After a leading UW-Madison stem-cell researcher said Wisconsin needs to take serious steps to maintain leadership in the stem-cell field, many state dignitaries said the state funding is likely not feasible.
Gov. Jim Doyle faced a tremendous challenge as he prepared this year’s State of the State address. The stock market is on a roller-coaster ride that just about everyone thinks will end in some sort of crash. Each day brings new evidence that suggests the Bush-Cheney recession will be painful.
The key to the next big computer chip breakthrough could be tiny algae that encase themselves in intricately patterned, glass-like shells.
The unicellular algae, called diatoms, exist in oceans, lakes and even wet soil and build their hard cell walls by laying down microscopic lines of silica, a compound related to the key material of the semiconductor-industry silicon.
“If we can genetically control that process, we would have a whole new way of performing the nanofabrication used to make computer chips,” Michael Sussman, a UW-Madison biochemistry professor and director of the UW-Madison’s Biotechnology Center, said in a UW press release.
UW-Madison stem cell research leader James Thomson said Tuesday that Wisconsin would have to invest $50 million a year in stem cell research to compete with California’s $3 billion investment.
The result would be high-paying jobs for the state and continued recruitment of top scientific minds to the University of Wisconsin, he predicted.
When Gov. Jim Doyle delivers his annual State of the State speech tonight, he’ll receive the requisite applause and standing ovations from lawmakers as he lays out his vision for the coming year.
But once the applause dies down and the chambers empty, Doyle may face some tough sledding in the remaining few months before lawmakers adjourn for the year and head for the campaign trail.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation entered a licensing agreement in early January with a biotech company to commercialize stem cell technology created at the University of Wisconsin.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — University of Wisconsin-Madison leaders are urging students to make sure their smoke detectors are working after two recent off-campus fires.
The university is handing out nearly 2,000 9-volt batteries at the student union Tuesday to students who live in houses and apartments.
Four companies raised nearly three-quarters of the state’s venture capital in 2007 – Virent Energy Systems Inc., NimbleGen Systems Inc., Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals Inc. and OpGen Inc. All are based on technologies developed at UW-Madison.
UW-Madison may be able to get the new dorm it wants without waiting for Legislative approval to get the process rolling.
As the university looks for ways to revive its bid for additional on-campus student housing, one possible option is a lease/purchase plan, according to UW System assistant vice president David Miller.
You have to look past all the cement and glass, the red seats, the wide concourses and the funky artwork on the walls to learn why the Kohl Center has been such a great home for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team.
From child care to health care, this year’s ATHENA Award nominees represent a variety of careers and interests. Clinical social workers are included in the mix, along with lawyers, educators and businesswomen.
(Among the nominees: Sue Morschhauser, program manager, Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
Older livestock farmers remember the days when most rural towns had a veterinarian.
….Old “Doc” has long ago retired from the rural scene, but animal care is still number one in most dairy farmers’ minds. There are concerns that food animal veterinarians will be in short supply in coming years — currently 30 percent of the graduating class at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine has expressed interest in food animal-large animal practice.
What started as a T-shirt slogan has become a lifestyle brand touting all things Wisconsin.
Sconnie Nation recently opened a retail location in conjunction with custom printer Underground Printing. In addition, it licensed its trademark Sconnie brand to a separate company offering road trip packages.
What has resulted is a network of enterprises created by students, primarily for students.
NEW YORK (AP) — Privacy concerns stemming from online shopping rose in 2007, a new study finds, as the loss or theft of credit card information and other personal data soared to unprecedented levels.
….The study, to be released Thursday, comes as privacy and security groups report that an increasing number of personal records are being compromised because of data breaches at online retailers, banks, government agencies and corporations.
People are finding more reasons to dance.
After watching athletes and entertainers learn steps on television, more adults have taken up ballroom dancing.
….Ballroom dance has been a mainstay at Wisconsin Union Mini Courses for 30 years, according to program director Jay Ekleberry.
The federal government wants more specifics built into a proposed settlement between the Sierra Club and the state intended to clean up emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the UW-Madison campus.
When Plymouth schools Superintendent Paul Brandl was retiring, he looked into warm Florida or Arizona like his friends had, but he decided on Madison instead. His major objective was to live within walking distance of the Kohl Center.
