Category: UW-Madison Related

Five years ago, the end of the world did not happen. Our contemporary god, the computer, was ready to smite us, or so we thought.

A former UW-Madison biochemistry professor Muttaiya Sundaralingam, and his wife, Indirani were among the thousands killed when a tsunami struck the island nation of Sri Lanka on Sunday.

In its Dec. 31 issue, Entertainment Weekly has named Afro-American studies professor Tim Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name” the third best nonfiction book of 2004. The magazine praises Tyson for injecting new life into writing about the civil rights movement.

Doug Moe’s column also mentions Chicago utility executive and UW-Madison alumnus John W. Rowe.

Paul J. Cleary, age 76, passed away on Saturday, Dec. 18, 2004. Paul was the first male to enroll in the home economics department at UW-Madison, earning a B.S. in food administration and experimental foods in 1955. Paul spent the next 25 years in food service management at the Memorial Union, Madison campus, ending his service there as food director. In 1970, he became the food director for the entire University of Wisconsin system. He was a guest lecturer and an instructor for the food administration for the University of Wisconsin.

The Madison woman detained in Israel for more than a week is headed back toward American soil. Bornshlegel, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a native of Juneau, Wis., was arrested Dec. 14 in the village of Bil’in, west of Ramallah. A judge had ordered that she be deported.

The marketplace has spoken. It’s time for the state Legislature to make it possible for UW System campuses to offer health insurance to the domestic partners of employees.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has dropped a PeopleSoft database for tracking alumni in favor of a system the Wisconsin Alumni Association has used for 12 years.

Schools and colleges can access alumni information through the association�s database, a custom software system based on a database from 4D, Inc.

UW-Madison is considering eliminating all of its roughly 1,800 state-owned cell phones issued to employees. University leaders – as well as state auditors – want to be sure that anyone with a state phone is using it only for official business they couldn’t do with a land line.

A Madison woman is being detained in an Israeli prison awaiting a judge-ordered deportation. Kelly Bornshlegel, who has an Israeli visa, was arrested last week in the village of Bil’in, west of Ramallah.

Reached by cell phone Friday at the Hadera Deportation Prison, Bornshlegel said she was arrested while filming a protest against construction of the separation wall between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The ground remained barren Monday afternoon as snowstorms continued to miss Madison after pasting cities to the north, south, east and west.

But inside, there was a blizzard of white-coated floors and tables as about 30 children made paper snowflakes and enjoyed snow stories at the Madison School District’s Allied Learning Center.

“We could put them on the window so it looks like it’s snowing outside,” JoAnn Savoy, head of the UW- Madison Water Resources Library, suggested to the children.

They happily obliged.

Monday’s event was part of a monthly reading program created by UW-Madison librarians to bring books and learning excitement to Allied Drive, on Madison’s southwest border with Fitchburg, where students post the lowest average state reading test scores in Dane County.

Last week, Google announced an ambitious new plan to start converting millions of books into digital files in partnership with several major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. This is a logical step for Google, which says its mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The idea of making books available online is not new, but this plan represents an enormous shift in scale, so enormous that if it is carried out successfully, it may redefine the nature of the Internet and the university.

National Peace Corps director Gaddi Vasquez congratulated graduates Sunday and encouraged them to celebrate the diversity of America.

“I urge you to dedicate some time to eradicate racism and discrimination in our nation,” he told more than 1,000 students who received University of Wisconsin-Madison degrees in two winter commencement ceremonies at the Kohl Center on a frigid December day.

Elected on a platform of consensus building, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz now finds himself branded a spoiler. Cieslewicz is being roundly rebuked for pushing an inner-city streetcar system that critics say is on a collision course with a longstanding countywide proposal for regional rail.

In a departure from its regular practice, Madison Area Technical College will not hold graduation ceremonies this month. December graduation will go ahead as scheduled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College on Sunday.

MATC spokeswoman Janet Kelly said all of this academic year’s graduates will be eligible to participate in the May ceremonies. It was primarily a cost-saving, more efficient measure, she said.

(MADISON) — It may be close to Christmas, but Madison officials are already focusing their efforts on eliminating Halloween problems.

MADISON, Wis. — Gating off State Street is just one idea Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and the University of Wisconsin student leaders have discussed to prevent a repeat of this year’s Halloween mayhem.

Reversing her position from the day before, Edgewood College Dean of Students Maggie Balistreri-Clarke acknowledged Thursday that federal law doesn’t prevent her from releasing the results of college investigations into two recent sexual assults on campus.

