Geoffrey Skelley, with UVA’s Center for Politics, said he disagrees with the committee’s reasoning for holding a convention instead of a primary. At the end of the day, he said, voter turnout and participation are higher with a primary.
While black voters are the core of the Democratic base, Alabama’s voting-age population is about 27 percent black and 69 percent white, according to 2014 Census data. “If black voters make up about 25 percent of the electorate and [Democrat Doug] Jones wins at least 90 percent of them, that would mean that Jones would probably have to win at least one-third of the white vote to have a chance of winning,” wrote Geoffrey Skelley, an analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics, in an analysis of the Alabama race.
This is a moment that has arrived on so many college campuses already. There is Georgetown University, which has worked to confront its ties to slavery. And the University of Virginia, where officials are planning a memorial to commemorate the contributions of enslaved people who helped build the school.
The awards keeping coming for UVA senior linebacker Micah Kiser. On Sunday night, Kiser won the 2017 Dudley Award, which is awarded to the state of Virginia’s top college player.
A team of UVA computer scientists trained AI image-recognition software to tie certain scenes to gender. It went through billions of images in two collections, one from Facebook and the other from Microsoft. The trained AI decided that shopping and washing are things women do, while linking coaching and shooting to men – because the images the AI analyzed were already marinated in human biases.
So when Daniel T. Willingham, a UVA professor of psychology and the author of “Raising Kids Who Read,” told me that parents don’t need to worry about teaching young kids the mechanics of reading – and in fact, he warns against doing so – I felt free. Parents, it turns out, are pretty crummy reading instructors.
There are already some publicly available reasons to worry about Trump’s health: Besides being the oldest president ever elected, he’s overweight, appears to subsist on a junk-food-heavy diet, and avoids exercise. “Grover Cleveland hid his surgery for jaw cancer, going so far as to have the operation done on a boat in New York Harbor,” said Nicole Hemmer, a UVA media history professor. “And of course the public was not informed of the full extent of Woodrow Wilson's debilitating stroke in 1919.”
With Christmas season coming up, a nationwide program is giving parents a way to put old crayons to use – by recycling them. It's called the Crayon Initiative. Crayons are collected, melted down, and turned into new crayons for the UVA Medical Center.
Another HEPC project entitled “Txt 4 Success” offers college counseling via text message to more than 11,000 students. A UVA report on this initiative indicates students who opt-in to receive texts are more likely to attempt and complete a higher number of college courses than students who do not receive text messages. Students who receive texts are also more likely to persist throughout their first year of college.
Dr. Jim Tucker, a UVA professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, explored the scientific legitimacy behind these beliefs. His book “Return to Life” features compilations of stories of children who reported memories from a history they weren’t alive for.
(Co-written by UVA alumna Chris Mai) A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that states nationwide face rising prison health care costs, exacerbated by their aging prison populations. The share of people ages 55 and older increased in 44 states between fiscal years 2010 and 2015, and this age group now accounts for more than 10 percent of the prison population in 25 states. These aging people in prison experience higher rates of serious and chronic disease than do their younger counterparts and consume more health care.
Levels of development figure prominently in how countries prioritize human rights, said Brantly Womack, a UVA expert on Chinese politics. Although China is the world’s second-largest economy, living standards remain low for the majority and millions remain mired in poverty. Along with many developing nations, China puts heavy stress on the unfairness of global inequality and the right of the majority to sustain and improve itself materially, Womack said.
The company is built around Lacritin, a protein that company co-founder and UVA researcher Gordon Laurie discovered in 2001. He found the protein lacking in patients with dry eye, so he isolated the active ingredient into an eye drop medication called Lacripep. The company spun out of UVA in 2013.
Comedian Ralphie May died from hypertensive cardiovascular disease, Clark County Coroner’s office confirmed. Dr. Brandy Patterson, a UVA assistant professor of cardiology, did not treat May, but she does have many other patients, including young adults, with high blood pressure and heart disease. Here’s what she wants everyone to know about these conditions.
UVA announced its inaugural baseball Hall of Fame Class on Thursday, and will induct 15 former players into the first class. The list includes four current MLB players, three of which are former All-Stars, as well as a host of others.
Deborah McDowell, UVA’s Alice Griffin Professor of English, taught students about Southern nostalgia for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy in the early 20th century, which inspired Charlottesville’s statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. McDowell, director of UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies, said Virginia politicians who helped establish Charlottesville’s Confederate memorial parks also backed laws that prevented racial integration, and permitted the forced sterilization of people with disabilities.
Fifteen years before Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy led an armed standoff against federal agents near his arid desert ranch, the devout Mormon combed through Latter-day Saints scripture and writings with his neighbor, another rancher upset about how the government regulates the public land around them. They compiled the works, highlighted and annotated, into an anthology called “The Nay Book,” named for rancher Keith Nay, Bundy’s late neighbor. Kathleen Flake, a UVA professor of Mormon studies, called the booklet an example of “radical libertarian dogma.”
Aside from the other risks it poses to your health, excess body fat can lead to an overproduction of certain hormones that disrupt ovulation. Your cycles may be less regular, you may ovulate less often, and you lower your chances of getting pregnant. On the flip side, too little body fat means your body may not produce enough hormones to ovulate each month or to sustain a pregnancy if you do conceive. Exercise can help you maintain a healthy weight. Just don't overdo it, says Dr. Christopher Williams, a UVA reproductive endocrinologist and author of “The Fastest Way to Get Pregnant Naturally.”
(Co-written by Douglas Laycock, a professor of constitutional law) The Supreme Court heard argument yesterday in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The issue is whether a conservative Christian baker who believes that weddings are inherently religious and that same-sex marriages are religiously prohibited can be required to design and create a cake to celebrate the wedding of a same-sex couple.
A new UVA study shows the text messaging service offered to high school seniors through the College Foundation of West Virginia has improved retention at some of the state’s colleges and universities.