Frustrated with studying for class, two UW-Madison graduates are setting out to make life easier for students across the country.
They’re gaining worldwide attention by the day, finding out a life changing business was just a click away.
Santa Monica, Calif. – In a brief filed with the U.S. Patent Office’s board of appeals and interferences, consumer watchdog groups have cited two legal errors allegedly made by a patent examiner in confirming a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation patent on human embryonic stem cells.
On July 18, 2008 the California-based and renamed Consumer Watchdog (hereafter â??Watchdogâ?), reexamination requester of three of related Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s (WARF) stem cell patents, filed a Notice of Appeal in the United States Patent Trademark Office (â??the PTOâ?) relating to one of those patents. That Notice and the concurrent press release brought back to the public eye the stem cell reexamination process which was initiated in July 2006 when Watchdog filed its reexamination requests. This is to update and revisit that dispute.
MATC Credit Union, which serves Madison Area Technical College employees and their families, plans to merge Dec. 1 with UW Credit Union, pending approval by the state’s Office of Credit Unions.
The Dane County Board voted Thursday night to require companies that work for the county on contracts worth $5,000 or more to offer health benefits to their employees’ domestic partners. The county already offers domestic partner benefits to its own employees.
The ordinance, which passed on a voice vote, also creates a registry for same-sex or other non-married domestic partners, a registry the city of Madison has had since 1990 but no other county in the state offers.
Domestic partners need to have been in a committed relationship for at least 90 days to register.
Dane County is the first county in Wisconsin to require contractors and service providers to offer domestic partner benefits.
The rule passed last night by the County Board only applies to employers who currently offer spousal benefits.
It also creates a domestic partnership registry for heterosexual and homosexual couples in Dane County.
One major hurdle still needs to be cleared before the University of Wisconsin can fully celebrate a new performance facility announced on Tuesday.
The Big Ten Network was a small footnote in News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch’s speech at an industry conference Wednesday but it was a choice nugget for those who’ve followed the channel’s tumultuous year-plus of existence.
As the city approaches the state-issued quotas on liquor licenses for bars and restaurants, members of Madison’s Alcohol License Review Committee voted Wednesday night to take a closer look at the economic benefits of granting new licenses.
The committee formed a subcommittee that will address ways to maximize the economic gain of a license, including considering whether a license is necessary or merely beneficial to a business, reserving licenses according to geographical area to save some for developing parts of the city and reserving licenses for particular purposes, such as for major hotels.
MADISON, Wis. — College students typically study beer drinking, but a new class could soon help them brew their own.
MillerCoors is donating $100,000 worth of equipment to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences for a beer brewing program.
A course on the science of brewing and fermentation will start this spring, beer experts from Miller’s Milwaukee brewery will help implement curriculum.
Earning credits for making beer is enough to make quite a few 40 hour per week employees think about heading back to school.
A new partnership between UW-Madison and MillerCoors is creating quite a buzz.
On the surface something like this begs a lot of questions about promoting drinking or what underage students could do with the knowledge but faculty at UW say that’s missing the point.
Washburn University agreed to modify its athletic logo Friday after UW-Madison filed an unprecedented federal trademark-infringement lawsuit against the school last year.
The University of Wisconsin has reached an agreement with Washburn University, a collegiate institution comprised of 7,200 students located in Topeka, Kan., after claiming the school had infringed upon UWâ??s â??Motion Wâ? logo.
In response to several missing checks that may have been lost in the mail, the Bursarâ??s Office of the University of Wisconsin sent out an e-mail to affected students this week.
University of Wisconsin music faculty expressed excitement Tuesday in the wake of the announcement of a $20 million donation from anonymous donors to support a new campus music center.
Eight Madison-area companies â?? several of them spinoffs from UW-Madison technology â?? are among the recipients of $7.3 million in state grants and loans for clean-energy projects, Gov. Jim Doyle announced Tuesday.
Two anonymous donors have given $20 million to UW-Madison’s School of Music for building two performing venues in a prominent campus location, next to the Chazen Museum of Art and three blocks north of the Kohl Center, by early 2013.
