Wisconsin workers filled more jobs in 2006 but earned less than in 2005 and, for the first time since 1983, experienced more unemployment than the nation as a whole, according to a Labor Day statistical update released today.
The Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compiles data from various government agencies to offer “The State of Working Wisconsin” in even-numbered years and a less comprehensive update in odd-numbered years.
Once upon a time in America, when worker productivity rose, wages followed. Not any more, says Joel Rogers, who directs the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The typical worker today is doing what almost two workers did three decades ago, but is getting just a teeny bit more pay than what one worker got back then. Rogers is explaining why a good many people who toil for pay are singing the Labor Day blues.
On Wisconsin Avenue, leading to the Capitol, orange cones fill the street, signaling detours through the normal traffic pattern.
The recent State Journal story on ethanol should have read, “Are we too energy dependent?” The answer is yes. Wisconsin consumers paid $19 billion for energy in 2005 with at least $12 billion leaving the state, costing us 300,000 jobs.
The Big Ten Network has landed its biggest cable deal yet and reportedly on its terms.
Regional cable operator Insight Communications currently is the nation’s ninth-largest cable operator with 1.4 million households, but its deal with BTN covers just 640,000 households, with the most notable markets being Columbus, Ohio — home to Ohio State University — and Evansville, Ind., not far from Indiana University.
Dear Editor: As a former University of Wisconsin football player, I am looking forward to another great UW football season and being able to catch this year’s games on the new Big Ten Network.
This network is a welcome idea as it will further elevate the Badgers on a national platform to highlight all of the amazing research and developments that take place at the UW to a much wider audience.
The Big Ten Network is looking to be included on expanded basic cable in Wisconsin and the other Big Ten states. Some have called this network a niche network. They are wrong. The Big Ten Network is definitely not just for sports enthusiasts. This network has mass appeal and deserves to be included among the basic tier along with stations like HGTV, MTV, ESPN, the Travel Channel and others.
Together, the public schools of southeastern Wisconsin have a regional economic impact nearly as big as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to a report released Wednesday
Like a graduate earning a diploma and heading off to explore new worlds, UW spinoff Quintessence Biosciences is about to reach a major milestone and tackle a new frontier.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Big Ten Network officials say the new TV network won’t be available to Comcast Cable subscribers when it starts broadcasting Aug. 30.
The new network and the cable company have squabbled for months over where viewers would find BTN and how much it would cost them.
The network, co-owned by the Big Ten conference and Fox Cable Networks, wants to be a basic cable channel for Comcast subscribers, while Comcast wants BTN to be part of a sports-channels package that subscribers pay more to see. According to Comcast, the network also wants the cable company to pay it $1.10 per subscriber.
Yet another high-end, high-rise apartment building could be going up soon on the UW-Madison campus.
A local real estate group is proposing a 14-story, 169-unit apartment building at the corner of West Johnson and Mills streets.
The project at 1022 W. Johnson would require demolition of two older homes while also encompassing an existing surface parking lot. Parking — always an issue on campus — would be provided underground with space for mopeds, bicycles and 125 vehicles.
The class was part of this week ‘s Senior Management Seminar presented by the Graduate School of Banking at UW-Madison. The school, founded in 1945, is separate from the university.
Malicious, self-propagating worms and other lethal attacks are the stuff of Paul Barford’s daily existence.
Since the Web site-defacing Code Red worm in 2001 terrorized computers around the world, the University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant computer science professor has focused on finding ways to defeat such nemeses.
It wasn’t that long ago when few people embraced alternative medical practices such as chiropractic services, acupuncture and massage.
Today, such services, like many advanced traditional medical practices, are moving into the mainstream of pet care as more and more people pamper their pets — although medical care isn’t seen on the same plane as some other pampering practices.
Quoted: Dr. Sandi Sawchuk, School of Veterinary Medicine
The blood thinner warfarin, which this week became the first widely used drug to carry a label encouraging doctors to perform a genetic test on patients before prescribing it, was discovered at UW-Madison.
