill Gates unexpectedly stepped in as substitute teacher for the day.
As part of the broadband cable network mtvUââ?¬â?¢s ââ?¬Å?Stand Inââ?¬Â series, in which celebrities drop in to college classrooms unannounced and teach for a day, Gates spoke to Computer Science 302 students about the importance and versatility of pursuing a career in computer programming.
Gates� stop at the University of Wisconsin was also part of a week-long tour of six universities promoting information technology and engineering careers.
Quoted: Donald Nichols, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor.
Gary Lessuise got his MBA from UW-Madison in 1972, but he always dreamed of coming back.
Lessuise, 58, went to work for Ford Motor Company and stayed for more than three decades.
On Sept. 6, he returned to his alma mater as assistant dean for master’s degree programs.
Local leaders must do a better job leveraging government dollars to boost development such as the fast-growing biomedical research and business cluster at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Milwaukee County Research Park, an economic development advocate said Monday.
After being dubbed in recent months as a low-key hotspot for biotechnology development by The Scientist and the nation�s top research university by Washington Monthly, Madison has gained even more recognition as an emerging powerhouse in the life sciences.
A high-tech business group is to meet this week in Oconomowoc. The location, between Madison and Milwaukee, is symbolic.
The goal is to emphasize the importance of linking the academic brainpower, entrepreneurial energy and industrial might of the state’s two largest cities to generate economic growth.
But the promise of synergy between Madison and Milwaukee has been long discussed and mostly unfulfilled. Last week, at a Board of Regents meeting, officials from Milwaukee demonstrated one of the reasons: petty rivalry.
Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law stands in his way.
Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.
Gov. Jim Doyle and several state lawmakers want to change that by exempting UW System researchers from that law, which is designed to discourage state workers from privately benefiting at taxpayers’ expense.
It’s one of those lawsuits that produces guffaws from those who read or hear about it, but it is anything but funny to the people who must bear its brunt.
….It’s the suit that claims the bars near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus conspired to fix drink prices, thereby overcharging money-strapped college kids who wanted to relax with a few drinks now and then.
….The pity is that all the owners did was try to cooperate with the UW and Chancellor John Wiley’s campaign against binge drinking.
Entrepreneur magazine has rated Madison the sixth-best mid-sized city in the country for entrepreneurs.
“Wisconsin’s capital is the paradigm for the idea that quality of life attracts entrepreneurs,” the magazine wrote. “Numerous studies have ranked Madison tops for schools, politeness, friendliness to people from kids to retirees, internet usage, and now, capacity to foster and grow business startups.”
UW-Milwaukee made an impassioned bid to be the site of a school of public health Thursday, while UW-Madison officials argued that it made more sense to integrate the offering within its School of Medicine and change the school’s name to reflect that growing focus.
“We have the buildings and we have the funds,” Medical School Dean Philip Farrell told the UW Board of Regents, adding later, “We have worked for a decade preparing for this.”
UW School of Veterinary Medicine and its students are mentioned.
UW-Milwaukee made an impassioned bid to be the site of a school of public health Thursday, while UW-Madison officials argued that it made more sense to integrate the offering within its School of Medicine and change the school’s name to reflect that growing focus.
“We have the buildings and we have the funds,” Medical School Dean Philip Farrell told the UW Board of Regents, adding later, “We have worked for a decade preparing for this.”
Bar owners in Madison may want to throw back a few after hearing this news.
A Minneapolis law firm filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing 25 bars near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and their trade association of conspiring to inflate drink prices from 1990 until last year. The class action lawsuit seeks relief for revelers it claims were ripped off.
The lawsuit also names UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley and two city officials for pressuring bars to illegally raise their prices in an effort to cut down on alcohol-related problems involving students.
Guess which news item is out of step with public opinion in the state, the nation and the world?
The state of Wisconsin grants $1 million and loans another $1 million to a company formed by Dr. James Thomson, a UW-Madison researcher so renowned that the words ââ?¬Å?Nobel Prizeââ?¬Â practically circle his head. The company has technology that could revolutionize drug discovery.
A Wisconsin-based research group will run the nation’s first federally financed embryonic stem cell bank, the National Institutes of Health said this week. The WiCell Research Institute, a non-profit set up in 1999 to support stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin, will store and distribute the cells under a federal plan to reduce the cost of using them. In 2001, President Bush limited federal funding to projects involving 78 lines of embryonic stem cells that already were in existence. He said taxpayer dollars should not pay for the destruction of human embryos. That policy has stifled the field, some researchers say, and only 22 lines are now available for use.
UW-Madison professor of telecommunications Barry Orton is quoted.
SkyCable TV of Madison has ceased operations, leaving its local customers without service beyond local over-the-air channels.
SkyCable was a partner with America Online in the effort to install wireless Internet access in Madison; AOL pulled out of that venture in August. Barry Orton, a UW-Madison professor of telecommunications, said he didn’t believe the wireless situation was the reason for SkyCable going out of business.