The financial gift will shift up to 300 concerts each year by UW faculty and students from the hard-to-find Mills Hall and Morphy Hall â?? both built in 1969 and tucked in the Mosse Humanities Building â?? to the new building at the northwest corner of University Avenue and Lake Street.
Sconnies wanting to ferment their knowledge about how their favorite brewskies are made will actually get to earn credit for it next spring, thanks to the second-largest brewery in the country giving beer making gear to UW-Madison.
MillerCoors is donating $100,000 in brewing equipment to the UW College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the keystone for a new brewing and fermentation course to be offered for the first time in the spring semester.
Chalk one up to a win â?? with a capital W â?? for UW-Madison’s Motion W logo.
Washburn University has agreed to tweak its logo as part of the settlement of a federal lawsuit that UW-Madison filed against the Topeka, Kan., school late last year, according to a UW-Madison official.
The nation’s economy has probably hit its low point and should start improving in the next six months.
That’s what speakers told about 80 people at the semi-annual Economic Outlook Conference at the Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus Friday.
“I think improvement in the economy is imminent,” said Clare Zempel, founder of Zempel Strategic in Milwaukee and former chief economist for Robert W. Baird & Co. “The slowdown should be in the process of slowing down.”
The home in which Brittany Zimmermann and her fiance, Jordan Gonnering, were living at the time she was stabbed to death in April was lacking in security, and her boyfriend had complained to the management firm about the lack of secure doors and locks, according to a lawsuit filed in Dane County Circuit Court by Zimmermann’s parents.
Wisconsin School of Businessâ?? entrepreneurship program is one of the best in the country, according to a national survey published recently by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.
The Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at UW-Madison ranks 13th nationwide in the â??Top 50 Entrepreneurial Graduate Colleges in the U.S.â? out of more than 2,300 undergraduate and graduate schools surveyed for the list. The center stands seventh among public universities.
MADISON — Kikkoman Corp. Chairman Yuzaburo Mogi figures he has been to Wisconsin at least 200 times in the past 35 years.
So he was on familiar ground Tuesday when he dedicated his company’s new research-and-development lab at the University Research Park on Madison’s west side.
Mogi said he has high hopes that Kikkoman scientists and UW-Madison researchers can collaborate on new food and other products in coming years. The lab will open early in 2009.
Quoted: Barry Gerhart, management professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Compensation.
If the Big Ten Network doesn’t broadcast enough Big Ten sports for you, it’s about to provide even more via its Web site.
BTN announced Wednesday that it would expand its Web streaming initiative to include more than 100 events, many of which would not otherwise be produced.
While some conferences charge a fee, the games streamed on www.BigTenNetwork.com will be free, the network said.
The latest in healthy, soy-based foods could someday sprout from a lab here in Madison.
Japanese dignitaries came to University Research Park on Tuesday to dedicate the Kikkoman USA Research and Development Laboratory, to be created at the MGE Innovation Center, 505 S. Rosa Road.
The lab will be Kikkoman’s fourth worldwide and the first of its kind in the U.S.
UW-Madison undergraduate students are not paying enough for the quality education they’re getting here, School of Business Dean Michael Knetter told a women’s leadership organization Tuesday.
“We dramatically undercharge for a (UW-Madison) degree,” said Knetter. Of the Big Ten schools, only the University of Iowa charges less than UW-Madison for state resident undergraduate tuition and fees last year, a comparison by UW-Madison officials shows.
The government did the right thing by bailing out mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before their finances deteriorated any further, a UW-Madison School of Business professor says.
“If we learned anything from the savings and loan (crisis of the 1980s and 1990s), it’s that firms have incentives to take big risks if they’re near bankruptcy,” said Morris Davis, assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics.
Slowly but surely, tenacious Ogg Hall is coming down.
After clinging to life for longer than expected, the UW-Madison dorm that students lovingly disparaged for its small and austere rooms seems finally on a clear path to demolition.
The state’s new commerce secretary, Richard Leinenkugel, must navigate a political climate that lacks consensus on how much – if anything – the state should spend on incentives and subsidies to attract and retain businesses. That discord impedes the work of the 3-year-old Milwaukee 7 economic development agency, the M-7 conceded last week.