Here are the biggest projects in Madison that received building permits between July 11, 2006, and June 30, 2007:
The University Square project, in the 700 block of University Avenue, with two floors of shops, restaurants and other businesses; 420 parking stalls; a nine-story tower housing UW-Madison functions such as the bursar ‘s office, registrar and a student health center; and a 10-story tower with 359 apartments.
UW-Madison ‘s Interdisciplinary Research Complex, in the 750 block of Highland Avenue, whose $158 million first phase is being built. The eight-story tower will house the Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center and will unite experts in different medical specialties to work together on cancer research. Two floors of the second tower, also in the current phase, will house research animals.
If you are selling property now in a market bedeviled by huge inventories of homes and a credit crunch, you could do better if you dumped your real-estate agent.
With a wide range of flat-fee and Internet-based services, you may fare well on your own, yet it’s still important to know your options.
Researchers Aviv Nevo and Igal Hendel of Northwestern University, and Francois Ortalo-Magne of University of Wisconsin-Madison examined sales conducted from 1998 to December 2004 through the Web site
Dear Editor: As a huge Badgers fan and UW alumnus, I’m excited by the prospect of a new TV network that will deliver all the Big Ten sports I love. It would especially be great if those with only expanded basic cable could catch Big Ten action without having to pay extra to see it on premium channels. So I hope the Big Ten Network is allowed to be part of expanded basic cable.
Mike Gomoll, Sun Prairie
Letter to the editor: “I’ve seen all the hoopla surrounding the Big Ten Network and don’t understand why it’s such an issue. Many people, including UW-Madison alumni like me, want to see Badger games on Wisconsin television stations as part of basic cable. It’s a no brainer.”
Dear Editor: The Badgers are incredibly popular in Madison and throughout the entire state. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, regularly watch Badger games and keep up with their favorite local sports team.
Many of us loyal Badger fans are looking forward to the launch of the Big Ten Network on Aug. 30 and can’t wait to see the Badgers in action when they take on the Citadel on Sept. 15. I just hope that we’ll be able to watch this game on our television.
The plan to water down Madison’s downtown by limiting the number of liquor licenses in the central commercial district continues to get watered down.
After several members of the business community asked for further amendments to the Alcohol Beverage License Density Plan, as it is officially called, the Alcohol License Review Committee on Wednesday voted to loosen one of the proposal’s primary restrictions.
In one sense, the public stare-down between the soon-to-be-launched Big Ten Network and the nation’s cable television providers is reminiscent of the contract battles between the owners and players in professional sports.
It’s hard for the little guy to figure out which side to root for when billionaires are fighting millionaires over who gets a greater share of the pie.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana University and the human-powered Internet search engine ChaCha are partnering to create a one-stop virtual reference desk that connects students with an array of experts and other help.
They will debut a Web-based search platform this semester allowing students, faculty and others to look for information using a machine-based search that marks the results recommended by IU experts. Visitors who need help finding information or refining their search can chat online with an expert in real time.
Dear Editor: Stop the presses! The Capital Times has discovered that sports leagues are greedy. What a shocking revelation.
….The Capital Times has sat silently by for the last two years as both the NFL and the Big Ten attempt to squeeze even more money out of cable subscribers by establishing their own cable networks. Apparently ever-rising ticket prices and special seating fees aren’t enough to satisfy their ever-growing appetites.
….It makes good sense that the state should encourage new businesses to emerge from the wellspring of research and innovation that erupts from the university. A friend of mine left the university in the late 1990s, mortgaged all his family’s worldly assets and, with seven employees, started a medical products company that now has 500 employees and assets of $1.8 billion.
But what if the state had been unwilling to invest in the university infrastructure that supported his education and research all those years prior to his start-up? What if the sagebrush rebels that impoverished university systems all across the western United States had succeeded in crippling the University of Wisconsin’s budget such that his professors had left, his program was cut prematurely, or his research had not reached the necessary level of development?