“They were trying to do the niche between cable and (DISH and DirecTV), and the niche turned out to be too small,” Orton said.
UW-Madison will be home to the newly created National Stem Cell Bank, Gov. Jim Doyle’s office said Friday.
The nation’s first embryonic stem-cell bank, awarded in a competitive process by the National Institutes of Health, presumably will be at the WiCell Institute. WiCell is a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds a patent on stem-cell work by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson.
WARF controls five of the 22 available stem-cell lines eligible for federal funding under President Bush’s 2001 policy. According to the NIH, the new bank will consolidate the other lines in one location, maintain them and distribute them to researchers at a cost less than what researchers now pay to study them.
The other lines are housed in Athens, Ga.; San Francisco and labs in Australia, Israel, Korea and Sweden.
When the Economist Intelligence Unit published its annual ranking of business schools late last month, readers may have been surprised by the absence of Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania�s Wharton School of Business.
Washington Monthly named UW-Madison the nation’s top research university this month.
Such an honor isn’t new for the institution, because it consistently ranks high on several college rankings.
But this recognition is different and deserves extra attention.
While major airlines continue to nosedive into bankruptcy, the Dane County Regional Airport has steadily climbed to cruising altitude.
The airport just added another nonstop flight to a major city — Atlanta, the busiest airport in the world with 1,000 flights a day.
The airport on Madison’s North Side also has increased passengers and profits in recent years and soon will complete a $65 million terminal renovation.
That’s good news for business, UW-Madison and the local economy. It also justifies Dane County’s strong support for the airport that must continue.
Cellular Dynamics International – the young company founded by UW-Madison stem- cell research pioneer Jamie Thomson and his partners – is getting a $2 million jump-start from the state.
But on the heels of Gov. Jim Doyle’s multi-front attack on the industry last week and a UW-Madison professor’s report saying that retail gas prices can’t be justified, Felmy spent most of his time explaining what he called a simple supply and demand imbalance made worse by hurricanes.
Cellular Dynamics International is on a fast track, with high hopes of becoming the first company to get stem-cell technology into the marketplace and the first to show a profit – in spite of major stem- cell efforts in other states, such as California.
Housed in the MGE Innovation Center at University Research Park, Cellular Dynamics expects to start providing drug screening services in early 2006. The company will use cells derived from kidney cells, modified to have some properties of human heart cells, to test drugs for heart patients.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced $2 million in new state funding for a Madison-based firm that applies stem cell research technology for drug development and screening.
Doyle said the state will provide a $1 million technology development grant and an additional $1 million in technology development loans to Cellular Dynamics International Inc., which was founded by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers James Thomson, Craig January and Timothy Kamp.
During an appearance at the firm’s headquarters Monday morning, Doyle vowed to veto a bill banning so-called human cloning, which is up for action in the state Senate today.
When it comes to growing Wisconsin’s economy, a lot of seeds have yet to be planted. One needs to look no further than Milwaukee’s central city, where unemployment for some is well into double digits, for evidence of that – a point certainly not lost on Gov. Jim Doyle.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Monday that he supports spending an additional $2 million on a southeastern Wisconsin research alliance that aims to fund collaborative projects among five area colleges and universities.
Doyle revealed his support of more state funding for the Biomedical Technology Alliance during appearances in three cities that were part of a tour he and Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton used to unveil a new economic development plan for the state.
Dear Editor: The smoking ban may be very useful in dealing with the downtown bar owners and the Tavern League. The city and the university spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find solutions to Halloween that will protect private property and public safety.
They may never have the right answers, but unless the tavern owners do then they had better assist the city and university.
Since the liquor sellers are really the only ones to profit from Halloween downtown, they need to bear the costs currently borne by property taxpayers as a whole.
Gov. Jim Doyle rolls out an economic plan, called Grow Wisconsin: The 2005 Agenda, in a three city swing beginning in Madison.
He’ll start in Madison at the new laboratory facilities for Cellular Dynamics International, a privately held biotechnology firm that has taken a lead in embryonic stem cell research. Doyle will announce a “significant new investment in the company,” according to an advance statement from the governor’s office. Cellular Dynamics was co-founded by James Thomson, an internationally recognized pioneer in stem cell research and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Whether or not the mayor’s hope to have an early close to this Halloween celebration is a viable plan or a Quixotic quest remains to be seen.
At a press conference before the final meeting of the Halloween Planning Group, made up of city, community, business, university and student representatives, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said no bar owners have signed on to his plea to close their doors 90 minutes early.
LA CROSSE (AP) – An ordinance prohibiting bartenders here from drinking on the job went into effect over the weekend to help change a binge-drinking culture that police say has led to several drowning deaths.
The ordinance allows bartenders to drink on a break, but their blood-alcohol level cannot exceed 0.08 percent, the legal limit for driving under the influence of alcohol. The fine for bartenders and tavern owners for breaking the rule is $75.
The city has moved to clamp down on excessive drinking after University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Jared Dion drowned in the Mississippi River in 2004. He was the seventh college student to drown in La Crosse area rivers since 1997. Police have said the drownings were alcohol-related.
