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Madison Remembers Otis Redding Crash

Musician Otis Redding was just 26 years old when his plane crashed into Madison’s Lake Monona back on December 10, 1967. Six other people were also killed in the crash and on Monday one Madison man remembered being in line for his concert on that tragic night.

Gary Knowles says he and a friend had bought their tickets for just cheap jerseys $3. They were standing in the cold outside The Factory Bar on Gorham Street waiting to get in when an employee came out with the news.

“Someone said Otis’ plane hadn’t come in and the concert would not be held that evening and they would tell us about a refund later,” Knowles said.

Knowles didn’t hear what really happened until later that night.

“To have anybody go down in Lake Monona was pretty shocking but to have a famous person go down here was really tragic,” Knowles said.

Another interesting note, Knowles says the band opening for Redding on that night 45 years ago was the Grim Reapers, a group that would go on to form the http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ famous Rockford band Cheap Trick.

Madison invention basis for top honor in clean

A new company built to commercialize a green energy discovery at University of Wisconsin Madison earned the top honor and a check for $100,000 at this month Chicago Clean Energy Challenge.

The firm, named Hyrax Energy, is developing a process to make sugar from cellulose, the tough carbohydrate that gives structure to plants.

That sugar could be a raw material for the biofuels, chemical and plastics industries. Ethanol, a biofuel added to gasoline, consumes about 40 percent of the total American corn crop. Using cellulose would reduce pressure on the price of corn and greatly expand the range of raw materials.

The new technology was developed by company co founder Ron Raines, a professor of biochemistry and chemistry.

can take a cotton ball, which is essentially pure cellulose, and which does not dissociate in any common solvent, and drop it into this ionic liquid, and it dissolves. It like a magic trick, he says.

The starting point came in 2002, when another lab discovered that certain liquids could dissolve cellulose. That opened the door to simpler processing, says Raines. much easier to do chemistry in a solution rather than on a solid. 2009 process produced a type of molecule called a furan, but then Raines figured out how to arrest the reaction to produce glucose, a sugar that is a basic building block of chemical engineering. The process occurs in a single reaction vessel, at relatively low pressure and temperature.

The key step cheap jerseys was adding an exact amount of water to halt the reaction when the solution was essentially a soup of glucose molecules. Water locks onto the glucose molecules so they cannot reassemble into longer molecules that would difficult to process, but too much water interferes with the reaction.

published this in 2010, and the same day, http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ it was described in The New York Times as a potential game changing way to make sugars from cellulosic biomass, non edible biomass, Raines says.

Although only small quantities of glucose have been made to date with the new process, it is extremely efficient, Raines says. 90 percent of the mass of cellulose and related molecules in corn stover [waste material left after kernels are removed] are converted into sugar molecules. We have tested, and they support the growth of microorganisms that ferment sugar into biofuel. research was funded by the Department of Energy through the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center on the Madison campus.

are thrilled to see that there is commercial interest in further developing the ionic liquids technology that was created in Great Lakes Bioenergy, says director Tim Donohue, a UW Madison professor of bacteriology. recent clean tech award to Hyrax is outside endorsement of this promising technology. cellulose rather than corn into chemical feedstock is a holy grail in the effort to convert more plant material into biofuels and other industrial chemicals.

Unlike many scientists, who are investigating biological methods to break apart cellulose, Raines focused on chemistry. enzymes that break down cellulose contain thousands of atoms, but a simple proton is enough to catalyze the reaction, he says. protons can be sourced in acids, which are cheap and easy to come by. far, the process has worked with corn stover, and other cheap or free sources of cellulose such as pine sawdust, wood and oat hulls, Raines says.

Hyrax Energy is at such an early stage of startup that it does not yet even have an office. The firm is negotiating to license the patent pending Raines technology, which has been assigned to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Raines suggests the firm could move quickly once the license is signed. processes have a tendency to be much faster to scale up, because they are simple and we are really good at building chemical plants. Raines work is further evidence of the broad and deep expertise in plant material conversion and green energy at the UW Madison. The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center has a wide portfolio of techniques for converting plant material into chemical feedstocks. WARF has a library of patents from university research available for corporate licensing.