Dear Editor: It is time to speak up and support Charter Communications in its dispute with the Big Ten Network. It must be very disappointing for Bo Ryan to recruit a team and field it, to be viewed by only about 10 percent of the TV viewers.
Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle and Tom Pomplun know the score: Traditional print media are losing readers. Maybe their graphic novels — essentially bulked-up versions of “comic books” — are the answer.
The three are producing books that might make a difference by not just racking up sheer sales numbers but by communicating graphically in funny, stylish and meaningful ways.
….”Madison Strike Riot” dramatizes the protests SDS joined in 1967 at a University of Wisconsin building where Dow Chemical was recruiting potential employees. Dow produced napalm for Air Force use in Vietnam, and the book vividly depicts administrators and police smashing a peaceful sit-in. The notorious 1970 bombing of the UW’s Sterling Hall involved no members of SDS, which had disbanded a year earlier.
Three educational institutions will make more than $100 million in the next 30 years by selling frequencies that can be converted to wireless broadband.
UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools and Milwaukee Area Technical College will lease a dozen channels of educational broadband Clearwire. Each will get $4.2 million initially and monthly payments of $55,000 that increase annually.
Dear Editor: Please don’t let this Big Ten Network fiasco be swept under some rug.
I have no problem with the NFL Network. That’s professional sports and, of course, all about money.
But Chancellor John Wiley and his highness Barry Alvarez really sold out to the greed of the athletic department with its luxury boxes and ridiculous ticket pricing, with a pittance going to UW-Madison programs.
The results are not surprising, said Morris Davis, assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics at the UW-Madison School of Business.
“There’s no reason to expect that what’s going on in Madison would be any different from what’s going on around the country,” Davis said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and a host of other colleges are considering saving money by switching student e-mail service to free, professional services like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.
More than 1,000 colleges have already signed up with such companies, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
But UW-Madison and UW System officials are carefully reviewing the pros and cons of outsourcing e-mail, according to Brian Rust, communications manager for the Division of Information Technology at the UW, and David Giroux, a spokesman for the UW System.
A California company hopes to use stem cell technology developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to make new medical and research products.
BioTime, Inc. has signed a licensing agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to use 173 patents and patent applications covering human embryonic stem cell technology.
The patents cover some of the work of UW-Madison scientist James Thomson.
Monona businessman and campus landlord Richard Fritz is proposing a six-story, 36-unit student apartment building at 125 N. Randall Ave.
Located across from the Camp Randall greenspace, the site currently has four rental homes owned by Fritz. Plans call for razing those buildings and replacing them with new construction.
The project is before the City Urban Design Commission tonight for its first public review but developers acknowledge there are issues yet to be resolved. The major hangup is whether the project would conform to the city’s new Regent Street/South Campus Master Plan. That plan, awaiting final approval of the City Council, calls for stepping back the upper floors of new buildings to make them appear less dense.
Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration said today the state is still negotiating to bring a new film starring actor Johnny Depp to Wisconsin.
Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton had planned to announce this morning that NBC Universal had committed to Wisconsin as the scene for parts of “Public Enemies,” with Depp playing Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger. Earlier news accounts today said parts of the film would definitely be shot here, but the announcement was canceled at the last minute.
Doyle’s spokesman Matt Canter said the state Department of Commerce was still working out final details of an incentive package with the company.
(The film will be directed by UW-Madison alumnus Michael Mann, who also wrote the screenplay.)
Trophic Solutions, a Madison company whose product extends the storage life of organs slated for transplant, has signed a licensing deal with CryoLife, a Georgia company that processes human tissue for transplants.
“We believe that they are the perfect partner for developing products based on our patent, and we are very excited to announce this relationship,” said UW-Madison professor of veterinary medicine Jonathan McAnulty. He invented the preservation fluid along with UW-Madison vet school professor Christopher Murphy and Texas Tech University chemistry professor Ted Reid.
Actor Johnny Depp, the biggest moneymaker for theaters the past two years, will soon be in Wisconsin portraying Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, Gov. Jim Doyle said today, confirming a new film will have major parts shot in the state.
Doyle said NBC Universal committed to Wisconsin as the scene for parts of “Public Enemies,” with Depp playing the robber whose Midwest crime spree ended when FBI agents shot him to death in Chicago in July 1934.
