Cellular Dynamics International is out with a new product: stem cell-derived neurons. The Madison company, founded by UW-Madison stem cell pioneer James Thomson, says it is the first commercial release of human brain cells, created through the company?s stem cell technology, in large enough quantity, quality and purity for use in life science research.
Christmas carols with a labor-oriented twist could be heard atop Bascom Hill Monday as members of a student organization rallied to demand action over the university?s relationship with Adidas.
He?s not an architect, developer or politician, but George Austin has left an imprint on Madison?s landscape like few others. As a former city Planning and Development director and a private consultant since 1998, Austin led the most complex, iconic projects in the city, including Monona Terrace, Overture Center and the recently opened Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery ? a half-billion dollars in construction in the past 15 years.Now, Austin, 59, is engaged in two more high-profile initiatives within a block of the state Capitol, both presenting the sort of challenges that confronted previous big efforts.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is jumping onto the “XXX” bandwagon, with the goal of preventing pornographic sites from tarnishing its name.
The UW System Board of Regents also unanimously approved the proposed Memorial Union renovation plans, the destruction of Brothers Bar and Grill on University Avenue and the addition of club seats in the Kohl Center.
Delta Air Lines announced on Monday that it has added two non-stop flights from Madison for fans headed to the Rose Bowl. The Delta flights from Dane County Regional Airport to Los Angeles International Airport will leave on Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, and return overnight Jan. 2/3 and early the afternoon of Jan. 3.
I am confused about Gov. Scott Walker?s inspiration for taking money from UW-Madison, one of the premier educational institutions in the world working on advancing human knowledge in breakthrough subjects you can?t even pronounce, then letting Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation give $4 million to a group of overpaid “experts” at Spectrum Brands who can?t make batteries or waffle irons without going bankrupt and losing the stockholders? money.
On Sunday, the Cap Times posted my blog which noted UW-Madison is considering cutting ties with Adidas because the sports apparel company is being accused of sweatshop abuses. Although the piece didn?t run until Sunday, it was written on Friday. Two phone calls and two emails to Adidas representatives on Friday did not produce a contact, so I noted attempts to reach officials with the company were not successful. However, over the weekend an Adidas public relations representative emailed me a statement.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has played a leading role in recent years when it comes to attempting to curb sweatshop abuses at companies that produce college-logoed apparel. But will Bucky still flex his muscle when the company coming under fire is Adidas — which supplies the university?s sports teams with everything from shoes and jerseys to athletic gear? “This time around, it?s a bit more complicated because of our involvement and close ties with Adidas,” says Vince Sweeney, UW-Madison?s vice chancellor for university relations. “We?re still in fact-finding mode.”
“I don’t believe money is going to ultimately drive this decision, and I hope I’m right,” says Lydia Zepeda, a UW-Madison professor of consumer science who chairs the university’s Labor Licensing Policy Committee (LLPC).
Major projects are on the agenda as the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents meets for two days.
Upon recommendation by the University of Wisconsin administration, an environmental study group hosted a public meeting Wednesday night to explore the possible green impacts the renovations planned for the Memorial Union could have on the surrounding area.
With apartment vacancy rates at the lowest level in 16 years, Madison developers said now is the time to act. From studios to five-bedroom apartments, redevelopment projects are targeting University of Wisconsin-Madison students. Nick Garcia, a UW-Madison junior, lives at 1323 W. Dayton St., and he said the location was a big reason he wanted to live there.
With apartment vacancy rates at the lowest level in 16 years, Madison developers said now is the time to act.From studios to five-bedroom apartments, redevelopment projects are targeting University of Wisconsin-Madison students.
Overall, things are better for Dane County businesses this year, but company executives are not so optimistic about 2012. That?s the gist of the 2011 First Business Economic Survey of Dane County, being released Wednesday. Of 3,584 surveys sent, 337 were returned. The sample size has a margin of error of 5 percent….The survey was conducted by UW-Madison’s A.C. Nielsen Center for Marketing Research in September and October.
Physicians Plus is suing UW-Madison?s doctor group, saying the doctors? threat to stop treating the insurance company?s patients is illegal. Physicians Plus, owned by Meriter Health Services, says the doctor group, UW Medical Foundation, demanded fees that are too high. After Physicians Plus refused to pay the fees, it says the doctor group threatened to stop serving most of the insurance company?s patients starting in 2013. Both sides say they?re still negotiating.
