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.
A new Mark is about to be stamped on the Applied Security Analysis Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
Mark Fedenia is stepping down after 21 years at the helm of the nationally known program that has graduate students managing a portfolio of more than $44 million in university money.
Patrick Genn is bullish on Wisconsin’s new economy. And he’s putting money where his mouth is.
As managing director of the Middleton-based Continuum Investment Partners, Genn has been working the past two years connecting local “angel” investors with new companies in need of working capital.
In years past, the kinds of partisan differences we’re seeing in this year’s state budget debate would be resolved by spending.
Money would be found somewhere to pay for what both sides wanted most and compromise would be reached. That can’t happen in this budget. There’s no money. Hence, what is shaping up to be a bitter battle over health care.
The state Supreme Court decided today that the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority is a “political corporation” with a cap on malpractice damages far smaller than the one for other hospitals and with a much smaller window of time in which to file suit against it.
BrainReactions provides teams of trained, Generation Y idea-makers who are professionals in structured brainstorming sessions that on average provide 700 ideas per two-hour session, or an idea every 15 seconds.
The company, which is self-financed and currently running off its earnings, employs 10 people and names Bank of America, BMW and the U.S. Peace Corps as clients. The company was founded in 2004 by Anand Chhatpar, himself of Generation Y, who started the company in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dear Editor: In this day and age, you can pretty much watch anything on cable TV. We have a seemingly endless menu of generic national programming from outdoor and food channels to old movies, home repair, and ESPN for national sports.
But where does the average dyed-in-the-wool, Bucky-red Badger fan go for all his or her games? Sure we’ve had limited public TV coverage, but what about a dedicated Big Ten channel on cable? Seriously, is that so much to ask?
A conservative Milwaukee-based “free market” think tank recommended today that the UW-Madison should be broken off from the University of Wisconsin System, which should also be reorganized to create clearer lines of management authority.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute says that in the 35 years since the former University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin State University systems were merged, the result has become “an outdated, inefficient management structure.”
To better monitor state subsidies to corporations, a UW-Madison think tank is calling for a searchable database to track whether those monies actually benefit 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.
Some high-profile scientists have jumped into the fight over the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s stem cell patents, supporting the effort to have them revoked.
The California-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and others are challenging patents that cover discoveries by UW researcher Jamie Thomson, who was the first to grow and isolate human embryonic stem cells in 1998….Competing scientists have jumped into the fray.
Five downtown and campus bars are being slapped with suspensions and fines tonight by the Madison City Council, a sobering reminder to all bars that if youth is served, penalties will follow.
Underaged drinking is the primary reason for the actions against Bull Feathers, 303 N. Henry St.; Kollege Klub, 529 N. Lake St.; Church Key Pub and Grill, 626 University Ave.; City Bar, 636 State St. and the Orpheum Theatre’s lobby bar, 216 State St., for incidents dating back to 2005 and 2006.
Challengers to UW-Madison’s stem-cell patents have enlisted some high-profile scientists to argue that the federal government’s preliminary rejection of the patents should be upheld.
Doug Melton, a co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said in a declaration released Monday that UW-Madison scientist James Thomson achieved his stem-cell discoveries in 1998 because of his access to money and materials, not because of ground-breaking science.
The two foundations questioning the validity of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s key embryonic stem cell patents have bolstered their protest with comments from three more scientists.
The comments were filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the groups said Monday. Douglas Melton and Chad Cowan of Harvard University and Alan Trounson of Monash University in Australia joined Jeanne Loring of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in filing declarations supporting the foundations’ efforts to get the patents overturned.
Madison is one fast city. So says Fast Company magazine in its article examining worldwide centers that offer the best in economic innovation and opportunity. Madison is named a Startup Hub in the listing of Fast Cities 2007.
….According to the magazine, “Fast Cities” are considered worldwide centers of creativity where the most important ideas and organizations of the future are located. They attract the best and brightest. They are great places to work and live.
The main reason Madison was chosen for the ranking, to be published in the magazine’s July-August issue, is research and development spending. The article reports that the University of Wisconsin-Madison spends more in research and development than Stanford, MIT or Harvard.
In retail terms, a “loss leader” is merchandise sold below cost in order to increase store traffic and sales of other items on shelves.
A store owner might lose a few bucks selling one heavily discounted gadget, but make up for it handsomely through other sales.
Wisconsin’s high-tech loss leader these days are human embryonic stem cells. No one is making much money – yet – on sales of stem-cell licenses or products, but the state’s highly advertised expertise in the technology is forcing others to look at what else is inside the store.
Drug technology being developed by local biotech start-up Centrose has received favorable coverage in the prestigious journal Nature.
Centrose is developing technology to combat the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as well as anti-cancer compounds.
….A study of the issue led by Centrose co-founder and UW-Madison Professor Jon Thorson was published last week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
At the core of the public spat between the Big Ten Network and the Comcast behemoth was a seemingly innocuous comment — “Indiana basketball fans don’t want to watch Iowa volleyball” — that prompted Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany to get defensive.
In picking a fight with Comcast, the largest cable provider in the country (24 milllion-plus subscribers as of December 2006), Delany may have violated the No. 1 Rule of Confrontation: Don’t pick a fight you can’t win.
