(Subscription required) UVA law professor Rachel Harmon, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who specialized in criminal cases against law-enforcement officials, said she knows of no federal law requiring U.S. officers to identify their agency, either visually or verbally.
A group of artificial-intelligence experts, including computer vision researcher and lead author Erik Learned-Miller of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences, and co-authors including computer scientist Vicente Ordóñez of the University of Virginia, recently proposed a new model for managing facial-recognition technologies at the federal level. They propose an FDA-inspired model that categorizes these technologies by degrees of risk and would institute corresponding controls.
In the past couple of decades, we’ve had satellites trained on Earth’s ice sheets, documenting climate change-induced losses. But those years are a small sample when it comes to understanding the range of behavior these frozen areas can exhibit over the eons of geologic time. Adds Lauren Simkins, a glacial geologist at the University of Virginia, who was not involved with the study, “Some people are going to think that’s probably the wrong interpretation.” Simkins says that it's possible those ridges formed in other ways.
(Commentary) Whatever one thinks of the specific debates regarding police tactics or allegations of institutional and systemic racism, it’s obvious there is a significant, shameless disparity between blacks and whites in America. Remedying that requires more than self-comforting public gestures expressing solidarity with the black community or BLM protesters. This is especially the case when the proportion of black children raised in single-parent families is 65%, more than double the number of white children. As UVA sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has often argued, family instability...
Diet and gut microbiota can affect the outcome of chemotherapy – and likely many other medical treatments – because of ripple effects that begin in our gut, new research suggests. University of Virginia scientists found that diet can cause microbes in the gut to trigger changes in the host's response to a chemotherapy drug. Common components of our daily diets (for example, amino acids) could either increase or decrease both the effectiveness and toxicity of the drugs used for cancer treatment, the researchers found.
The Propel Management Consulting Program is a collaboration between the CVSBDC and the UVA Career Center. Students who had industry internships canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be able to use their skills to help businesses transition online in response to the pandemic. The projects will target Fluvanna, Louisa, Orange and Greene counties.
More than a thousand people marched from downtown Charlottesville to the University of Virginia on Sunday evening to demand justice and affirm that black lives matter. The march was led by UVA students Tyler Tinsley and Joshua St. Hill, who, upon reaching the Rotunda, urged the crowd to keep pushing for police accountability even after “BLM” is no longer trending online.
(Commentary) We know that universities – especially large research universities – are economic engines. The coalfields have a university – UVA-Wise – but not a research university. That could change. Virginia, if it wanted to, could invest heavily in that school to transform it into a research center.
An end to “copycat” buildings and a ban on skyscrapers taller than 500 meters (1,640 feet) are among the Chinese government's new guidelines for architects, property developers and urban planners. “The document is really not just about height,” said Li Shiqiao, a UVA professor of Asian architecture. “It’s about Chinese culture, the urban context, the spirit of the city and the appearance of modernity. This has been in the academic discussion a lot, but somehow not in a government document until now.”
Five members of the UVA Board of Visitors have been reappointed for another four-year term.
“I want to be clear that there will be no healing or reconciliation until we have equity,” said Zyahna Bryant, 19, a University of Virginia student who started a petition seeking the statue’s removal when she was a 16-year-old high schooler in Charlottesville. Speaking at Northam’s announcement, she paid tribute to the demonstrators who have marched tirelessly for the past week, and those who came long before.
As Racist Posts Circulate, Some Colleges Rescind Admissions Offers. Others Say Their Hands Are Tied.
Admissions offices typically play a reactive role, responding when offensive posts are reported to them – by students, parents, or people anonymously emailing the university or contacting the institution on social media. Admissions officers don’t have time to actively monitor the social-media accounts of incoming students, said Jeannine Lalonde, associate dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of Virginia. “We’re not out there looking for reasons to deny a student,” she said. The only reason she’d look up students online is if they wrote something that caught her eye in their appli...
Do not leave the house without water. You need to stay hydrated if you’re going to be marching around in the streets for hours. Even if you’re stressed about not having a bathroom break, drinking water is pretty much the only thing keeping you from getting heat exhaustion or potentially deadly heatstroke, says Vickie Southall, a professor of nursing at UVA.
But as with any large gathering, there’s a heightened risk of spreading the coronavirus during a protest, said Dr. Taison Bell, an assistant professor of medicine in the divisions of Infectious Diseases and International Health and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Virginia. Not only are people in close contact with one another, but “things like yelling, screaming and chanting could potentially cause the spread to happen in a wider field than just 6 feet,” Bell said.
All women should have access to the at-home test that can provide early detection of cervical cancer
(Commentary by Emma Mitchell, assistant professor of nursing) I’m a public health nurse who has spent a career studying ways to better test women for the human papillomavirus, the main cause of cervical cancer, so they can get early and lifesaving treatment. In rural, resource-limited areas – in the U.S. as well as abroad – I’ve seen how this disease claims lives and fractures families. When a mother dies early, stable homes vanish, children are orphaned, and girls’ sexual and reproductive health, often already at significant risk, are placed in even greater jeopardy.
Health care workers at Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital got a special tribute for their work during the coronavirus pandemic. A parade was held in their honor Thursday evening to say thank you for risking their lives. Along with the parade, University of Virginia’s Pegasus helicopter and a private helicopter flew over the hospital earlier Thursday afternoon, bringing some nurses and patients to tears. Organizers say they are going to try to organize a parade and flyover at UVA Medical Center for those frontline workers and patients fighting COVID-19.
A team of structural biologists at the University of Virginia have created a Web resource that provides scientists a quick assessment of SARS-CoV-2 structural models and enhanced versions of these structures, when possible. Their goal is to carefully validate the models deposited into the Protein Data Bank of CoV-2 proteins, with the aim of helping the biomedical community to establish a validated database.
The University of Virginia Board of Visitors unanimously voted Thursday to rename Ruffner Hall in honor of Walter Ridley, the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from the university.
The University of Virginia is waiving its ACT and SAT requirements for next year’s applicants. The university announced Thursday that it will not require applicants to submit standardized testing as part of their application “for at least the next application cycle.” UVA made the move because of the “uncertain prospect of universally accessible, reliable and equitable” testing.
The University of Virginia will not require applicants to submit standardized testing scores to apply for the fall 2021 semester, but students who want to submit a test score still can. The uncertain prospect of universally accessible, reliable and equitable SAT or ACT testing because of the coronavirus pandemic is behind this decision.