UW-Madison law professor Jonathan Lipson wants to correct what he says is a big misconception about where he works. The university?s law school isn?t anti-business, Lipson said, and it does a lot more than try to help the disenfranchised and free the wrongly convicted.
Microloans are common in developing countries to help the poor start a business. A Wisconsin micro-lending organization started by UW students operates on the same principle.
UW-Madison should put Badgers uniform provider Adidas “on notice” because of alleged worker rights abuses, a campus committee recommended on Friday. At issue is a factory owner in Indonesia who reportedly failed to pay more than 2,800 workers an estimated $3.2 million in severance, according to a university news release. The payments equal nearly one year?s salary per worker at minimum wage.
A university committee recommended Friday UW-Madison put top apparel manufacturer adidas on notice after an allegation of workers? rights abuses in Indonesia.
A UW-Madison office in Shanghai could be open as soon as June, according to officials who just returned from a trip to China to explore the possibility of the university?s first foreign outpost. Gilles Bousquet, dean of the division of international studies and vice provost for globalization, said that would be the “ideal” timeline but it hinges on continued support here and getting the necessary permits in China. He said UW-Madison is convening a planning team to determine next actions.
A university committee recommended Friday UW-Madison put top apparel manufacturer adidas on notice after an allegation of workers? rights abuses in Indonesia. The Labor Licensing Policy Committee, made up of student representatives, faculty and administrators, voted university officials propose a 90-day deadline for adidas to make $3.2 million in legally mandated severance payments owed to displaced factory workers in Indonesia.
While the market for owner-occupied housing remains weak, the interest in new apartment construction in Madison is soaring. A number of major projects are envisioned, including plans for a 12-story apartment tower near the UW-Madison campus and an architecturally intriguing 115-unit project facing Monona Bay.
Ten doctors at UW-Madison received $48,000 or more from drug or medical device companies last year, a State Journal analysis of campus disclosure records found. Six of the doctors were orthopedic surgeons, and each made $99,000 or more in consulting or royalty fees on top of their salaries averaging $750,000. The top earner ? Dr. Thomas Zdeblick, with nearly $1.7 million in medical industry income ? has been the subject of investigations and media reports about conflicts of interest in medicine. But he?s not alone in earning large sums, according to university records that only recently have included specific amounts of income instead of broad ranges.
Members of a city business group scrutinized a proposed design for remodeling the Memorial Union, a controversial plan that could alter the famed campus landmark and increase student accessibility.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has managed to become very effective at keeping electronic waste out of area landfills.
A 2008 UW-Madison analysis of Downtown bars found that things were little different there: noise complaints and assaults rose precipitously as the night went on, peaked between 2 and 3 a.m. after most bars closed, then fell.
The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery has received the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification in time for its one-year anniversary Friday.
In celebration of the building?s first anniversary, multiple celebrations, including a variety of tours, are slated to take place from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Discovery Building.
AquaMost, a Madison company developing a new type of water purification technology, has received another $4 million in investment funds and grant money. AquaMost?s technology, called photoelectrocatalytic oxidation, was invented at UW-Madison.
State tourism officials said director David Zucker is slated to return to Wisconsin to film a commercial. Tourism Department spokeswoman Lisa Marshall said Zucker will direct and edit a commercial depicting winter activities in the state.
It?s not uncommon for state and local governments to provide such incentives, said Barry Gerhart, Ellig professor of management at the UW-Madison School of Business. “It is a reality that companies like Spectrum Brands can be mobile. There?s nothing that I know of that requires them to produce batteries here in Wisconsin,” he said.
….Steve Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, agrees there are areas in southwestern Wisconsin enjoying the benefits of the local food trend, but adds that there is little research proving it?s an economic driver.”Twenty years ago, all the research said local foods was such a small market it wasn?t worth worrying about,” he says. “But over the past five or more years, there has been a ?push back? on large-scale commercial agriculture.”
Success in national collegiate entrepreneurial competitions landed two UW-Whitewater students at the White House on Monday. Andrew Hoeft of Onalaska and Daniel Fink of Ashwaubenon were selected to represent the university?s Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, or CEO, at the “I Am An Entrepreneur” event.