That disunity came to the surface last month when John Wiley, the outgoing chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a scathing criticism of the state’s ideologically split political landscape, which has stalemated tax and economic policy. Asked in an interview Friday what sort of economic climate Leinenkugel inherits, Wiley replied:
“The climate in Wisconsin is bad for a lot of reasons but the worst is the political partisanship,” he said.
When Yahoo! employees call for technical assistance this fall, the accent they hear may be “Cheesehead.” The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh announced Wednesday that tech giant Yahoo! will establish a student-staffed technical support center in Oshkosh.
The Yahoo! CareCenter, which is about two years in the making, will provide technical support to some of the company’s 17,000 employees.
Students staffing the Yahoo! CareCenter will be able to earn $10,000 or more per year working part time, UW-Oshkosh said in a news release. Twenty students will be recruited initially, with 20 more added as needed.
Madison police have a suspect in custody after a fatal stabbing Wednesday night in downtown Madison.
A 22-year-old Madison man was stabbed outside the Plaza Tavern, 319 N. Henry St., at about 11:40 p.m. following an in-bar dispute between two groups of men.
(According to police the victim was not a UW-Madison student)
A host of local politicians, UW officials and business development insiders will welcome the chairman of Kikkoman Corp. to Madison next week.
Gov. Jim Doyle, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and University Research Park Director Mark Bugher will host Kikkoman chairman Yuzaburo Mogi on Tuesday to mark the establishment of Kikkoman USA’s new research and development laboratory in the MGE Innovation Center at University Research Park.
….The Kikkoman Foundation is also granting $100,000 for scholarships at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
….To better monitor state subsidies to corporations, a UW-Madison think tank has called for a searchable database to track whether that money actually benefits the Wisconsin economy. Patterned after a system recently implemented in Illinois, the database would include how much companies pay in state taxes, how much business they do in the state and how much financial help they get.
In 2003, Illinois passed a Corporate Accountability Act, considered one of the most comprehensive corporate disclosure laws in the country. As part of that act, companies receiving state economic development money must also report on their progress in job creation, retention and wage promises.
“This level of transparency is key for policy makers and the public to better evaluate the tax system and see if it is truly working in the economic interests of the state,” said Kate Gordon, lead author of the report for the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
Like Jon Foley, I do environmental work. And just as he is leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a better opportunity at the University of Minnesota, I too left Wisconsin at the end of July.
In 1996 I received my doctorate from the UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. I own an 8-year-old environmental management consulting firm.
….Rep. Steve Nass might be driving some academics to leave with his disrespect for UW-Madison, but others in the state are proving remarkably effective at driving some of the rest of us away too — or at least not being very shrewd about how to keep us around.
The company was founded by Li and Bin Ran, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and director of the university’s Traffic Lab. It has patented software and predictive models that collect data from about 350 sources, such as helicopter data, probes embedded in highway pavement and cell phone towers. The result is route-specific, real-time traffic information and travel time forecasts.
The Charter Communications/Big Ten Network agreement is bittersweet for many sports fans.
We’ll be the first to admit that it’s good news that Charter’s cable subscribers in southern Wisconsin will finally be able to see Badger football and basketball games that are exclusively carried on the Big Ten Conference-controlled network.
….There is a downside, however. Once again, big-time college sports and the television-connected outfits that enter into deals with them wind up putting the squeeze on the little guy.
Some of the kingpins in today’s athletic culture find it hard to believe that there may actually be people out there who can’t afford expanded basic service, much less the digital package that is increasingly being pushed. But, of course, there are and they’re big fans — as big as the high rollers who have taken hold of supposedly amateur sports today.
Charter Communications said the Big Ten Network would be up and running for its subscribers by late Thursday afternoon, meaning the University of Wisconsin’s football opener Saturday will be available for Charter subscribers.
Charter spokesperson Bob Pinter said BTN will be found on Channel 73 for Expanded Basic subscribers, and on channel 795 for HD subscribers. BTN will telecast the UW-Akron game at 11 a.m. Saturday at Camp Randall and the Badgers’ second game against Marshall on Sept. 6 at 11 a.m.