A study by the UW Comprehensive Cancer Center has found that nonsmoking bartenders in Madison who work in establishments where smoking is allowed are much more likely to experience five upper respiratory symptoms.
The study was undertaken in May and June, before the city’s smoking ban went into effect. A follow-up study is being conducted to find out possible effects of the ban.
“It was a random sample of bartenders,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and associate director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. About 700 bartenders responded to the survey.
Thomas Rockwell Mackie, radiology professor, long wrestled with an issue central to the treatment of cancer patients: Keeping the cure from killing them. TomoTherapy is a Madison company founded and led by Paul Reckwerdt (left) and Frederick A. Robertson that is helping the capital city benefit from reseach done on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. For years, he and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School struggled to come up with a method for better zeroing cell-zapping rays on malignant tumors and off healthy organs.
Quoted: John Hoffmire, director of the Center on Business and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wisconsin’s economy will continue to grow next year, although a bit more slowly than the rest of the nation, Donald A. Nichols said at a semi-annual conference Friday. In fact, the state, led by a strong manufacturing sector, will continue to close its per capita income gap with the U.S. in 2006, said Nichols, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and leading expert of the state economy.
Harvard College and the University of Wisconsin now tie for the most CEOs – 15 – on the list, according to Spencer Stuart.
Madison-based Stratatech Corp. announced that it has been awarded another federal grant, this one worth $154,000 from the National Institute of Aging to continue development of its genetically engineered human skin substitutes to speed the healing of chronic skin ulcers such as bed sores.
….Stratatech’s products are based on a patented, unique source of pathogen-free human skin cells identified at UW-Madison as being able to multiply indefinitely.
Eight of 10 metropolitan areas across the nation with the highest physician prices are in Wisconsin and Madison ranks fourth, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
….Ralph Andreano, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said competition has little impact on health care costs because medical facilities have the same equipment and techniques.
“What usually is the case is that high cost means high quality. The state-of-the-art is costly. High-quality medicine is very costly and it’s difficult to contain it,” Andreano said.
UC Irvine has chosen the head of a University of Wisconsin real estate program as the executive director of its Center for Real Estate.
Kerry Vandell, who runs the Grasskamp Real Estate program at the Madison, Wis., campus, will begin his UCI duties full time in July, UCI officials said. (Registration required.)
The Halloween Party on State Street this year combines daylight-saving time, a request from city and university leaders that bars close before the clocks turn back and an angry Tavern League.
A letter Tuesday signed by Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley asks bar owners to voluntarily stop serving alcohol at 2 a.m. Oct. 30 so that the Saturday night crowd stops drinking a bit earlier that Sunday.
With savings rates for Americans at an all-time low ââ?¬â?? even in negative territory ââ?¬â?? Ted Beck is going to have his work cut out for him in his new job.
Beck, who has been associate dean for executive education and corporate relations since 1999, will take over next month as president and CEO of the National Endowment for Financial Education.
Snubbed by venture capitalists on both coasts, fast-growing TomoTherapy — started by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers — now finds itself being wooed by Wall Street and health care centers around the world.
Dane County has to look beyond its borders as it plans for the next half-century of growth and service to Wisconsin, according to one of the state’s leading economists.
Terry Ludeman, chief of the Office of Economic Advisors in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, said the Madison area is one of about 100 dynamic metropolitan communities in America and needs to think beyond county lines as the 21st century progresses.
….Madison has the right kind of stuff, he said, including a good quality of life, a major university, a highly educated population and an infrastructure to make the community grow, not just via highways but by moving knowledge around through an advanced communications system like the Internet.
In what appears to be an attempt at “branding” (the marketing strategy to build long-term reliability and broad public recognition) the University of Wisconsin School of Music has scheduled most of its faculty concert series for the upcoming season on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 8 p.m.
“It’s an experiment,” said concert manager Richard Mumford of the popular series, which opens on Monday, Sept. 5, with the traditional Karp Family Labor Day Concert at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall. “The proof will be in the pudding when we count up the final numbers. I think it makes sense for someone to opt for a different night that isn’t in competition with other local groups.
International Business Machines Corp. on Tuesday became the latest company to settle charges of infringing a patent involving making computer chips owned by the the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
WARF, which owns and licenses patents based on research at UW-Madison, had accused IBM in a federal lawsuit of infringing on patented technology in making and selling copper-based chips.
The patent in question covers a metal barrier that prevents conductive metals from getting into the silicon that stores data in computer chips, stopping them from overheating or malfunctioning. It was granted in 1986 to John Wiley, an engineering professor who is now the school’s chancellor, and his colleague John Perepezko.
On the eastern edge of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison sits what is considered one of the best destinations in the world for executive education programs.
The Fluno Center, opened in March 2000, has been included for four years running in the London-based Financial Times’ annual ranking of the world’s top 40 executive education programs. The rankings include categories related to academic offerings, facilities, and food and accommodation