The Majestic Theatre was sold today, with the new owners confident they can transform the King Street site into a nationally known live music venue.
A small investment group from outside Wisconsin paid $1.35 million for the historic vaudeville theater at 115 King St., a price that includes the building and equipment left from its previous life as a dance club featuring hip-hop DJs.
“This is going to be an entirely different operation. It’s not going to be $12 all you can drink,” said Matt Gerding, a native of Kansas City who spent the past three years working in Los Angeles, booking acts into Midwest clubs, including Madison’s High Noon Saloon, the Annex and the former Luther’s Blues.
The UW-Madison plans to build a $100 million research facility to house a federally funded bioenergy research center that it will head.
….The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will focus on basic research toward new technologies to convert cellulose in nonedible plants into energy as a way of increasing U.S. energy independence.
Funding of the facility will be a state and university effort.
Gov. Jim Doyle committed $50 million in state funds for the facility Tuesday, but that funding will have to be approved by the state Legislature. The UW hopes to raise the other $50 million with gifts, grants and company investments, according to Al Fish, associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and management at the UW-Madison.
UW-Madison will build a $100 million facility to support a new federal research center for developing alternative fuel sources, with half of the money coming from state taxpayers, officials said Tuesday.
The school will also spend another $4 million to hire eight faculty members affiliated with the center.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and its partners have been selected as one of three consortiums nationally that will receive $125 million each in federal funds to find new ways to turn plants into energy.
UW-Madison will be the site of one of three bioenergy research centers designed to find new ways to turn plants into fuel, officials said Monday.
The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center on UW-Madison’s campus, along with centers in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and near Berkeley, Calif., were described by the Department of Energy as three startup companies with $125 million each in capital, said two officials with knowledge of the grants, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official announcement had not yet been made. They will involve numerous universities, national laboratories and private companies as partners.
The booming popularity of Web sites offering rock-bottom airfares, along with the plethora of Internet travel resources and do-it-yourself guidebooks, have drawn many students away from traditional travel agencies.
But despite this trend, a local branch of a world-wide agency continues to flourish at the University of Wisconsin campus.
Jim Delany is a smart guy. He’s got a law degree and has spent nearly 30 years as a collegiate conference commissioner, the last 18 as the Big Ten’s head honcho. He has presided over a number of advancements in collegiate athletics over that time, from the addition of Penn State to the league in 1991, to the establishment of a conference hoops tournament and the advent of instant replay in football.
But even smart guys can lose their wits from time to time, especially when they get their dander up. Such was the case with Delany on Thursday, when he used a conference call with reporters regarding the fledgling Big Ten Network to take a giant cable outfit to task for perceived slights against the Big Ten.
With action heating up in Congress on the biggest overhaul of patent laws in half a century, universities are joining the chorus of companies and organizations pushing for changes in the proposed legislation. And, separately, the presidents of the Big Ten universities are adding their voices to the choir.
Without some adjustments, the institutions and companies argue, the new laws will undermine the value of patents and “hinder innovation across the diverse sectors of the American economy we represent.” One issue that unites universities and industry is their concern over a proposal to establish a new system for challenging patents after they are granted. Universities and companies say they fear such a system, as now designed in the legislation, would allow third parties to “harass the patent holder” and create too much uncertainty about the value of an issued patent.
Mike Wilkinson, the former Badger basketball star now playing professionally in Greece, was back in Madison this week and did something he did all the while he was in school.
Wilkinson got a haircut from Don Fine at the College Barber Shop at the campus end of State Street.
Fine, 77, has been cutting hair in the shop since 1953, and he isn’t stopping anytime soon, but come next month, there will be a difference.
Local companies that haven’t even formed yet could be among the biggest beneficiaries of the startling financial success of two local high-tech companies in the past two months, experts say.
TomoTherapy, which makes targeted radiation systems for cancer treatment, last month enjoyed a $223 million initial public offering of stock, while gene chip maker NimbleGen Systems this week passed on the IPO it had filed for in favor of a $272.5 million acquisition by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG.
….Years ago, TomoTherapy and NimbleGen were merely ideas in the brains of talented UW-Madison researchers. Developing such ideas into products and, ultimately, profitable companies requires funding — typically large amounts of funding.
Dan Chavas and Eli Persky just want to chew the fat, not ban it.
The two UW-Madison grads on Wednesday unveiled an awards system that seeks to “start a dialogue” about trans fat, not outlaw it as other cities, like Philadelphia, have done. The “Low Trans Fat Awards” honor local restaurants that serve a no or low trans fat menu.
The University of Wisconsin football team will play its first game on the Big Ten Network on Sept. 15 when the Badgers host The Citadel at Camp Randall Stadium at 11 a.m.
The Big Ten Network, which will debut in August, is currently available only in Madison only on some satellite services. Negotiations with Charter Communications, the primary cable provider in the Madison market, are ongoing.
….This remains the great state University of Wisconsin, not some rinky-dink outfit on the Internet. We have standards and a great history. Are we willing to drop “the great state university” moniker and just call the UW “a university with state and corporate support”?