The long feud between Charter Communications and Big Ten Network finally came to a close today (Wednesday), ending an episode that in Wisconsin challenges the recent case of Brett Favre vs. The Green Bay Packers in terms of duration and emotion.
Throughout this tedious negotiation process, the feelings of most fans have fallen by the wayside while the media giants tussled in the ring.
So what do people think of the agreement, which will give the network a spot on the expanded basic lineup of the Madison area’s largest cable company, perhaps as soon as Saturday’s University of Wisconsin football season opener against Akron?
There was no word yet Thursday morning whether Charter Communications would be able to complete equipment work in time to air Saturday’s Big Ten Network telecast of the University of Wisconsin’s football opener.
Charter spokesman John Miller said in an e-mail that an announcement would be sent out “as soon as engineers give us the word,” if they are able to complete the work.
Amidst all the joy for sports fans with the announcement of a Charter-Big Ten Network deal, one group of people wasn’t exactly doing cartwheels on Wednesday: bar owners.
“I was sorry for the people who didn’t have it, but sometimes it’s good when you get thrown your bone, too,” said Scott Peterson, a manager at Babe’s Grill and Bar on the west side.
John Wiley is leaving his post as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bang. A political bang.
In an article penned for Madison magazine, Wiley takes on the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce corporate lobbying machine in language that rocked the state’s political scene.
It wasn’t that Wiley said anything new. There has for a number of years now been a dawning consciousness among thinking Wisconsinites that WMC is leading a race to the bottom that would have this state define being competitive as being “among those states with the lowest taxes, lowest wages, and least regulation in the nation.”
When it comes to economic development in Wisconsin, biotechnology has been grabbing all the headlines. That’s understandable in one sense because the state largely missed out on the silicon revolution of the 1980s and has been a Midwest leader in the life sciences.
Yet when it comes to actual job creation and income generation, computers still rule, says a top University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
“Epic Systems hires more people every month than all the biotech companies in Wisconsin combined,” said Guri Sohi, past chairman of the UW-Madison computer science department.
Greg Rice is scurrying about like the owner of a brand-new home, checking all the details and looking for any signs of shoddy workmanship.
“I wonder what happened here?” asked Rice, noting a small chip in the corner of a concrete planter on the massive, fourth-floor rain garden that captures stormwater from the new University Square. Upstairs on the top floor of the Lucky Apartments portion of the project, Rice is curious about an 18-inch-ring stain on the hallway carpet.
But you can excuse Rice, 53, for being a little nervous. He’s overseeing the final phase of the largest mixed-use project ever built in downtown Madison just as some 40,000 students start pouring onto the UW campus and the U.S. economy teeters on the brink of recession.
Charter Communications and the Big Ten Network finally have a deal, but it’s uncertain if it will be in time for Charter to carry Saturday’s telecast of Wisconsin’s football opener.
The two sides said in a joint announcement Wednesday morning that they “have reached an agreement-in-principle on terms of a multi-year distribution agreement in which Charter will carry the Big Ten Network and related programming throughout the Big Ten territory, including its systems in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and northern Illinois.
MADISON, Wis. — Charter Communications is actively negotiating with the Big Ten Network and an announcement about a possible deal to bring college games to local cable subscribers could come as soon as Tuesday afternoon, according to a spokesman with the cable provider.
“I cannot confirm that a deal has been done, but we are very close,” said Charter spokesman John Miller.
Miller said that Charter workers are preparing to make the games available should both sides reach an agreement, which might open the possibility to see Saturday’s football game between the University of Wisconsin Badgers and Akron.
Dear Editor:
It’s time for more people, businesses and institutions to come out against the arrogant, anti-people, anti-government, anti-education and often anti-business stands and actions of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. We thank the people at Epic and outgoing UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley for taking leadership roles in this.
Gene & Linda Farley, Verona
And then there was one.
Just days after a testy public exchange and publicly expressed pessimism about the chances for a deal, the Big Ten Network and Time Warner Cable announced late Monday that they have reached a deal for BTN to be carried by Time Warner, the dominant cable provider in the Milwaukee and Fox Valley areas.
Coupled with a report â?? yet to be officially confirmed â?? by Multichannel.com last Friday that BTN and Iowa’s major cable company, Mediacom, reached a carriage agreement, Charter Communications now is the lone remaining major TV provider in the region without a BTN deal.