When it comes to Occupy Wall Street, everyone?s got an opinion. In his recent op-ed in the Wisconsin State Journal, for example, Karl Garson called the movement “raucous and inarticulate ? and bound to fail.” The reason, Garson claims, is “screw-you wealth” ? Wall Street doesn?t care what the people think. We agree that Wall Street doesn?t give a fig about Main Street, but we disagree with Garson?s conclusions. Occupy Wall Street, in its second month, is facing police repression, cold weather and other stumbling blocks, but it shows no sign of giving up the ghost.
(Susan Kepecs, MFA, Ph.D., is a freelance arts and culture writer, an honorary fellow in the Department of Anthropology and author of numerous scholarly and popular articles.)
Two University of Wisconsin students teamed up to create the nonprofit Madison Fund in an effort to combat the effects that recent years of economic uncertainty have had on small businesses in the community.
Wisconsin?s big win over Penn State sent them to the Big Ten Championship Game and sent screen printers to their shops to start getting new T-shirts ready.
A new group has been formed to try to give a helping hand to people in Madison who may not be able to be helped through traditional lending practices.
Boxes are stacking up in Murfie.com?s airy offices on the eighth floor of the U.S. Bank building on Capitol Square. But that?s a good thing. The brown packing boxes hold dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of music CDs that Murfie will catalog, store and make available for their owners to download or sell. It?s the latest business venture for serial entrepreneur Matt Younkle, a UW-Madison graduate and Ashwaubenon native who invented the TurboTap beer dispensing device and began selling it to sports stadiums in 2005.
Taking a cue from the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, two University of Wisconsin-Madison juniors are aiming to lift people out of poverty by lending them money.
The Madison Fund, founded by Alex Rosenthal and Andrew Tapper, recently made its first loan to a local man who used the money to apply for U.S. citizenship. The man found the not-for-profit organization by doing a Google search, said Rosenthal, the fund?s co-founder and executive director.
Shoppers at Sunday?s third annual Close to Home: Arboretum Local Products Expo were abuzz about the light, floral flavor of (Nathan) Clarke?s raw, unfiltered Urban Honey made by bees that gather nectar from Madison?s flowers, trees and gardens.”Very good,” said Susan Fischer of Madison. Like many others in the steady crowd of shoppers who perused more than 30 booths throughout the Arboretum?s Visitor Center, she was drawn by the locally produced offerings.
Hunched over their computers, scientists at the Space Science and Engineering Center have advanced meteorology to where we can now literally peer into the future and predict everything from the landfall of hurricanes to the formation of tornados.
City officials approved the first phase of a revised plan for the Wisconsin Union Redevelopment Project Monday, which included a smaller theater lounge than what was proposed in the former plan.
A city committee on Monday night unanimously approved phase one of a plan to renovate the Memorial Union, a proposal that comes a month after a previous plan to renovate the Union was voted down by just 23 votes in the Associated Students of Madison fall elections.
Members of the Student Labor Action Coalition held a demonstration Monday protesting UW-Madison?s main licensing partner, saying it fails to give severance pay to recently unemployed factory workers. The demonstration was a response to an Indonesian factory contracted by Nike and UW partner Adidas that closed abruptly in January, leaving 2,800 workers jobless. Legally, the companies still owe 1.8 million of the original 3.3 million employees monetary compensation for the factory?s closure.
Learning has been central to Kristin Redman?s success. It began at her childhood home in Holliston, Mass., about four miles from the start of the Boston Marathon….After high school, she studied biology, art and design and thought she was on a career track to learning how herbicides interact with wetland systems. Her course work brought her to UW-Madison to study limnology and oceanography, but Redman is no longer wearing hip boots and collecting water samples.
More than 100 people who live in Madison cashed hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm subsidy checks from the federal government last year. The checks were sent straight to their urban homes ? some of them fancy places on the lake, in Maple Bluff and Shorewood Hills ? regardless of need, high prices for crops or whether the recipients are even farmers. It?s a system ripe for savings as Congress and its “supercommittee” try to stem the federal government?s chronic budget deficit and soaring debt.
The owner of a Shorewood Hills home valued at $1.1 million received several hundred dollars in farm subsidies last year. So did a retired UW-Madison physics professor and a former high-ranking local government bureaucrat, according to EWG data and State Journal research.
When the monthly jobs numbers come out these days, the Internet comment boards heat up fast over whether Gov. Walker has the state on course — or not. Unfortunately for the governor, the numbers announced Thursday showed the state losing nearly 10,000 more non-farm positions in October, the fourth straight month of declines….Over the past year the state has lost 5,200 professional and business services positions, including nearly 3,800 science and tech jobs.
