Category: UW-Madison Related

A judge has delayed a civil trial for a former University of Wisconsin-Whitewater dean who claims he was audited and demoted because of his race.

The man exonerated in the 1980 rape and murder of a University of Wisconsin-Madison student will remain behind bars in New Mexico. WKOW-TV reports the parole board in New Mexico has denied the release of Ralph Armstrong.

As Sony Corp.â??s e-book devices vie with the Kindle to win over readers, the real showdown may come later: when a shift to electronic textbooks at schools threatens to eclipse the current market for the products.

Noted: E-readers face other challenges in the textbook market. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University said last week that they wonâ??t recommend the Kindle for their schools unless Amazon.com makes it easier for blind students to use the product. Intel Corp. introduced a handheld device this month for $1,499 that reads printed text aloud.

An Illinois man was charged Tuesday with felony battery for allegedly delivering a blind side blow to a former UW basketball player that left him in critical condition.Sean N. Longabaugh, 24, of Lake Villa, Ill., was charged with aggravated battery for allegedly punching Darin Schubring in the head on Halloween night at the Main Depot, 627 W. Main St. He is scheduled to appear in court Thursday.

Southern Illinois Universityâ??s president introduced a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee administrator Tuesday as his pick to be the next chancellor of SIUâ??s flagship Carbondale campus.Glenn Poshard chose Rita Cheng — provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UWM since May 2005 — to succeed Samuel Goldman, who has served as interim chancellor of the 20,350-student Carbondale campus since spring 2008. Goldman is a former university trustee.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in announcing that it will not make the Kindle available to students until the device has improvements to be better enable blind people to use it.

IBMâ??s quest to build a computer that can mimic the human brain has reached a new milestone, with what IBM calls the first brain simulation to exceed the scale of a catâ??s cortex.

In addition to IBM, the project involves researchers at Stanford University, Cornell University, Columbia University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and UC-Merced. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer that performed the cat cortex simulation is based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The family of a Madison college student who was killed last year isn’t giving up its efforts to find her killer. Relatives of Brittany Zimmermann have placed ads on a Madison billboard and inside Metro Transit buses. They’re hoping the ads will encourage anyone with information on her 2008 death to come forward.

When Sarah Palin burst onto the national political stage there was a lot of talk about her distinctive way of talkin’, you betcha. Three University of Wisconsin-Madison linguists tackled the conundrum in a research article to be published in the Journal of English Linguistics next month. The answer lies in something that happened in the 1930s. The UW researchers said people living in Alaska’s Matanuska and Susitna valleys, where Wasilla is located, are largely descendants of farmers who moved there in the 1930s from the Upper Midwest.

Though they kept the world waiting until the last legal minute, the parties to the proposed Google Book Search settlement managed to meet their new November 13 deadline to file a revamped version with the federal judge overseeing the case. Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers submitted Settlement 2.0 close to midnight Eastern time on Friday.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student newspaper filed suit against the university Wednesday, alleging the redaction of record materials was uncalled for under the state open records law.

You can help new moms and their children stay warm this winter by donating a blanket.

The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Milwaukee Police Chief Edward A. Flynn are planning to meet to discuss safety and crime-fighting efforts in the area near campus, according to an e-mail from the university and a Milwaukee police spokeswoman.

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire plans to increase its tuition by $1,500 annually over a phase-in period of the next four years to enhance the quality of the schoolâ??s education.

Noted: A model for this involvement can be found about 900 miles away at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Like this university, Wisconsin faced massive budget cuts. As a result, in-state students from families making at least $80,000 a year are facing an increase of $1,000 in tuition during four years and out of state students face an increase of $3,000.The funds raised by increasing tuition will be used to hire new faculty, expand course offerings and improve student services. But thereâ??s a catch: In exchange for student support, administrators gave students a legitimate say in exactly how the money is spent.

Amazonâ??s Kindle can read books aloud, but if youâ??re blind it can be difficult to turn that function on without help. Now two universities say they will shun the device until Amazon changes the setup.The National Federation of the Blind planned to announce Wednesday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University wonâ??t consider big rollouts of the electronic reading device unless Amazon makes it more accessible to visually impaired students.

Members of the city planning department met with the City Plan Commission Monday to discuss an overview of the current downtown plan.