Maybe U.S. Bank could help with admissions. Those with their bank card oh, let’s not go there.
Entering into contracts that harm students but profit the university without transparency and open bidding is an outrage….
NimbleGen Systems has hit its home run.
Spun out of UW-Madison research, it was announced Tuesday that the DNA microarray company will be purchased by Roche, of Basel, Switzerland, one of the world’s giant drug and diagnostics companies, for $272.5 million.
NimbleGen incorporated in 1999 after being spun out of technology developed by four researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and after a license agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
MADISON, Wisconsin: Gene-chip maker NimbleGen Systems Inc. said Tuesday it will be bought out by pharmaceutical giant Roche in a deal worth $272.5 million (â?¬203.3 million).
Madison, Wis.-based NimbleGen announced in March it would file for public offering and had hoped to raise $75 million (â?¬56 million). But the company remained private and will be sold in its entirety to Roche, it announced in a news release.
Additional delays are likely as criticism mounts on a plan, in the works since last fall, to freeze the number of bars in downtown Madison.
The city’s Alcohol License Review Committee was to consider the proposal, known as the Alcohol Beverage License Density Plan, at its meeting Wednesday night.
But council President Mike Verveer, one of the sponsors of the ordinance, now predicts that, due to proposed changes and concerns, the committee won’t take action on it until July.
Madison-based gene chip maker NimbleGen Systems, which in March filed for an initial public offering of stock, instead has been acquired by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG in a $272.5 million deal announced today.
NimbleGen, a UW-Madison spin-off founded in 1999, had filed for a proposed IPO of up to $75 million in common stock.
CINCINNATI (AP) – Federal investigators overstepped constitutional bounds by searching e-mails without a warrant during a fraud investigation related to an herbal supplement company known for its “Smiling Bob” ads, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
….”The district court correctly determined that e-mail users maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of their e-mails,” Judge Boyce Martin said in a case closely watched by civil-liberties advocates in the still-emerging field of Internet privacy.
TomoTherapy is teaming up with the prestigious Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to develop a more powerful type of cancer radiation therapy device.
They are part-time artists or craftspeople with full-time jobs of another kind — typically Caucasian women with bachelor’s degrees who are over age 50, producing their arts/crafts from home.
Their impact usually remains under the radar, because they work in isolation and independently, but these creative endeavors pump more than $31 million per year into northwestern Wisconsin economies.
The enterprising Big Ten Network signals a beginning, and an ending. The network, scheduled to launch this fall, is offering a comprehensive package of televised events and a new funding source for financially strapped athletic departments.
But, locally, it will come at the expense of WHA-TV, which no longer will be allowed to carry tape-delay broadcasts of University of Wisconsin football and men’s basketball games, thereby ending a long sports relationship between public television and Badger fans throughout the state.
Emily Blankenheim knows what the best-dressed Badger fans will be wearing next fall.
She’s forecasting trends for the Insignia brand as part of her internship this summer with University Book Store. The internship grew out of her studies in retailing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She hopes her consumer science degree will earn her a top retail job after graduation next year.
When Jerry Kelly isn’t busy trying to win tournaments on the PGA Tour, he may be busy over the next several months raising money for a Nationwide Tour event being touted for Madison.
….It is expected that the new American Family Children’s Hospital at the UW Hospital and Clinics will be the major benefactor of the tournament’s charities.
Lawmakers should direct the center to be located in metropolitan Madison, where it could capitalize on the UW-Madison research that is the source of many business ideas and where it would be near the growing community of high-tech entrepreneurs in Dane County.
The Dairy State has one up on its California competitors.
Though California has stolen the lead in cow milk production from Wisconsin, we outrank California and — apparently — all other states in sheep milk.
Quoted: UW-Madison professor of animal science Dave Thomas
….Sun Microsystems has just named a 1980s Madison West grad, Jeff Kesselman, as one of the company’s “contrarian minds of 2007.” Kesselman also graduated UW-Madison in 1987. He serves as chief architect on Project Darkstar, a server platform for massive-scale online games, a new arena for Sun.
If University of Wisconsin fullback Chris Pressley thought Michigan had an impenetrable defensive line, maybe akin to the Wall of China, he has since learned that nothing compares to the real thing. And if he thought winning a Big Ten championship was an uphill climb; maybe akin to scaling the Himalayas, he also since learned that nothing compares to the real thing. But if he thought Pasadena was paradise, maybe akin to Shangri-La, he knew all along that nothing compares to real thing — the Rose Bowl — even after seeing Shangri-La in northwest Yunnan province.
To this end, the 20-year-old Pressley has shared his awakening with fellow classmates during an ongoing three-week field trip to China arranged by the UW Business School.
American Transmission Company is sponsoring three public information sessions starting tonight to discuss the idea of burying at least part of a controversial 345-kilovolt power line stretching from Rockdale to west of Middleton. But an activist group questions why the sessions are being held when ATC has already proclaimed underground construction as unfeasible.
Annita Wozniak, co-chair of Citizens for Responsible Energy, told The Capital Times today the three open houses tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday night are “just another opportunity for ATC to promote their own motives” on the need for the new line.