Among the largest housing projects started during the past year, the emphasis — except for Capitol West condominiums ($37.6 million) — was on apartments and student housing, including Steve Brown ‘s Lucky apartments at University Square ($36.1 million), UW-Madison ‘s new Ogg Hall ($27.9 million), Parmenter Circle Apartments in Middleton ($15.9 million) the Pres House dormitory ($11.3 million) and Edgewood College ‘s Dominican Hall ($10.6 million).
When Mark J. Ready visited the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while working on his doctorate in finance during the last 1980s, he fell in love. Not with a woman. The New Jersey native was a happily married man with a young family back in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was attending Cornell University.
Instead, Ready fell in love with the market itself, with its ebbs and flows of information among a sea of humanity striving to make a profit at every turn.
That infatuation has defined the rest of his career, which in 1990 brought him to a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. On Wednesday, he will take over one of the gems of the school, the Stephen L. Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, becoming just the fourth director in the center’s 37-year history.
C56, which is a spinoff from the biotech firm Lucigen, is developing enzymes that can make ethanol production more efficient, whether corn-based ethanol or the next-generation version known as cellulosic ethanol.
The firm is one of the corporate partners collaborating with University of Wisconsin-Madison, which recently won $145 million in funding over three years to become one of three national biofuels research centers in the nation. The others are in California and Tennessee.
The architects of the Big Ten Network believe that men’s hockey and baseball provide significant programming opportunities, but pledge that will not affect the status of either sport at the University of Wisconsin.
That is, the Badgers will continue to skate in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association for the foreseeable future, and baseball will remain defunct.
(Article contains information on other sports as well.)
The Big Ten Network is offering an olive branch to Charter Communications and the other cable companies it’s negotiating with as its Aug. 30 launch nears. And Charter appears eager to sit down for peace talks.
Executives of the network and the conference are touring Big Ten markets, joining with representatives of member schools to put out a clear message to the cable companies: Agree to place us on a regular service like Charter’s Expanded Basic and we’ll work with you on other issues — even price.
If “not in my backyard” is a high priority goal in placing a proposed 345-kilovolt power line across Dane County, the Beltline route seemingly would win out, because it has far fewer residential backyards to run through than the route cutting across the southernmost tier of towns, according to power line builder American Transmission Company.
MADISON, Wis. — Two proposals for a new 345-kilovolt power transmission line through the Madison metro area will be forwarded to the Public Service Commission, but neither include an underground option.
American Transmission Co. announced on Wednesday that it won’t recommend one plan over the other to state regulators. The controversial Beltline proposal is included in the recommendation, but so is a southern Dane County route that would affect mostly rural areas.
….Critics of the Beltline route â?? including Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum officials and the state Transportation Department, which doesn’t want 345,000 volts of electricity pulsing above or below the heavily-used freeway — asked ATC to put the line underground.
The Beltline could be the backbone for American Transmission Company’s new 345-kilovolt transmission line, one of two route options being submitted in October to the state Public Service Commission.
Company officials announced their two route options, with two alternate variations to those base routes, at a press conference at company headquarters this afternoon.
“We need this to keep the lights on,” said Mark Williamson, ATC vice president of major projects. “Even with recent improvements, the transmission system is operating at near maximum capacity.”
MADISON â?? The overhaul of the patent system now working its way through Congress would hamper innovation, hurt inventors, crimp small biotech companies and cost the University of Wisconsin, the head of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) warned today.
â??If this law passes, there will be every incentive for people to infringe on patents and not license,â? said Carl Gulbrandsen, WARFâ??s managing director, speaking today at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon.
Echoing his childhood board game, “Clue”, the dispatcher’s voice was clear as cab driver Ramy Renor headed for the Karaoke Kid to pick up a fare about 1:30 Friday night.
“On State with a snake.”
“Too bad I can’t take that,” the 34-year-old, 6′ 1″ woman, who has been driving for Union Cab for seven and a half years, said. “I’ve never picked up a snake, but I did pick up ‘Whitesnake’ once,” she added.
When Beth Donley was an undergraduate, her plan was to one day run her own business.
Instead, she followed her mother â?? Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Pat Roggensack â?? into the legal field.