Donations to the UW Foundation have decreased 12 percent since last Septemberâ??s economic downturn, prompting UW-Madisonâ??s colleges and departments to cut back on certain program spending.

A year to the day after the historic 2008 presidential election, President Barack Obama spoke to teachers and students at a Madison middle school about the federal Race to the Top program and the importance of improving education standards.

The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges and Extensions has been named a finalist for the position of president at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Md., which could raise some concern about finding a replacement if he were to be offered the position and accept. The final stages of the search for president closely mirror that of UW-Stevens Point current search.

A Dane County judge granted a motion Wednesday allowing a portion of the digital recording of the 911 call of the Brittany Zimmermann murder to be used by the counsel of the Zimmermann estate in their wrongful death lawsuit

President Barack Obama highlighted the importance of making Americaâ??s education system more competitive on a global scale as he spoke to a crowd of children, local officials, parents and others at a south-side middle school Wednesday.

Jim Fleming has soothed us with the classics, read to us and informed us. Now he is retiring.

Fleming, who started at Wisconsin Public Radio in 1968 while a student at UW-Madison, has announced that his last show as host of “Morning Classics” will be Dec. 3.

President Barack Obama will visit a Madison middle school today to speak about his proposals for improvement of education in the nation.

The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges and the UW-Extension is a finalist to become president of Morgan State University in Baltimore.

University of Wisconsin farm researchers are teaming up with a regional food bank to fight hunger in the state.At the UW experimental garden in Madison, the motto is â??Where Good Ideas Grow.â? Judy Reith-Rozelle supervises the garden, where a variety of fruits and vegetables are grown for research. Reith-Rozelle says giving the crops away to the needy may be their best idea yet, as they always have extra produce and donating it means itâ??s not left in the field to rot. (Fourth item.)

At the invitation from UW-Madison Real Estate Program, the Hammes Co. will join in a public discussion this week of its revised plans for a $93 million redevelopment of the Edgewater Hotel.

In what would continue a building boom around UW-Madison, a developer is proposing to demolish two houses for a $6 million, eight-story apartment building in the Langdon Street National Register District. Developer Patrick Corcoran is seeking to demolish two two-story, wood-frame houses at 617 and 619 Mendota Court for a 40,000-square-foot building that would have 33 rental units and a total of 103 bedrooms.

Federal stimulus money created or saved more than 10,000 jobs in Wisconsin, President Barack Obamaâ??s administration reported Friday. The report showed that in total $2.4 billion had been awarded and $733 million had been received in Wisconsin. The state reported spending about $680 million in stimulus money through the end of September. The UW System spent about $5.2 million.

Madison attorney William Conley was nominated Thursday by President Barack Obama to succeed the retiring U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb on the federal bench. Conley received his law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Some minority students at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls said they may not go to school on Monday after a written threat was discovered in a library bathroom.

President Barack Obama will visit Madison Nov. 4, according to a statement released by the White House Tuesday.

The White House announced Tuesday President Barack Obama will visit Madison Nov. 4, exactly a year after his election to the nationâ??s highest office.

Philanthropist Michael Cudahyâ??s financial support has vanished and some faculty are skeptical, but the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee remains committed to creating a science research facility and business park in Wauwatosa.

University of Wisconsin-Madison say 40 computers have been hacked, possibly exposing personal information of nearly 3,000 people.

University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said that 40 computers have been hacked, possibly exposing personal information of nearly 3,000 people.UW-Madison authorities sent a letter Oct. 12 to faculty, staff and students affected, apologizing and promising new security tools.

Lawrence Halprin, the Bay Area landscape architect who pushed the design of Americaâ??s urban spaces in new directions over a career that spanned 60 years, died Sunday of natural causes. He was 93, and a 1941 graduate of UW-Madison.

Think you’ve got the stomach for competitive eating? Here’s your chance to find out.

The Association of Independent Competitive Eaters comes to Madison next year to crown someone king or queen of the mall food court.

MADISON (WKOW) — Madison Police are investigating a sexual assault that happened on University Avenue around 7:00 p.m. Wednesday evening.

Several concerned citizens called 911 to report hearing a woman screaming. A short time later, the victim, a 21-year-old Madison woman, called police to report what happened.