Options ranging from the “ridiculous” — closing down the Isthmus — to the “sublime” — putting gates around the 500 block of State Street.

WHEN JEREMY Hinzman walked into the Toronto law office of Jeffry House, he, Hinzman, was not yet the most famous deserter from the U.S. military over the war in Iraq. It was earlier this year, and prominent stories about Hinzman in the Washington Post and on “60 Minutes” were still months off. House, 57, had yet to be called “a dopey lawyer” by Bill O’Reilly.

Five daily flights between Madison and Chicago’s Midway Airport will be suspended Jan. 4 by bankrupt ATA Airlines.

Dane County airport director Brad Livingston said 62,876 passengers flew on the 28-seat ATA Connection flights through the first 11 months of 2004, representing about 4 percent of the airport’s market share.

Following a recent crime string, police are encouraging students to be safe in the last week of the semester.

Google, the operator of the world’s most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

At a Christmas party this past weekend there was a discussion of Madison’s proposed public wireless Internet district downtown and there was some clear confusion about why it was needed.

The UW Police Department is once again fully equipped with automatic defibrillators after getting stuck with two dozen of the life-saving devices that were recalled last month. The bad news is that the company that sold the bad ones is not going to make good on them.

WASHINGTON – Compared with their peers in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, U.S. 15-year-olds are below average when it comes to applying math skills to real-life tasks, new test scores show.

The University of Wisconsin System announced Tuesday Jack Miller, chancellor of UW- Whitewater, will likely leave to become the 12th president of the Central Connecticut State University. Miller has spent over 25 years in four state university systems nationwide.

If you’re a Madison Gas and Electric Co. customer, you’ll soon pay more to run the dishwasher, keep your home cool in the summer and watch your big-screen television.

The rate boost also covers a chunk of costs related to construction of the West Campus Cogeneration power plant, scheduled to be completed by mid-2005, and transmission line improvements passed along from American Transmission Co.

More than 60 people packed a meeting room in Memorial Union on Tuesday to discuss police handling of Halloween festivities on State Street this year, many to criticize police use of pepper spray.

Compiled by KELLIE BARTLETT

The 23 American universities that are seeking to raise at least $1-billion collected a total of $246.5-million in gifts and pledges during the last month for which they had data available.

Robert Novak’s outing of a CIA operative married to a presidential critic barely came up and a promised student protest never materialized when the conservative commentator appeared here Wednesday night. Instead, the right-wing “Crossfire” panelist offered post-election analysis.

The Joint West Campus Area Committee met Tuesday night to discuss the renovation of the 1300 block of University Avenue.

Backed by 20 leaders of Wisconsin’s Asian communities, Heidi Pascual plans to launch the state’s first Asian magazine in January.

� Shree Shridharan, India, a retired UW-Madison educator.

Academic medical centers represent the top rung of medical research in this country and are widely thought to be impartial and independent. So it is disheartening to find them signing restrictive contracts with pharmaceutical companies that allow the companies to dictate what drug testing data can be openly discussed and published. The manufacturers of drugs and medical devices are already under increasing pressure to list all of their clinical trials and results in public databases. Now academic medical centers will need to clean up their own practices to help prevent suppression of information about the safety and efficacy of drugs.

Daunted by soaring costs, as many as a quarter of low-income students with grades and test scores that make them prime college material no longer even apply to college. This is bad news at a time when skilled jobs are moving abroad and a college diploma has become the minimum price of admission to the new economy. The Bush administration, however, could actually make this problem worse by cutting the federal Pell grant program, which was developed to encourage poor and working-class students to pursue higher education.

Two men accused of causing nearly $20,000 damage to 43 vehicles in a single night were charged Wednesday.

As Madison Police captain Luis Yudice’s retirement nears, he looks back on his 30-year law enforcement career, including his leadership role in planning for and dealing with this year’s Halloween bash on State Street.

‘This isn’t a war on drugs. This is a war on certain people who use certain drugs. I wonder if anyone’s going to go to prison for life for Vioxx?’

In a city that is devoting years of construction and redesign to the campus and downtown area, graffiti continues to be an ongoing problem.

Court Report:

Five UW-Madison students were among eight men charged Wednesday with beating another student so badly last summer that he required plastic surgery to rebuild his nose.

