Germans make Madison presentation on sustainable environmental policies & transportation

Posted on by

Environmental leaders from Freiburg, Germany will give a presentation at the MATC Downtown Education Center from 7:30 to 9:30 am on Friday, August 26. Dr. Dieter Woerner, Director of Freiburg’s Environmental Department, will give a talk on sustainable environmental policy and Andreas Hildebrandt of Verkehrs-AG will discuss the regional transportation system. Freiburg has developed sustainable environmental policies including extensive use of solar energy, bike trails and mass transit, recycling and urban planning. In 1992, Freiburg was awarded the title “German Environmental Capital” in a nationwide competition.
More information about Freiburg and other German sustainable development efforts visit: http://madisonfreiburg.org/sustainablecity.htm, http://www.solarregion.freiburg.de, http://www.wi-ei.org/germanymission.pdf and http://www.greentierwi.info/green.html
This event is sponsored by the Madison-Freiburg Sister City Committee, Sustain Dane, UWEX/SHWEC, and MATC.

VOIP Users Soar

Posted on by

Brian Bergstein:

The number of consumers bypassing the traditional phone network and opting for Internet voice service is soaring beyond expectations.
An analysis by the TeleGeography research group found 2.7 million subscribers nationwide in the second quarter, compared with just 440,000 a year earlier.

I’ve used Packet8 for a couple of years – quite successfully.

More on the Tax Shelter Controversy

Posted on by

TaxProf summarizes a number of recent articles and documents regarding the ongoing IRS battle with the major accounting firms over 1990’s Tax Shelters. Perhaps most interesting is this 6MB PDF memo sent by several current and former KPMG partners to the US DOJ and the media. This is a fascinating look at the internal politics of a large organization. Lynnley Browning has more:

The accounting firm KPMG is quietly putting the boxing gloves back on. Even as KPMG is in discussions with federal prosecutors to settle a criminal investigation over its sale of what the Internal Revenue Service says are bogus tax shelters, the firm has been taking on former clients who have sued it over those same shelters.

What is RSS?

Posted on by


These small xml icons are popping up all over the internet. Clicking on them allows the reader to view a link to the site’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) page and subscribe to them using a NewsReader. These “feeds” allow the reader to quickly scan headlines and, if interested, view a summary (or in some cases the entire) article. RSS is a very efficient method of reading and sharing information.

Sites can have many RSS feeds, such as Channel3000 or the Washington Post. Isthmus’s Daily Page has a feed, as does WisPolitics.

Getting Started:
Download a NewsReader:

RSS FAQ.

I’ve also posted a brief screencast that demonstrates my use of a RSS NewsReader (NetNewsWire). 13MB Quicktime