It’s the first major production to come to Wisconsin since new tax incentives for the film industry took effect Jan. 1.
(UW alumnus Michael Mann wrote the screenplay and will direct the film.)
Cellectar, a UW-Madison spinoff company developing products that light up cancerous tumors and shrink them, is getting a big financial boost.
When he was a high-ranking executive at GE Healthcare, Dr. Bill Clarke heard a lot of pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs.
It became fairly routine, and he wasn’t expecting anything extraordinary when he came to hear UW-Madison Prof. Jamey Weichert detail Cellectar, a local firm he founded to develop his cancer fighting compounds.
“I was going to give Jamey an hour and four hours later I walked out and I thought, ‘This is really good,’ ” Clarke said in a phone interview.
Morris Davis, economist in the department of real estate and urban-land economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and until 2006 a staff economist at the Fed, is one of the authors of a study that finds homes overvalued compared to rents. He addressed questions about the study in this article.
Let me start by providing some other background information on why the rent-price ratio for housing â?? which is like the dividend yield for housing as an asset â?? is a useful metric. (Subscription required.)
In a world without uncertainty and with constant growth, the dividend yield of an asset has the simple expression of r-g, where r is the discount rate on future dividends and g is the growth rate of dividends. Thus, if the dividend yield falls, either the discount rate r has fallen or the expected growth rate of dividends g has increased or both.
Quoted: UW-Madison School of Business professor Jim Seward.
U.S. house prices “likely would have to fall considerably” to return to a normal relationship with rents, says a study by one former and two current Federal Reserve economists.
The U.S. study is by Morris Davis, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and until 2006 a staff economist at the Fed; and Andreas Lehnert and Robert F. Martin, staff economists at the Fed.
MILWAUKEE — Diane Grezenski grew up a city girl but is now one of a growing number of women playing significant roles in agriculture.
She and her husband of 21 years operate a dairy farm outside of Stevens Point, and she has taken on more and more of the farm work over the years.
Journal Sentinel story on the biggest business stories of the year mentions the stem cell breakthrough, the Morgridges’ $175 million gift for college scholarships and the $85 million gift to the Wisconsin School of Business.
Close collaboration between business, labor, education and government is a must to ensure that the public’s money is spent prudently.
For the early morning regulars at Rennebohm ‘s on University Avenue, the smell of coffee, eggs and sausage has been just a pleasant memory since 1981, when UW-Madison bought the building and turned it into offices.
Now it ‘s time for the building itself to go.
How many times have you had to wait 45 minutes at the doctor’s office because he or she was called to the hospital for an emergency?
And have you been awakened early in the morning at a hospital because a doctor is making rounds before heading off to the clinic for appointments?
Both of those possibilities have lessened because of a new physician type — the “hospitalist.”
Wisconsin policymakers ought to confront the following question with a new sense of urgency:
How will the state ‘s economy generate the high-paying jobs to keep the next generation prosperous?
Gov. Jim Doyle’s signing of the state cable franchising bill isn’t likely to mean AT&T — a leading backer of the bill — will bring its U-verse TV service to the Madison area anytime soon, one prominent observer said.
“I don’t see it in Madison in any widespread way in 2008,” said Barry Orton, a UW-Madison professor of telecommunications who has advised many communities in their dealings with cable companies.
Orton noted that AT&T has been reducing its rollout projections for U-verse in recent announcements.
UW-Madison telecommunications professor Barry Orton says the changes will help a little, but basically take a very bad bill and improve it a little.
All of you frustrated sports fans out there have friends at the Capitol. More than a dozen lawmakers are sponsoring a bill that tries to end the stalemate between large cable companies and the Big Ten and NFL networks. Similar bills have been introduced in about a half dozen other states.
Interests on both sides of the debate on why the Big Ten and NFL networks aren’t on several cable TV networks comes to the Capitol. Representative from networks, the NFL, UW-Madison, and the cable industry were on hand for a legislative hearing at the Capitol Thursday, on a bill that would create an arbitration process for disputes between video providers and networks.
Some have questioned how the Big Ten Network is able to pay millions of dollars to all of the universities without support from major cable companies.
Wisconsinites want the government to stay out of the ongoing dispute between cable companies and the NFL Network.
