Skip to main content

Category: UW-Madison Related

Residents fuming over Metro bus alerts

Capital Times

Noted: The alerts are a response to the 2011 accident that killed a longtime UW-Madison Library employee who was hit in the crosswalk by a Metro bus as she crossed University Avenue. As part of a safety initiative, Metro also has repositioned its buses’ rearview mirrors to eliminate blind spots.

Doug Moe: Last notes for dual music teaching careers

Wisconsin State Journal

Noted: Each knew early they wanted to teach. Schneider grew up in a musical family in a suburb of Minneapolis. “I knew in 10th grade I wanted to teach music,” he said. Sanyer, raised in Madison, began playing violin in fifth grade. “I knew in high school I wanted to teach,” she said. She attended UW-Madison on a music scholarship.

Doug Moe: A novel of New York’s mean streets

Wisconsin State Journal

Noted: He benefited greatly from taking a writing class from Christine DeSmet of UW-Extension. “This isn’t a police report,” she noted of one early scene, asking him for richer detail. Chiarkas began calling her “the mean woman from the university.” But the revising and cutting paid dividends with the publication of “Weepers” this week.

Donald A. Downs: Shouting down speakers on campus is unethical

Madison.com

Column from Downs, professor of political science, law and journalism: “With increasing frequency, especially on college campuses, speakers presenting unpopular views — or views unpopular with a vocal minority of the audience — are being disrupted or ‘shouted down’ until they leave the stage. This has happened at UW-Madison, where I am a professor, and at many other universities.”

Universities, feds fight to keep lab failings secret

USA Today

Noted: University officials provided 420 pages of documents at no charge to USA TODAY. Shortly after the request was filled, university officials pointed to the process as grounds for a new state law that would restrict access to records of university research until that information is published or patented.

Aztalan visitor center plans to debut May 30

Daily Jefferson County Union

Noted: As part of the special event, Professor Sissel Schroeder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Anthropology will provide a brief presentation at the park shelter at 2 p.m. She will discuss her archaeological field school excavations, which will be under way at the time and focus on the residential homes of the prehistoric people who populated Aztalan.

Here are the facts on Wisconsin’s economy

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Unfortunately, Noah Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison violated this principle last week in a Journal Sentinel op-ed on the state of the Wisconsin economy. Williams opinion is that the states economy has performed “quite well” under Gov. Scott Walker. He is perfectly entitled to make that argument, although as I have argued elsewhere, the evidence is overwhelming that he is wrong.

UW-Madison could not sell University Ridge Golf Course for revenue until 2021

Capital Times

University Ridge, a top-ranked public golf course at County Road PD and County Road M in the city of Madison, was developed and given to the university by the University of Wisconsin Foundation in 1991, university officials reported in response to a records request … the terms of this gift contain an automatic reversion provision that returns the property to the Foundation if sold within 30 years of the gift, Lisa Hull, a special assistant to the vice chancellor in the Office of University Relations, said in an email.

Doug Moe: Putting a period on a Playboy puzzle

Madison.com

Columnist tries to once and for all settle the debate over whether the magazine printed this statement touting UW–Madison’s party school status: “Of course we did not include Wisconsin in this list because it would be unfair to rank professionals with amateurs.”

The best brain exercise may be physical

Chicago Tribune

(From 4/30/15) Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that people who said they exercised for 30 minutes five times a week in late-middle age did better on cognitive tests and showed less accumulation of the beta amyloid plaque, the protein that builds up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Tech and Biotech: WISC Partners looks to boost promising Wisconsin companies

Wisconsin State Journal

WISC Partners plans to establish a $25 million fund and use the money to invest in eight to 12 Wisconsin companies, at about $2 million to $3 million each. With its eye out for health care, information technology and the intersection between those two, the group will zero in on companies that are past the starting gate, that already have won over some individual The other thing that’s unique about WISC Partners: It was created by UW-Madison alumni.

Repositioning Scott Walker

New York Times

An editorial about Walker’s shifting stances mentions a recent paper, “The Whiteness of Wisconsin’s Wages,” by Dylan Bennett, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, and Hannah Walker, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Washington, which argues that “Governor Walker and his allies activated the racial animus of white workers.” The piece also mentions Walker’s proposed $300 million budget cut to the UW system.

Programmers, designers descend on UW-Madison for 24-hour ‘hackathon’ competition

Wisconsin State Journal

The student hackers — computer programmers and/or designers — were gathered for MadHacks 2015, the UW-Madison’s first ever large-scale, public hackathon. Collegiate hackathons, competitions in which college students get together to design and build new computer programs over a set time frame, have become increasingly popular in recent years.

U.S. Patent Director visits Madison

WKOW

A leader in the U.S. business world visited Madison on Wednesday in hopes of fostering more innovation.

Michelle K. Lee, the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, toured the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Lee said she wants to identify ways that her office can better serve the innovators and entrepreneurs in the Madison area.

John Nichols: Stanley Kutler challenged the ‘luxuriant privilege’ of the powerful

Madison.com

The University of Wisconsin professor of history, Guggenheim fellow and Fulbright lecturer, who has died too soon at age 80, recognized that the history that mattered was the history that political and economic elites preferred to keep concealed. That is why he fought, sometimes for decades, to open the closed doors of the past and reveal the dark doings of the powerful.

Mark Pitsch: Final Four isn’t good enough for Kentucky

Wisconsin State Journal

Column contrasting UW, KU athletically and academically. Snippet: As a reporter in Kentucky, I often heard from higher education leaders and politicians that they wished UK had paid less attention to basketball over the last several decades and more attention to academics. At the time, UK was just exploring creating a university research park like the one UW-Madison launched three decades ago.”

UW-Madison alum makes waves in LA

Channel3000.com

There’s been a movement over the last few years to get more Badgers into the entertainment business in Los Angeles. News 3 talked to Richie Schwartz, whose Madison connections got him started in LA.