….But there still may be hope for Badger fans who are Charter subscribers, according to a statement e-mailed to The Capital Times Tuesday morning by Charter spokesman John Miller.
With the college football season set to begin, things are getting down and dirty between Time Warner Cable and the Big Ten Network.
…while Charter and BTN have mostly kept their negotiations and dispute civil, Time Warner on Friday sent a letter to UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez offering to broadcast the UW games against the University of Akron Aug. 30 and Marshall University Sept. 6 on a pay-per-view basis, with UW setting the price and keeping the proceeds, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
A similar letter was sent to Ohio State University athletic director Gene Smith, the paper said.
They say no good deed ever goes unpunished. And so I say to former UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley, though I know he will grit his teeth to hear it, â??Thank you.â?
Late Thursday night I received a phone message from Matt Nelson, an old comrade from student activism in the 90s: â??You wonâ??t believe what Wiley wrote in the upcoming issue of Madison Magazine!â?
Madison, Wis. – University Research Park may be planning a second campus, but there still of plenty of demand for high-tech business space on its existing site.
The research park, which is home to 115 companies, is planning another new building for start-up companies, this time for new companies that â??graduateâ? from its business incubator, according to a report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In an incendiary parting shot, outgoing UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley reopened a feud with conservatives in and out of the Capitol by accusing the state’s largest business lobby of undermining support for the school in the Legislature.
Madison – Retiring University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said the state’s largest business lobby has become an obstacle to economic development. Writing in Madison Magazine, Wiley slammed Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and state lawmakers for creating a political environment that he said puts partisanship ahead of pressing needs. The university disputed his characterizations.
The Big Ten Network announced Thursday it has signed a deal with US Cable, which serves numerous small communities in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin.
US Cable, a N.J.-based company that serves seven states, will offer the network on its expanded basic level of service to the majority of its customers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Communities it serves in Wisconsin include Alma, Bay City, Buffalo City, Cochrane, Ellsworth,
With just weeks to go before he steps down as chancellor of UW-Madison, John Wiley has penned a blistering rebuke of state officials and the state’s largest business lobby for putting Wisconsin on the road to becoming a “permanent third-world state.”
“Wisconsin has lost its way,” opened Wiley in a 3,000-word treatise titled “From Crossroads to Crisis” that appears in the September issue of Madison Magazine. “We’ve lost touch with our traditions and values. Our politics has become a poisonous swill, and the most influential voice for the business community has been taken hostage by partisan ideologues.”
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley is stepping down in less than two weeks and he has a message for the state.
He’s taking lawmakers and the state’s largest business organization to task for creating a political environment he calls toxic. Wiley lays out his arguments in an article in the September issue of Madison Magazine.
The column was written as a follow-up to one five years ago, which sounded the alarm about the state’s economic health and its effect on education. He’s ramping up that concern and taking a stand against what he said is bringing Wisconsin down, WISC-TV reported.
In a small apartment on Madison’s South Side, nine children arrive for summer camp and immediately begin pulling out small, lime-green computers from oversized backpacks.
The campers are part of a new UW-Madison research project to test the effectiveness of the laptop computers as a learning tool, which were specially designed for children in developing nations.
Two people were hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries Monday afternoon after a chemical spill at the SAFC Pharma company temporarily caused the evacuation of the company building at 645 Science Drive in the University Research Park.
A Madison Fire Department spokesman said the spill consisted of fewer than two liters of methyl bromoacctate and was contained within a room in the building.
Dear Editor: The middle of August means one thing for downtown Madison: college moving season. Like most other college students, I figured a U-Haul would be my best bet. I called to reserve a U-Haul at the advertised rate for the needed time period.
I received a call two days before moving telling me that there was no way I could get the U-Haul I requested over a month ago for the time period I needed it. I was told that the Madison U-Haul center had given strict instructions that no one could rent a U-Haul for more than six hours between Aug. 13 and 17.
Hartland native Brandon Nolde’s acceptance letter from UW-Madison was followed by a disappointing phone call.
University housing told him, “Sorry, we’re full.”