That’s according to a new poll paid for by the cable industry, which found that 85 percent of Wisconsin adults who pay for video service from a cable or satellite company don’t want government involvement in the dispute, with 72 percent feeling strongly for this position and just 12 percent disagreeing.
Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said he thinks that network’s conflict with cable providers can be resolved without arbitration, as a bill proposed in the Wisconsin Legislature would provide. But negotiations with the country’s largest cable providers have been “going no place,” Delany said Thursday before a hearing on the arbitration bill.
The Wisconsin proposal, versions of which are being considered in Illinois, Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Indiana, would establish an arbitration system to settle disputes between the sports networks and cable companies.
Opponents, including the cable industry, argue the state should not interfere with negotiations in a free market and say doing so may be unconstitutional.
“I urge you to not undercut our ability to continue to negotiate with cable programmers such as the NFL and Big Ten networks,” said Tom Moore, executive director of the Wisconsin Cable Communications Association in prepared testimony.
Collins is a graduate of the Graduate School of Banking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The bill aimed at getting more Packers and Badgers games on cable television would set a bad precedent for government meddling in the free market.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Both sides of the ongoing conflict between cable providers and the NFL and Big Ten networks will line up Thursday at a public hearing on a proposal designed to resolve the dispute. But similar proposed resolutions in other states haven’t gotten past the line of scrimmage.
Wisconsin and a handful of other states think that leading both sides to arbitration is the way to solve a dispute that has left fans across the country angry and confused when key games on the networks are not carried by major cable companies.
It turns out that the Jan. 4 Wisconsin game against Colorado College won’t be televised by the Big Ten Network. That was scheduled to be the network’s first hockey game of the new year and the first of eight broadcasts in the second half of the season. Now, the BTN schedule shows only four games.
A Big Ten Network spokesperson said the games were removed from the schedule because of logistical issues with production trucks and equipment being needed at other televised events.
Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals â?? the company formed by UW-Madison vitamin D expert Hector DeLuca to bring 2-MD, a bone-building drug, to market â?? is plunging ahead with two new drug compounds, thanks to a hefty infusion of cash.
Madison-based Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Monday that it has raised $12 million in a second financing round led by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
If you’re a “Wisconsin sports fan” who recently received an online survey “to learn more about opinions surrounding cable and satellite coverage of Wisconsin sports,” the entity behind it was the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
In the last four years, local Sierra Club attorney Bruce Nilles has stopped 58 coal-fired plants from being built in the United States. As a result of his work, energy companies have abandoned their plans, fearing going through the permitting process of getting a new coal plant built.
Gumseng restaurant, an Asian American restaurant located at 1314 W. Johnson St., will close its doors for good Dec. 21 as plans begin for the major renovation of Union South, which will begin in 2009.
We can all agree that Wisconsin is a great place to live, work and raise a family. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t be here.
We would also agree Wisconsin and Minnesota have many similarities. Both states have a similar climate, and roughly the same population. The residents of both states also have a strong Midwestern work ethic.
But Minnesota outperforms Wisconsin in a few key areas.
With the fall semester winding down, room cleaning probably isn’t high on the agenda of most UW-Madison students. But some residents of Chadbourne Residential College weren’t given an option over the weekend.
A broken radiator coil in a seventh-floor dorm room Saturday morning led to partial flooding all the way down to the west wing’s main level, forcing dozens of students to scoop up belongings and temporarily evacuate their rooms.
Third Wave Technologies, 502 S. Rosa Road, has secured a five-year, $25 million line of credit with Deerfield Management, a health-care investment fund based in New York.
Dear Editor: The granting of an alcohol license to the proposed Field Pass restaurant and bar frustrates the effort to control alcohol consumption downtown.
The Field House will be sited in a complex that includes student housing, and across the street from the southeast dorm complex. I couldn’t think of a worse location. Alcohol establishments should not be placed in the middle of student housing.
Thirteen nano-level university laboratories across the country are hiring themselves out to businesses eager to make their mark in the millennium of the minuscule. The intimidatingly named National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, begun in 2004, is funded in part with $14 million a year from the National Science Foundation.
Participating business owners say the network allows them to do much more research than they would have without access to its resources. That research, to which the businesses retain all rights, will foster better products and industrial processes that will bolster the national economy, they say.