But after more than a decade representing the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation as chief counsel, Donley left WARF last year to found Stemina Biomarker Discovery with UW-Madison stem cell researcher Gabriela Cezar. Donley also served as executive director of WiCell, the stem cell offshoot of WARF.
A federal court ruling in Connecticut could slow AT&T’s expansion of its U-verse TV service to Madison and other Wisconsin communities, a UW-Madison professor of telecommunications says.
Quoted: Barry Orton
DES MOINES, Iowa – Big Ten officials will likely discuss expanding to 12 schools to accommodate the new Big Ten Network, commissioner Jim Delany said.
The network, which is scheduled to launch Aug. 30, would benefit from an additional big-name university in a large television market, Delany said.
“I think we need to look at it in the next year,” he told the Des Moines Register on Wednesday. He offered no specific candidates.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced the availability of $450,000 for 16 agricultural development projects ranging from renewable energy to specialty potatoes.
Included are $22,500 to the Horticulture Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, to research the economical feasibly of large-scale organic vegetable crop production, another $15,000 to the Horticulture Department to promote and develop specialty potatoes for the fresh market, and $22,500 to the West Madison Agricultural Research Station, Verona, to grow and test production methods for seedless table grapes for the fresh market.
Charter Communications will be adding ESPNU, ESPN2 HD, and several religious channels as part of a series of lineup changes that take effect Aug. 21.
“We’re just tremendously delighted to make the announcement,” said John Miller, Charter Central Division spokesman. “It’s a significant addition to add additional sports value to our lineup.”
The Big Ten Network is drawing fire on a new front. EchoStar Communications, parent of satellite TV provider DISH Network, has asked the Federal Communications Commission to declare the Big Ten Network a regional sports network, which would allow it to seek arbitration so that it can secure carriage of the service “on reasonable terms,” Multichannel.com reported.
EchoStar filed a 19-page petition with the FCC last Friday seeking expedited treatment regarding Big Ten Network, a joint venture that is 51 percent-owned by the Big Ten Conference and 49 percent-owned by Fox Cable, a unit of News Corp.
Third Wave Technologies stock zoomed up Tuesday on the strength of a court ruling seen as favorable to the Madison biotech company in its legal battle with Digene Corp., a Gaithersburg, Md., company about five times its size.
A Republican lawmaker is trying to use the power of the purse to eliminate academic programs he disagrees with philosophically and eliminate university administrators he feels are doing a poor job.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has recruited the chief economic development strategist from Mississippi State University with the goal of transforming UWM into a research-driven institution that can catalyze job creation in the Milwaukee region.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A problem with Duke University’s wireless network caused outages at the school, officials said Friday, exonerating the initial suspect, Apple Inc.’s new iPhone.
“A particular set of conditions made the Duke wireless network experience some minor and temporary disruptions in service,” Duke spokeswoman Tracy Futhey said in a written statement posted on the university’s Web site. “Those conditions involve our deployment of a very large Cisco-based wireless network that supports multiple network protocols.”
The other day on his Web site, waxingamerica.com, a tongue-in-cheek Paul Soglin suggested that we move the University of Wisconsin’s Camp Randall to Belmont, the little southwestern Wisconsin town that was the state’s first capital.
His remarks were aimed at the difficulty that architect Bob Sieger is having trying to get the city’s Plan Commission to let him construct a building at the corner of Regent and Monroe Streets, smack dab across the street from the Field House and football stadium.
Every spring during his academic career at UW-Madison, Ying Chan makes sure he is sitting at a table at the Memorial Union terrace on the warm day when the ice on Lake Mendota disappears for the season.
To him, the moment has grown to symbolize the strong connection in Wisconsin between everyday life and the natural world. “Wisconsin has a love affair going on with the environment,” Ying said.
For Lynn Allen-Hoffmann, watching the painstaking and painful process of applying precious grafts of his own skin to farmer Ted Fink’s horribly burned body at UW Hospital in 2000 was an epiphany.
It gave the UW-Madison skin researcher a mission: to create a company that would make skin available for grafts on burn victims and others, on demand.
Dairy science students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will see more wear and tear on the soles of their boots and less on the seats of their pants this school year, thanks to curriculum changes aimed to help students build their technical and analytical skills.
