Is the U.S. already in a recession or can the dreaded R-word be averted?
Experts who addressed the Economic Outlook 2008 conference at UW-Madison’s Fluno Center on Friday didn’t quite agree.
“It’s a rotten economy, whether they call it a recession or not,” said Don Nichols, UW-Madison professor emeritus of economics and public affairs. “I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a recession.”
Not long ago, the popularity of UW-Madison’s dairy science program was in such decline Stephen Babcock himself may have been rolling in his grave.
California surpassed Wisconsin in milk production years ago and is nipping at the heels of the state’s Cheddar title. The enrollment woes are somewhat of a sign of the health of the dairy industry in Wisconsin, Grummer said.
The housing market remains very slow throughout southern Wisconsin, with some areas starting to show some significant price drops.
Quoted: UW-Madison real estate professor Morris Davis
If you’re thinking about starting a company, the best advice you can get comes from people who have been there and done that.
That’s the philosophy behind the Venture Mentoring Service at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its director, Sherwin Greenblatt, was at UW-Madison this week to explain how the program works.
Taxi!
Downtown bar patrons will be able to get a cab at a moment’s notice starting tonight, with the city’s first taxi stand being set up in the 600 block of University Avenue on the north side of the street, picking up fares from midnight to 3 a.m.
Users will queue up at the stand, with a starter directing passengers into the next cab in line. The stand will have large sandwich boards noting it’s location, right in front of the restaurant A 8 China at 608 University Ave.
….The project is a cooperative venture of the city, the police, UW-Madison, business owners downtown and the cab companies.
Establishing a board is considered to be one of the best practices to help a family business survive to the third generation or beyond.
An independent board, which includes a limited number of family members, is recommended, said Ann Kinkade, director/faculty associate of the UW-Madison Family Business Center.
Yet many business owners don’t create one â?? often concerned about being told how to run their company and fearing a loss of control.
This won’t come as a surprise to the unemployed, under-employed or otherwise underpaid citizens of Wisconsin. But the state is falling even further behind the national averages in income, creating jobs and launching new private sector businesses, according to a report released Monday.
Wisconsin’s per capita income — one key measure of a state’s relative economic health — now stands at $34,476 compared to $36,629 for the nation as a whole. That puts the state 5.9% below the national average, the lowest ranking since 1991 when incomes here lagged the nation by 6.7%.
….These sobering figures come not from a left-leaning UW think tank but rather via the annual report of Competitive Wisconsin Inc., a nonpartisan consortium of agriculture, business, education and labor leaders.
With our economic and financial crises deepening, government insiders reportedly are debating whether we need to restore some regulation — or not. Given the state of things, we can expect further woes and no regulation.
Why have regulation when JPMorgan can gobble up Bear Stearns for peanuts, with the backstage encouragement and acquiescence of the Federal Reserve Board?
(Stanley Kutler is a UW-Madison professor emeritus of history and law.)
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race has attracted the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which admonishes Justice Louis Butler and other court members for making the state an unfriendly environment for business, potentially depressing business activity and discouraging investment in the state.
Over the years that I have studied the patterns and effects of civil litigation, I have never encountered any direct evidence of this, nor evidence that actual Wisconsin businesspeople (as opposed to their lobbyist spokesmen) are despairing about the state’s civil justice system.
(Marc Galanter is a professor emeritus at the UW Law School)
Though the economy looks pretty fragile, job prospects for college graduates are quite strong, two UW-Madison career directors say.
“There definitely are good prospects. We were surprised at the extent companies are still hiring,” said Steve Schroeder, director of the undergraduate career center at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business.
“Part of it is that the baby boomers are starting to retire. For the next 15 or 20 years, there will be more people retiring than graduates entering the market.”
The Wisconsin Union Directorate unveiled three different building plans for the new Union South project Thursday night.
Prevention of a flu pandemic is the goal of a $1.3 million grant to the UW-Madison from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The grant announced today will support research aimed at understanding the molecular features that lead to influenza pandemics. The University of Wisconsin-Madison will collaborate with Maryland-based Lentigen Corp. on the project.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and Lentigen have agreed to broadly disseminate the knowledge generated in this project to the scientific community. Key pieces of the intellectual property created during the project will be donated by WARF to the international research community to improve human health across the globe.
If you think the big fight between the Big Ten Network and the cable TV industry is the pits for fans of college basketball, take a look at this.
The NFL Network, which is also at an impasse with the cable companies here and elsewhere, has been clamping down on churches that have been holding football viewing parties in their basements to raise a few bucks to help fund their activities.