The University of Wisconsin Law School is launching a new initiative in an attempt to better connect with the business world. “At a state level, I think there is a misperception in a variety of communities that the law school is either indifferent to business law or is hostile to it, and that?s just not true,” says Jonathan Lipson, a UW-Madison professor of law and the director of the school?s new Business Law Initiative.
International education is more than learning a second language or becoming well-versed in world geography. In today?s new economy, it is all about preparing our young people to live, work, lead and compete in an interconnected, interdependent world. In a word, it is about employability. It also is about making sure that home-grown employers ? private, public and nonprofit alike ? can locally recruit the talent they need to fuel their growth in today?s increasingly global marketplace.
A former UW-Madison student who faced more than $400,000 in fines for operating an illegal liquor delivery business got his penalty reduced to about $3,000. The city of Madison filed a 575-count complaint against Danny Haber in May 2010 for operating Campusdrank.com, a website that sold and delivered alcohol to customers, mainly to UW-Madison students. The complaint charged Haber and fellow student Matthew Siegel for selling alcohol without a license and to underage customers.
The Madison area pretty much stinks compared to several peers when it comes to creating private sector jobs and generating new companies, according to a $140,000 study. It found the Madison region lagging in income growth, ethic diversity and the number of young people putting down roots here. Other black marks include the high cost of living, lack of broadband access and limited access to investment capital. But the report lauded the area for its high quality of life, the easy availability of health care and the large amount of research and development at UW-Madison.
?American culture is better off for Pleasant Rowland and the creation of American Girl,? said Deborah Mitchell, UW-Madison School of Business senior lecturer in marketing. ?There?s never been a time in our history when there?s been a greater need for girls to have an expanded view of who they are, where they?ve been and what they could be.?
The University of Wisconsin-Extension can move forward with broadband Internet expansion projects in four areas of the state after a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin Independent Telecommunications Systems.
A feud between UW Health and Meriter Health Services has escalated into a court battle, with UW?s doctor group filing a lawsuit Friday against Meriter over Meriter?s decision to stop providing doctors to oversee patients at night who are treated during the day by UW doctors. The UW Medical Foundation filed the suit in Dane County Circuit Court. It says Meriter made it harder for UW to fill the night coverage gap by refusing to let more UW doctors work at Meriter and by hiring some of the UW doctors.
They?re here, they?re hungry and they need haircuts. The explosive growth in the number of Chinese students at UW-Madison has created boom times for Chinese-owned businesses near campus.
When Rocco Landesman was an English major at UW-Madison in the late 1960s, he starred in Shakespeare?s “Richard II” and worked as the fine arts editor for the Daily Cardinal. On Tuesday, he?ll return to Madison ? now as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Tony-winning Broadway producer, investor and co-owner of the one-time Kenosha Twins minor league baseball team will be part of an afternoon panel at Goodman Community Center discussing how Madison can better leverage the arts for economic development.
Quoted: Tax credits rarely are the primary reason a company relocates, said Jack Huddleston, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in economic development. The savings are too small compared with long-term costs of adding employees and setting up a permanent home for a company.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, one of Newsweek?s “Most Important People in 2010,” will speak at Union South Nov. 15. Jackson will discuss challenges facing environmental laws as well as the EPA?s efforts to respond to President Barack Obama?s request that federal agencies work with American businesses to help create jobs.
It took a couple of years to complete the deal but a new $5 million, mid-rise apartment is going up behind the historic Acacia fraternity house on the UW campus. A groundbreaking ceremony is Thursday at 229 W. Lakelawn Place, just off Langdon Street at 4 p.m. The five level building has 14-units and 59 bedrooms of student housing, along with 20 moped and 61 bicycle parking spots. No vehicle parking is provided.
Milwaukee is developing a reputation as a leader in freshwater research and technology. The Chronicle of Higher Education is the latest publication to take note. An article posted over the weekend states Lake Michigan is not “just a pretty backdrop and source of recreation here but a strong economic driver, with more than 130 water-technology-related businesses in the region bringing in $10.5-billion annually in revenue.” That number is huge. UW-Madison, for example, is one of the leading research institutions on the planet, and it brings in only a fraction of that — approximately $1 billion per year — in research dollars.