She told officers she was walking along the 2000 block of University Ave. when a stranger approached her from behind, lifted her skirt and touched her inappropriately.

Despite membersâ?? near certainty that a proposed new Downtown bar and gaming center would see its share of underage drinkers, Madisonâ??s Alcohol License Review Committee voted unanimously Wednesday in favor of the project, which more than one member singled out as one of the best applications the committee had ever seen.

The developer of a hotel near Camp Randall stadium told 27 News he expects to open in February 2010, months after his original target date to accept guests.

“We tried to do a sixteen month process in ten months,” developer Bob Sieger told 27 News in a telephone interview from Minneapolis.

The University of Wisconsin-Superior is unique in many respects and is planning its future as an institution of higher education with some of those unique characteristics in mind, the UW Regents were told last week.

The UW System Board of Regents is facing a lawsuit from a downtown Madison bar.

Brothers Bar and Grill filed the suit Tuesday, claiming the Board is unfairly condemning their property on University Avenue.

Noted: The Neighborhood Indicators Project went online today after years of negotiation between government agencies over how to protect individual privacy and technical work by the UW-Madison Applied Population Lab.

Raising questions about the extent of the universityâ??s power to seize private property, the owners of a campus-area tavern are suing to stop the UW Board of Regents from condemning their bar.

This September a team of UW-Madison staff unveiled a new process to reduce the time it takes to eliminate former employees from accessing information technology systems, but the new process still takes longer than many others used throughout the University of Wisconsin System.  

The problem with textbooks is that they offer little accommodation to professors who disagree over how and in what order material should be taught, says M. Ryan Haley, an associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkoshâ??s College of Business. On the other hand, Haley says, professorsâ?? ability to cut and paste electronic textbooks according to their own preferences can result in uneven development of students across a single program and foil the expectations of those teaching advanced courses.

Tom Olson has been selected as the new chief investment officer for the University of Wisconsin Foundation, succeeding David Erickson, the foundation said Tuesday.

A nationally known economist and author said students need better advice on choosing a college during a presentation Friday afternoon for the Board of Regents at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Anyone holding out any hope for justice, fairness or creating sound policy in Wisconsin should pay attention to the pre-game activities at Saturdayâ??s Badger Homecoming game. People will observe the only bar exam that graduating UW-Madison law students will ever have to take to practice law in Wisconsin.

There’s a celebration on the Isthmus this weekend: all in the name of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

It’s homecoming week for UW-Madison, and the culmination of a week’s worth of events started Friday evening with the homecoming parade.

UW-Madison received $75.5 million out of $83.1 million awarded to the UW System by grants funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Thursday.

The University of Wisconsin System was awarded nearly $83 million in stimulus funds, with University of Wisconsin commanding the majority of that money, receiving $75.5 million for its 236 projects.

Happy birthday “On, Wisconsin!” UW-Madisonâ??s fight song is turning 100. The UW Marching Band will commemorate the occasion with a special half-time show at Saturdayâ??s Homecoming game.

After more than two decades of studying the interplay between education and economics and seven years as president of Minnesotaâ??s Macalester College, Michael McPherson knows a lot about higher education. But his latest book generated eye-openers for him and his co-authors.

Noted: Much of the development before 1966 doesnâ??t match with current zoning rules. UW-Madison, for example, is in a residential district that allows colleges with a special permit. The draft code includes new districts such as campus institutional, airport, traditional (meaning older) residential and suburban residential to better reflect the existing character or plans. The new districts will let owners do more building projects as a matter of right that currently would need special permission. That means the owner of an older home likely could add an open front porch without special permission.

The part time teachers union was trying to get their message out by protesting outside of MATC’s open house for it’s new west side campus.

They are claiming they have poor job security and that the wage gap between full time and part time teachers continues to grow larger.

Students in three majors at the University of Wisconsin-Stout will have the option of finishing their degrees in three years instead of the typical four.

The University of Wisconsin Foundation announced Tom Olson as the new chief investment officer Tuesday, who will be responsible for overseeing the allocation of over $2 billion in assets.

I am struck by District Attorney Brian Blanchardâ??s apparent unequal treatment of unnamed researchers at the UW-Madison – even though he acknowledges their illegal killing of animals by “decompression” for decades – and Jorge Iglesias, whom Blanchard has charged with 13 felonies for staging cockfights.