….The NFL isn’t alone in its audacity, however. Before the start of last fall’s football season, newspaper advertising departments got a letter from the UW-Madison’s trademark licensing director, Cindy Van Matre.
The Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds is one of a group of employee benefit trust funds collaborating to push the adoption of innovations aimed at improving health care quality and lowering costs.
“We’re going to be exploring best practices,” said Tom Korpady, division of insurance services administrator for ETF, which administers retirement and other benefit programs for more than 540,000 Wisconsin Retirement System participants and 1,400 employers.
Korpady added that many things are on the table, “but it’s premature to say exactly what we’re doing,” as the group is just beginning its work.
Genesis Development Corp. has hit a rough patch just as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. Its cash reserves are low, and its three-story building on Madison ‘s South Side — called a business incubator — is only half full of tenants.
A key demographic is missing from the city ‘s recently-completed economic development plan — the young leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and creatives of the Madison area. By not adequately addressing this demographic ‘s potential and needs, the city is squandering one of its most competitive advantages.
More than any other generation, young people today are entrepreneurs. To meet the small business owners, the tenants of UW Research Park and other key entrepreneurs in Madison is to meet an under-40 demographic. There is ample opportunity to provide dynamic support for young entrepreneurs and the talent coming out of UW-Madison. Young entrepreneurs are a powerful determinant of the city ‘s future economy. They cannot be an afterthought.
There’s no one alive today who was around to witness the birth of Wisconsin’s dairy and cranberry industries in the late 1800s or the state’s rise as a manufacturing power in roughly the same era. But a new page in Wisconsin’s history of commerce is being written in our time – the emergence of stem cell medicine.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine plans next year to install the first TomoTherapy machine designated for veterinary use.
With the U.S. economy in shaky territory, two University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students say there’s one examination every stock should undergo: the stress test.
The subprime mortgage mess and subsequent paralysis in U.S. credit markets have made banks hesitant to lend and investors skittish about stocks. It’s unclear how much longer the situation will last, and how much blood will be left on Wall Street when it ends.
That’s why John Poehling Jr. and Jason Schultz say stress testing your stocks is so important.
If they flop on Wall Street, Hollywood may save them.
University of Wisconsin-Madison business students created a mind-numbingly dull video about their Applied Security Analysis Program – until 1:47 into the 6-minute video.
Jean-Paul Chavas, UW-Madison professor of agricultural and applied economics, said pressures come from both the demand side and supply side of world economies.
As some UW-Madison students frantically search for summer internships with national companies, others already represent some brands through a unique, peer-to-peer advertising agency.
Spending in Ohio was more than three times greater than in Wisconsin, according to a report released Wednesday by University of Wisconsin Advertising Project.
The rush to produce corn-based ethanol as an alternative to oil will likely worsen pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and substantially expand a summertime “dead zone” that kills fish and other aquatic life every year, researchers say.
A study by Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia modeled the effects of biofuel production on nutrient pollution in an aquatic system.
Three strikes, and you ‘re out.
That baseball truism should be ringing in the ears of the folks from California who are trying to challenge UW-Madison ‘s stem-cell patents.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office upheld the two remaining embryonic stem-cell patents in support of UW-Madison researcher James Thomson Tuesday that were challenged in April 2007.
At a recent open forum soliciting input on the design of the new Union South, one of the architects posed a seemingly simple question: â??What makes a place uniquely Wisconsin?â? Initially, I thought it would be an easy question to answer.
Law, business and engineering professors hold the highest paid positions at most universities around the country, according to a recent survey of college professorsâ?? salaries.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office officially upheld Tuesday the two remaining patents on stem cell technology held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation that had been challenged by two watchdog groups.
Two local arts organizations — one that performs classical music and the other that exhibits fine art — find themselves about to expand their reach to national and international audiences.
The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, conducted by its musical director Andrew Sewell, has just released its third CD, which is its first recording to have a national and international distributor, the New York-based company VAI Records. The two-CD set features three early Mozart piano concertos — Nos. 6, 8 and 9 (“Jeunehomme”), called the “Salzburg Concertos” and composed in 1776, done with prize-winning soloist Adam Neiman — and the Symphony No. 38 “Prague” (1787). The recording was made in the Capitol Theater of the Overture Center, the WCO’s home venue, and was engineered by Madison-based Audio for the Arts.
The University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, in turn, has found itself the object of attention from two international art publishers that have expressed continuing interest in the museum’s world-class collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century colorful Japanese “ukiyo-e” (pictures of the floating world) woodblock prints.
