The speed with which people can process information declines at a steady rate from as early as their 20s. One possible culprit, says Timothy Salthouse, director of UVA’s Cognitive Aging Laboratory, is depletion of a chemical called dopamine, receptor sites for which decline in number with advancing age.
The Tom Tom Founders Festival announced its 2017 schedule, a new partnership, a number of national keynote speakers for its weeklong spring festivities and the addition of the Hometown Summit, sponsored by UVA’s Darden School of Business.
A UVA business incubator program is accepting application for its 2017 class. The i.Lab incubator is open to UVA students, faculty and staff as well as the local community, with for-profit and nonprofit business ideas.
Virginia’s public universities showed modest overall enrollment growth for the fall semester, although seven of the 15 schools lost students. The decline was experienced by schools that already enroll the highest numbers of in-state students, posing potential unintended consequences from an effort at the General Assembly to cap out-of-state enrollment, members of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia say.
Virginia’s public universities showed modest overall enrollment growth for the fall semester, although seven of the 15 schools lost students. The decline was experienced by schools that already enroll the highest numbers of in-state students, posing potential unintended consequences from an effort at the General Assembly to cap out-of-state enrollment, members of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia say.
Presidents give farewell addresses primarily to reflect on their achievements during their four or eight years, sometimes even including expressions of regret for promises left unfulfilled, said Marc Selverstone, associate professor at UVA’s Miller Center, which studies the presidency.
Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, said McAuliffe’s hands have been tied by an opposing legislature, leaving the governor to focus his “considerable energies” on economic development and unilateral executive orders.
The danger for Trump is heightened given the sprawling nature of his business, the Trump Organization. “We’ve had presidents before who were rich, but we’re in some uncharted territory given Trump’s wealth and his myriad of business interests,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a UVA law professor who specializes in constitutional separation of powers.
Guided by influential conservatives, President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will nominate a Supreme Court justice within the first two weeks of taking office on Jan. 20, but his candidate could still easily miss what remains of the high court’s current term. “I assume the Senate will at least go through due diligence, usually two or three months,” said Doug Laycock, a UVA law professor, adding that it might be likely that Trump’s pick will not be seated in time to participate this year.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist with UVA’s Center for Politics, told VOA the speech was different from others given by presidents before they left office. “Certainly, it was untraditional; we’ve never had a farewell address like this. One can only imagine what George Washington, or for that matter Dwight Eisenhower, who had the most famous farewell address, would have thought of this manner of delivery. It was more like a political rally.”
The Donald Trump who took questions from reporters Tuesday in his first press conference as president-elect was the same combative, short-tempered figure the American public saw on the 2016 campaign trail, down to the red power tie. Russell Riley, associate professor at UVA’s nonpartisan Miller Center, said Trump’s remarks demonstrated a “personalization that you just do not see in the history of the presidency.”
All parents want their children to engage with teachers and develop a caring bond. Now, a new study of the stress levels of preschoolers underscores the health impact of teacher-child relationships. Researchers, including Amanda Williford of the University of Virginia, wanted to see if encouraging a supportive teacher-child relationship could affect that heightened stress level, especially for preschoolers with behavioral problems. Such children are more likely to have higher cortisol levels and sustain those levels during the day, when the hormone should normally decline.
Edgar Gunter, a UVA professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, said that maintaining tire pressure and rotating car tires are crucial safety measures that few drivers do. “It’s so important to train kids early on in high school about vehicle stability,” Gunter said.
(By Connie Whittaker Dunlop, executive director for professional advancement at the Darden School of Business) As the director of coaching programs at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, I remind my coaches that the path toward expertise has been studied extensively across a variety of domains, from the arts of music, acting, and ballet to the sciences of surgery, aviation and computer programming.
Dry eye specialty optometrists may soon be able to add new tools to their treatment arsenal, as international research progresses on new therapies. UVA researchers hope that a natural protein found in tears may one day offer relief to dry eye patients.
(Commentary by Kyle Kondik of UVA’s Center for Politics) When Donald Trump takes the oath of office Jan. 20, he will complete a remarkable journey, going from private citizen to the highest elected office in the nation without any elected stop in between. His journey is one that is we are increasingly seeing at the gubernatorial level.
(By Kostadin Kushlev, research associate in UVA’s psychology department) Could our increasing reliance on information from devices, rather than from other people, be costing us opportunities to build social capital? My collaborator Jason Proulx and I looked at the relationship between how frequently people used their phones to obtain information and how much they trusted strangers.
A criticism of the faculty reward system is that it tends to value research over teaching. A working paper co-written by UVA’s Sarah Turner offers new evidence in support of that contention. Yet the paper asserts that universities behave “rationally” in making such decisions, and suggests that prizing research output over teaching doesn’t necessarily affect educational quality.
Now, a new study looking into this form of magical thinking provides even more insight into how the mind tricks itself into believing in its own best intentions. As it turns out, by focusing on a new calendar-defined cycle, like the beginning of a new week, month or year, we can make any date feel more distant than it really is, thus allowing ourselves to become overly optimistic and less focused on future obstacles. The two authors of the study, Marie Hennecke, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Zurich, and Benjamin Converse, a professor of public policy at the University of V...
A UVA political analyst says that the Republican wins in Tuesday’s special elections mean controversial Democratic legislation might not make the light of day. "Which means that there will be no chamber that's allied to Governor McAuliffe in any way. Had Democrats won, it would have been a 20-20 Senate which would have allowed the tie-breaking vote by Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam to give them control," said Geoffrey Skelley of the UVA Center for Politics.