A group of about 60 anti-war protesters created confusion Thursday when they held up rush hour traffic on University Avenue for over an hour. The group, protesting the escalation of fighting in Fallujah in Iraq, clogged the thoroughfare at about 4 p.m., after marching from Library Mall with a long, white, wordless banner.

The Madison Police Department will receive $117,000 from the federal government to help combat gun-related violence in the city.

The MadHatters, a University of Wisconsin men�s a cappella group, turned a dream into a reality Wednesday night, singing for a sold-out audience at the Overture Center�s Grand Overture Hall.

The state appeals court upheld a decision Thursday that the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse did not violate state open meetings law in naming Veterans Memorial Stadium and its field after a former coach.

Veterans of the Iraq war on the UW campus are not worried about being harassed like vets of the Vietnam era. But they acknowledge they can still spark politically heated conversations.

Almost five years to the day after University of Wisconsin biologist James Thompson reported the first-ever isolation and culturing of human embryonic stem cells, the state of California passed Proposition 71.

(November 11, 2004) ââ?¬â? ORCHARD PARK ââ?¬â? When Lee Evans walked into the locker room at the Buffalo Bills’ training facility Wednesday morning, he found a picture on his stool, one suitable for framing.

It captured the rookie wide receiver making his dazzling fingertip catch in the end zone Sunday against the Jets, the second touchdown reception of his burgeoning career.

Their readers may still value the “class notes” most (the Wellesley Magazine section fostered a kidney transplant between graduates), but alumni magazines these days are revamped, glossy and offering an impressive array of more worldly topics. (Login required.)

Elton Aberle, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will retire next September. Aberle made the announcement in a written statement on Monday. The college is home to 2,200 undergraduates and about 1,000 graduate students. It has an annual budget of more than $150 million.

Paul Barrows, University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor for student affairs, is taking an unspecified period of paid leave from the university. Barrows is well known for his leadership of campus diversity efforts. (11/5/04 Capital Times print edition)

The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents was criticized Thursday for its plans to raise executive salary ranges. The regents’ Business and Finance Committee endorsed the raises; the full board was expected to approve the raises today.
The regents hedged on a plan released by the committee’s chairman earlier this week to seek a 5.5 percent tuition increase for each of the next two years to pay for an increase in faculty and staff salaries.

When California voters enacted a lavishly financed stem cell program on Tuesday, they performed a valuable service that should help keep this nation in the forefront of one of the most promising areas of biomedical research.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, $1.286-billion as of October 15 (increase of $42.4-million in the last month); the goal is $1.5-billion by 2007.

Averting discussion of tuition estimates for the 2004-05 school year, the Business and Finance Committee of the UW Board of Regents focused Thursday on maintaining competitive salaries for UW System personnel.

As anyone who’s ever earned a college degree knows, it’s not unusual for universities to ask their students for money long after the last tuition payment has been made.

They call them “gifts,” rather than bills, after you graduate.

Whitewater, Wis. � Despite all the financial and mental effort put into creating a product, without the right marketing it will never get past a limited release or even a prototype. A source of guidance and research moving further into the spotlight is the Wisconsin Innovation Service Center.

Much as he tries to disguise it, Jonathan Barry is frustrated. And he suspects others are, too. It’s been eight years since the former Dane County executive co-chaired a county committee that evaluated the feasibility of a commuter rail system. And he not only concluded it was worth pursuing, but predicted in a 1997 interview with this reporter that we’d have a such a system up and running no later than 2003.

More than 850 experts in international security have signed an open letter to the American people assessing the Bush administration’s foreign policy as a “misguided” one with “overwhelmingly negative” results for American national security.”

MADISON, Wis. � The residents of 508 W. Washington Ave. were already pretty psyched when they realized that a massive rally with Sen. John F. Kerry and Bruce Springsteen would take place on their street Thursday afternoon.

When the rock star’s trailer parked in front of their house, 21-year-old Danya Bader-Natal ââ?¬â? one of the seven University of Wisconsin seniors who live in the gray wooden house ââ?¬â? scrawled a message in green marker on a flattened box and hung it from their second-story balcony: “Bruce come up for a beer.” (Login required.)

Construction throughout the city of Madison is evident around the campus and downtown area. No end is in sight of the current renovations, and benefits of new and updated facilities are continuing to be discussed.

MINNEAPOLIS – The man accused in a Midwestern mailbox bombing spree is mentally ill and should be committed, a federal magistrate judge ruled on Thursday.