Madison — internationally known for stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin — will host a World Stem Cell Summit in September aimed at bringing together top researchers, advocates, investors and others to advance stem cell research and promising technologies that could save lives.
“Embryonic stem cell research holds the potential to cure some of the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases — from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s to multiple sclerosis,” said Gov. Jim Doyle when announcing the summit at a State Capitol press conference this morning. “Stem cell research represents the promise to not only save lives, but to create economic opportunity for innovation and job growth as well.”
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation said Tuesday the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected challenges to its two key embryonic stem cell patents.
The federal government has upheld two more UW-Madison stem-cell patents, meaning all three patents under contention can stand.
But expected appeals on one of the patents could linger for years. And the government review caused the university to narrow some patent claims and loosen its licensing policies, the patent challengers say.
The federal government has upheld two more UW-Madison stem-cell patents, meaning all three such patents under contention can stand.
Expected appeals could linger for months or years, however, and the government review led the university to make a few changes to some patent claims.
These days, Russell Panczenko is a man on a mission who goes armed with both good and bad news.
The good news is that the membership of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art has a renewal rate of about 55 percent.
“That’s very high by any standard,” says Panczenko, the museum director, citing national statistics.
The bad news, however, is that the total number of museum members — about 1,200 — has remained at a plateau for the past dozen years or so, he adds.
There finally may be some light at the end of the tunnel for Charter Communications and the Big Ten Network. But if there is, it’s still dim, said Barry Orton, a UW-Madison professor of telecommunications who closely follows cable issues.
BTN appears poised to land a carriage deal with Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal reported Monday.
….Such a deal could provide a framework for a deal between BTN and Charter and Time Warner, Wisconsin’s two major cable providers, Orton said.
A longtime minority construction company in Madison is going out of business. But the result is likely to be more projects, and bigger ones, for the owner and his crews.
Brian A. Mitchell Construction, 403 Troy Drive, is selling its ironworking tools and will close this summer when the company’s last job is completed. Mitchell is a UW-Madison graduate of civil engineering.
University Research Park in Madison announced Friday that it has published “The First Fifteen Years: 1984-1999” a retrospective about the award-winning research park.
The non-profit research and technology park was established in 1984 and now is home to more than 114 companies that employ more than 4,000 people. Many of the companies are the result of research done at UW-Madison. It contributes more than $680 million each year to the state’s economy.
Madison’s new economic development plan should be required reading for city officials.
It provides good recommendations and strategies for improving Madison ‘s economy, most of which are already underway but need follow-through.
The plan promotes job creation and growth. It emphasizes strong public-private partnerships. It seeks skilled, business-savvy leaders and employees to be effective champions for the city and region.
The company ‘s Wisconsin projects include the $12 million Institute for Influenza Viral Research under construction on the UW-Madison campus and a Kettle Foods manufacturing plant, completed last August in Beloit.
Pharmaceutical giant Roche has tapped University of Wisconsin researcher James Thomson to use heart cells derived from human embryonic stem cells to test new compounds that affect the human heart.
The head of the state’s 13 two-year colleges told the UW System Board of Regents Thursday that those institutions should be able to provide a type of bachelor’s degree for place-bound or under-served students.
The University of Wisconsin Colleges are open admissions institutions that provide an access point for higher education for much of the state, said David Wilson, chancellor of the UW Colleges and UW-Extension.
But the colleges could do more to help fill the state’s needs for college graduates to build Wisconsin’s economy, he said.
A company formed by UW-Madison stem cell pioneer Jamie Thomson today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Roche Palo Alto, one of pharmaceutical giant Roche’s five research facilities, to test candidate drug compounds for cardiotoxicity, or damage to heart tissue.
Under the agreement, Roche will supply Madison-based Cellular Dynamics International Inc. with two sets of 25 well-characterized drug compounds to validate CDI’s current toxicology products and services.
The list of who’s who in the movement for social justice continues at the YWCA of Madison, which announced today the five honorees of its 2008 Women of Distinction awards.
….The YWCA will honor the award recipients at its 34th annual Women of Distinction luncheon May 29 at the Concourse Hotel, 1 W. Dayton St.
Among the honorees is Cheryl Rosen Weston, CEO of Douglas Stewart Co. and a University of Wisconsin Law School professor. She’s also an attorney with Cullen, Weston, Pines & Bach and is a longtime board member and former president of Jewish Social Services of Madison. She is an alumna of the Law School.