A Madison spin off called Virent uses catalysts to make biofuel has more than 100 employees, and Raines says co founder Jim Dumesic, a UW Madison professor of chemical and biological engineering, was an in showing the potential of new methods for converting organic materials into industrial chemicals.

Madison residents get details on budget

MADISON >> Residents filled the Polson Middle School auditorium Tuesday night to hear about the town and board of education budgets, as well as proposed changes to the town charter.

Residents had a chance to sound off on both the charter, as presented by the Charter Review Committee, and the budget, as presented by the Board of Finance.

Joan Walker, selectman and chairperson of the Charter Review Committee, said the Board of Selectmen will meet within 15 days to review the charter and make the appropriate changes.

board of selectmen have two special meetings set up to review all of the charters, they are going to do recommendations back to the Charter Review Committee, Walker said. will then take those recommendations under consideration, so we will have 30 days after that 15 days to be able to finalize the charter that will then be taken back to the board of selectmen for voting. 11px;

One of the big things Walker announced during the public hearing was the possibility of hiring a town manager, which she said had been requested by some in town.

hard to tell. It hard to predict what the board of selectmen will take because there have been lots of comments through the community and it not just this public hearing, Walker said. have been comments to the website, as well, so we have to see.

Walker said the first selectman is tasked with multiple duties at once. During the presentation she said hiring a town manager would help alleviate some of those roles the first selectman plays, which she said are chief elected official and chief operating officer.

The charter also suggests giving department heads the power to fire and hire staff, rather than having that duty placed solely on selectmen.

First Selectmen Fillmore McPherson said he also is uncertain as to which way the board will turn with hiring a town manager, but said it will be a part of a separate question when the public votes on the changes to the charter.

read is that there are mixed feelings in town and I don know how that will turn out. It will be a separate vote. So there will be at least two, and maybe three, questions on the charter, said McPherson.

McPherson said the board also will ask residents whether they want extended town meetings, which he said is not very common in the state.

extended town meeting is a significant change. It not been done before in the state of Connecticut and it one of those topics that sound nice, but cheap jerseys I personally am concerned if it doesn work out as well as hoped, then you stuck with it for ten years, said McPherson. maybe be some other ways to deal with that topic.

Davis said the public should be allowed to speak at least once more toward the end of the meeting before the board votes on anything, that way, the public has an opportunity to voice concerns should they ever change their stance on an issue after everything has been said and done, which the board agreed to.

The board of finance presented a $77,794,313 budget to the town, a 2.7 percent increase over the last budget. The town portion is $23,970,990, a 3.16 percent increase over last year, while the Board of Education portion was $58,823,323, a 2.49 percent increase.

McPherson said a good deal of the increase to the town budget can be attributed to capital projects, which contributed a 13.21 percent increase of the last fiscal year capital projects budget.

can speak to the Board of Ed, but on the town side, there is normal inflationary increase. People do get some raises every now and again. But we actually increasing our capital spending more than the operational spending, McPherson said. we putting more money into roads, putting more money into technology, we had several servers crash in our police department this year, so we doing some rebuilding in our technology area. We increasing our fire truck reserves because looking down the road, we will be buying a new hook and ladder truck in a few years and they don come cheap, so we have to put money away from that.

Resident Jeffrey Burt, who said he was a board member for Madison Youth Soccer, said support the budget that presented. One of the things that come to mind is this last year we had difficulties with our field, specifically at the surf club. It had gotten so bad we had to close them. But it not just soccer; my children play four different activities that essentially use all the fields in Madison. And if we don maintain our fields, it not only creates a safety issue but also creates a scheduling issue.

what was mentioned several times by the audience, we going to try to do a better job at maintaining our fields and our playgrounds, McPherson said.

The proposed charter http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ questions will be prepared for the November ballot by the Board of Selectmen by Sept. 3, and the budget will go to referendum May 12.