Attention now turns to New Alabama U.S. Sen. Doug Jones himself, how he will vote and the interplay between his progressive stances and his conservative constituency in Alabama. "If he is to seek and win re-election, he likely will have to figure out ways to differentiate himself from the bulk of the rest of the Democratic Senate caucus," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics.
“Like a number of publications, Essence is going to face that hardship of re-securing its audience,” said Meredith Clark, a UVA assistant professor of media studies. “That’s a real-high maintenance relationship.”
Google’s caution around images of gorillas illustrates a shortcoming of existing machine-learning technology. With enough data and computing power, software can be trained to categorize images or transcribe speech to a high level of accuracy. But it can’t easily go beyond the experience of that training. And even the very best algorithms lack the ability to use common sense, or abstract concepts, to refine their interpretation of the world as humans do. As a result, machine-learning engineers deploying their creations in the real world must worry about “corner cases” not found in their trainin...
Astronomers are observing star-forming regions in our galaxy with NASA's flying telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, to understand the processes and environments required to create the largest known stars, which tip the scales at 10 times the mass of our own sun or more. The research team, led by James M. De Buizer, SOFIA senior scientist and Jonathan Tan at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Virginia, has published observations of eight extremely massive and young stars located within our Milky Way Galaxy.
Thousands of babies die in their sleep every year in this country, with some deaths unexplained, but most are from accidental suffocation. “Have the baby on the back, in a crib or bassinet next to the parent’s bed. Nothing else should be in that crib or bassinet except for the baby,” said Dr. Rachel Moon of the UVA School of Medicine.
If you want to know how 2018 is going to turn out for Democrats, it's worth looking at gubernatorial races in the big states (including Pennsylvania), UVA political analyst Kyle Kondik, of Sabato's Crystal Ball, observes this Thursday morning. All told, voters nationwide will make decisions in 36 gubernatorial contests in 2018. Kondik thinks Democrats will end the year in control of more governors' offices than they hold now.
(By Saphira M. Baker and Anita McGinty of the University of Virginia) In the social sector, most people tend to see program evaluations as high-stakes endeavors designed to confirm the value of specific programmatic work. And yet the findings often feel irrelevant or unactionable to the very people who do that work. Results may lack coherence with what the organization intuitively knows about itself, its culture, its beneficiaries, and its history.
UVA’s Christopher Ruhm shows in a new paper that while U.S. counties that experienced economic decline since the beginning of this century have been the hardest hit by the drug epidemic, the correlation between economic factors and opioid abuse is likely spurious. Ruhm's painstaking regression analysis shows a greater likelihood that the epidemic has been driven more by "changes in the drug environment" -- that is, drug availability -- than by despair.
Also on Tuesday, Attorney General Mark Herring announced that Toby J. Heytens would serve as solicitor general effective Feb. 21. Heytens is the David H. Ibbeken ‘71 Research Professor of Law and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Kristina Alimard was named interim CEO of University of Virginia Investment Management Co., and Sargent McGowan was named interim CIO, endowment spokeswoman Sonia Speh confirmed in an interview.
The U.S. Supreme Court did something Jan. 5 that it’s never done before, at least in modern times: It granted a law professor's request to argue as an amicus curiae. UVA School of Law professor Aditya Bamzai‘s long shot paid off.
A nurse practitioner at the UVA Medical Center is trying to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria. Elizabeth Alvarez is asking for the community’s help in getting much-needed supplies to the people who live there.
The $394 million expansion of the UVA Medical Center reached a milestone Wednesday. Workers laid the final steel beam for the 440,000-square foot project, which will double the emergency department’s capacity, add dedicated space for mental health services, expand interventional services and add private rooms.
Sean Griswold is Virginia's new director of football development and performance, the school announced on Tuesday. Griswold, who will start on Jan. 15, comes from Arizona State, where he spent the previous six seasons in a similar role.
Small differences in the amount of iron in a star may herald substantial differences in the type of planetary systems that form around it, say scientists at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland. Specifically, reports Robert Wilson, a UVA graduate student in astronomy, stars containing higher levels of iron are more likely to have planets with orbital periods of 8.5 days or less.
UVA law professor Toby J. Heytens will take the reins as solicitor general to start the second term of Attorney General Mark R. Herring.
In an ideal world, partisans on both sides would acknowledge their need to collaborate and compromise with members of the opposition party. In our increasingly hyper-partisan political world, however, the opposite is more likely to happen. Here’s why: According to Geoffrey Skelly at UVA’s Center for Politics, “most of the Republican incumbents who lost in this election were, relatively speaking, more moderate than the remaining Republicans in the House. At the end of the day, the Republican caucus just moved notably to the right. Conversely, the Democratic caucus is surely further to the left ...
A UVA School of Law professor has been named the next solicitor general of Virginia. Toby Heytens, a 2000 graduate of UVA’s law school, was selected for the post by state Attorney General Mark Herring.
Astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have learned that the chemical composition of a star can exert unexpected influence on its planetary system—a discovery made possible by an ongoing SDSS survey of stars seen by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, and one that promises to expand our understanding of how extrasolar planets form and evolve. "Without these detailed and accurate measurements of the iron content of stars, we could have never made this measurement," says Robert Wilson, a UVA graduate student in astronomy and lead author of the paper announcing the results.
Trump raised concern last month when he slurred some words on national TV. When asked about it, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said questions about Trump's health were “frankly, pretty ridiculous” and blamed his slurred speech on a dry throat, “nothing more than that.” Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at UVA’s Miller Center, said, “There's a long history in the presidency of presidents hiding their medical infirmities, both as candidates and as presidents.”