LAKE GENEVA — Stem cell researcher Jamie Thomson, conservationist Aldo Leopold, flamboyant Liberace. Visionary architecture, below-zero tailgating, cheese curds that squeak. House on the Rock, Taliesin, Harley.
Wisconsin is a place where you can feel free to be yourself and express yourself. This is the conclusion of a five-month branding project undertaken by the state Department of Tourism and announced Tuesday night by Gov. Jim Doyle at the annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism.
Wisconsin Union administration sent an e-mail to its student staff Tuesday, announcing plans to host listening sessions for employees in response to a letter written last week that voiced complaints about Union management.
The Wisconsin Union will hold a series of forums in the coming weeks to hear student employeesâ?? concerns with management and operations in the facilities, officials announced Tuesday.
After a year without a key leader in place, North Milwaukee State Bank has hired a chief executive who wants to help the bank get more deeply involved in small-business lending and urban economic development.
In Erbert Johnson, who spent the past decade in Cleveland working in public finance and banking, North Milwaukee also found a local guy who has returned to the community wanting to do some good. Johnson majored in aacounting at UW-Madison.
A new proposal in the state Assembly would require all cheese served in University of Wisconsin System campuses to come exclusively from Wisconsin cheese manufacturers.
Charter Communications lost nearly 3 percent of its cable TV subscribers in Madison during the fourth quarter — a period during which its numbers had been essentially steady in the previous three years, the city of Madison reported.
Charter cable TV subscribers in the city went from 57,156 last October to 55,559 last December, a decline of 2.7 percent. By contrast, the company posted slight increases in the same period in 2006 and 2005 and a slight decrease in 2004 (see accompanying chart).
The obvious difference last year compared to the prior three years was the Big Ten Network, which Charter does not have a deal to carry but competitors such as satellite providers DirecTV and DISH Network have been carrying since last summer.
The state Senate voted in favor of allowing the University of Wisconsin to construct an addition to the School of Veterinary Medicine late last week.
If the University of Wisconsin business school ever writes a case study about itself, the lesson may be that some things are more valuable unsold.
Condé Nast Portfolio reports that the school persuaded alumni to donate $85 million in exchange for a promise that it would not sell its name for the next 20 years.
Sometimes, a bird in the hand isn’t worth anywhere near two in the bush. In September, the University of Washington School of Business struck a $50 million deal with a family foundation to rebrand itself the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, honoring its largest donor. But as precious a commodity as a school’s name may be, it could prove far more valuable unsold.
In October, the University of Wisconsin School of Business announced that about a dozen alumni had donated a total of $85 million to keep it from selling its name for the next 20 years. In the months since, the value of the school’s name has already appreciated by about $2 million, according to the calculations of Dean Mike Knetter. It took Knetter two years of smooth talking to convince alumni that cash donations remained even more valuable without naming rights.
In your Feb. 21 article titled “Challenges remain for biotech,” The Capital Times reviewed an interesting talk given at the University of Wisconsin last week by Steve Burrill, a venture capitalist who has created a very successful business focused on biotechnology investments. In the talk, Burrill presented his viewpoints on the biotech industry as an investment.
As a biotechnology industry advocate, scientist, and entrepreneur of over 20 years and as a father to three children, I found the article and Steve’s talk too pessimistic and narrow in scope.
Three statewide organizations with far-reaching constituencies have mounted strategic initiatives that see Wisconsin’s economic challenges in clear terms and then raise the bar on where the state should be headed.
They are the University of Wisconsin System, Competitive Wisconsin and a new entity called Wisconsin Way.
A disputed stem-cell patent held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation was upheld Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent was one of three held by WARF under review.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office decided Thursday to uphold the terms of one of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundationâ??s three previously contested stem-cell patents.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office announced Thursday they upheld the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundationâ??s patent on human embryonic stem cell technology discovered by University of Wisconsin researcher James Thomson.
Countering a poll paid for by the cable industry, an NFL Network-affiliated group has paid for a survey that produced very different results on topics that include a legislative proposal that would create a neutral arbitration process to settle disputes between cable providers and channels such as NFL Network.
The survey of 500 likely Wisconsin voters shows that 65.8 percent of the respondents support and 21.8 percent oppose state legislation creating a neutral arbitration system that could be used to resolve the current programming dispute between cable companies and independent channels like the NFL Network.
Quoted: UW-Madison telecommunications professor Barry Orton
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has upheld one of the three disputed University of Wisconsin patents on a technique for isolating and maintaining embryonic stem cells. But the two groups that have challenged the patents say they will continue their efforts to overturn that patent, and the two other related ones.