Dear Editor: I was shocked to read of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s concern about vendors needing to pay third-party fees to present their ideas and products to UW-Madison officials on energy efficiency.
The UW shouldn’t be constrained to sifting through every hare-brained idea in order to find the ones that make sense. The organizer of such an event performs a vital service. Taxpayers should applaud the UW for finding inexpensive ways to build a better and greener university.
Kyle Stiegert, Fitchburg
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Apple Inc.’s flashy new iPhones may be jamming parts of the wireless network at Duke University, where technology officials worked with the company Wednesday to fix problems before classes begin next month.
Bill Cannon, a Duke technology spokesman, said an analysis of traffic found that iPhones flooded parts of the campus’ wireless network with access requests, freezing parts of the system for 10 minutes at a time.
For a UW-Madison ophthalmology professor about to enter half-time retirement, his vision for the future is clear: a world rid of avoidable blindness within his lifetime.
“It can be done,” says Dr. Suresh Chandra, quietly confident in his mission even after more than two decades spent fighting an epidemic that has only grown.
Chandra in 1984 started the Combat Blindess Foundation in 1984, and has been treating hundreds of patients across the world.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison next week is hosting more than 1,100 attendees of an international turfgrass industry convention, symposium and trade show.
(MADISON) A California botox maker is coming to Wisconsin. The anti-wrinkle product was discovered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and thatâ??s one reason the Mentor Corporation chose to build a new plant here.
The late Ed Schantz was a UW-Madison researcher in 1946 when he discovered the toxin that paralyzes muscles. The University of Wisconsin still holds the botox patent and licenses it out to different companies. One of them is the Mentor Corporation based in Santa Barbara, California. It is building a large production facility at the University Research Park on Madisonâ??s west side.
Dear Editor: Jason McMahon’s recent column on the Big Ten Network was right on point: Commissioner Jim Delany needs to get real about charging Wisconsin fans millions of dollars to watch his new Big Ten Network — the second most expensive national cable channel in the country — which will air what sports columnists are now calling “fifth tier” sporting events such as nonconference tune-up football games and university swim meets.
In order to salvage the BTN into a profit-making venture, Delany says that he will try to migrate to his network many games from the ABC and ESPN networks, thus asking consumers to pay premium fees for many of the games they used to be able to see for free.
Wisconsin cannot afford to let a “not in my backyard” reaction to ethanol plants shut down the state’s effort to be in the forefront of biofuel development.
That is a lesson Wisconsin communities should learn from the feud that threatens to squelch plans to build an ethanol plant at Sparta.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is no stranger to attracting federal research funds, ranking eighth in the nation in 2006 among all universities.
Mentor Corp. began construction this week on a plant in Madison that will make remedies from the toxin that causes botulism, University Research Park officials said Wednesday.
Two key UW-Madison officials attended a conference at a New Mexico resort where vendors who paid large fees were promised one-on-one meetings with university, school and hospital officials who attended.
Vendors participating in the “Sustainable Operations Summit” in June each paid $18,500 to event organizer CraigMichaels Inc. for 15 one-on-one sales meetings with officials at the summit, or $25,500 if the vendor sent two representatives to each meet with 15 people, according to the event organizer.
The higher-ranking UW official who attended denied knowing about the fees, but Mike McCabe, executive director of the government watchdog group the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, said the practice appeared to be “a dire sign of the times. The university should resist a temptation to act the way people at the State Capitol act. That people can pay to get a higher degree of access to you is dead wrong.”
A budget proposal that rejects tax increases but that critics argued would be devastating for education and health care cleared the Assembly on a partisan vote Tuesday. Quotes Chancellor John Wiley’s criticism of the spending plan.
But angel tax credits work. They help the state’s smallest, newest companies, not multinationals that shouldn’t get assistance. It’s shortsighted not to expand what, frankly, was a fairly meager effort to begin with.
Angel investors are a key link in the chain of capital that pulls good ideas into the real world – good ideas like those being honed in that little corner of the airport in Racine.
