Not only is [UVA lumnus] Gordon Sutton, president of family-owned petroleum distributor Tiger Fuels, going solar by adding rooftop panels to Tiger Fuel’s chain of convenience stores and gas stations, he also is growing solar by purchasing Altenergy, the Charlottesville-based developer who designed and installed those arrays.
Improving accessibility for individuals with disabilities isn't just about building ramps or creating more parking spots. It’s the communication that plays a key role, but that is often overlooked. A Charlottesville start-up is training local businesses on how to improve disability etiquette. Joe Jamison, the founder of VisitAble and a UVA graduate, said that not all businesses can make large changes like adding elevators. Instead, his start-up is able to provide other ways of creating an accessible environment.
Teaching college-level biology over the past year has also posed challenges. "STEM fields, biology and some of these other very content heavy, mechanism-driven courses are difficult in person, let alone on Zoom," said Sarah Kucenas, a UVA professor of biology.
Platonic parenting, according to Naomi R. Cahn, a law professor and director of the Family Law Center at the UVA School of Law, is an international movement that probably got a boost from the pandemic because dating slowed down and the ticking of the biological clock may have seemed much louder.
The daily rhythm is a twist on a traditional schedule that’s popular in Montessori and Waldorf education circles. “Rather than focusing on what time things happen, we’re focusing on the general flow of what happens next,” says Theresa, a Seattle-area mother of two who is the creator behind Montessori in Real Life. For kids, the benefits are clear. “Young children really thrive on routines and set ways to do things,” says Angeline Lillard, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius.”
"Economically, it is taking longer for young adults to find the kind of stable jobs that make them feel financially ready to have kids," said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. "Culturally, people are investing more in education and work—and they accord less importance to family."
Paul Seaborn, an assistant professor of commerce at UVA, agrees that debt capital markets are essential for mature consumer products industries, but he also thinks cannabis is going to stay weird for a long time yet. "Every month, every year the industry is becoming more normal, but that doesn't mean that it's gone mainstream by any means," said Seaborn. "There's going to be a need for companies like this one who specialize in cannabis."
(Video) Stephen Mull, UVA’s vice provost for global affairs, has argued that Iran and the West could enter diplomatic procedures to try to reach agreements on their common interests. The U.S. Senior Foreign Service officer has suggested a diplomatic intervention could help resolve tensions between the West and Iran. Mull, who spearheaded the U.S. enactment of the Iran nuclear deal, added that reaching agreements on both parties’ interests in common could help “make hostage-taking go away.”
(Audio) UVA Vice Provost for Global Affairs Stephen Mull, former U.S. ambassador to Poland and lead implementer of the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, discusses the talks surrounding a nuclear deal with Iran. He spoke with Bloomberg's David Westin.
(Commentary) Here’s the real problem: The oversight board was a flawed idea from the start. Such self-regulation “is an excellent way to appear to promote particular values and keep scrutiny and regulation to a minimum,” UVA media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan observed last year.
Academics and policy experts have been pushing for Facebook and other social media companies to permanently ban the former president. UVA School of Law professor Danielle Keats Citron and University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor Hany Farid wrote in Slate in February: “The decision around Trump’s ban will be among the first the Facebook Oversight Board will make, but it is hard to imagine a more consequential case. The world is watching to see if the board is capable of speaking truth to power, to both Zuckerberg and Trump. In saying enough is enough, the board will show t...
UVA professor John Edwin Mason, the scholar National Geographic tapped to examine the archives for the magazine’s Race Issue, noted to Vox in 2018 that “the magazine was born at the height of so-called ‘scientific’ racism and imperialism,” a time when the U.S. was rapidly developing as a leading global industrial power. It was also birthing the American eugenics movement. It was this culture of white supremacy, Mason said then, “that shaped the outlook of the magazine’s editors, writers, and photographers, who were always white and almost always men.”
Meredith D. Clark, a UVA assistant professor of media studies, argues that the misuse of woke is a combination of an elite class taking the word and making it toxic to serve their own purposes; and in some cases, a not-so-subtle form of anti-Blackness.
(By Lisa Russ Spaar, professor of English and creative writing) For this entry in my Second Acts column, I take the liberty of pairing Judith Hall’s second and fifth poetry collections.
Children, of course, have personality for miles, and there’s no doubt that some kids are more playful than others. But there’s still no clear connection between playfulness and overall abilities, says UVA psychologist Angeline Lillard. Lillard and colleagues reviewed the state of the science on pretend play and cognitive development in a 2013 report in Psychological Bulletin. Whether studies looked at problem-solving, creativity, intelligence or social skills, there was no consistent sign that playful children had any advantages. “People will say, absolutely, pretend play helps development, bu...
A new UVA study is looking into what happens in the brain when children learn math.
Boffins in China and the U.S. have developed a technique to hide a backdoor in a machine-learning model so it only appears when the model is compressed for deployment on a mobile device. Yulong Tian and Fengyuan Xu, from Nanjing University, and Fnu Suya and David Evans, from University of Virginia, describe their approach to ML model manipulation in a paper distributed via ArXiv, titled “Stealthy Backdoors as Compression Artifacts.”
Northam also stopped by the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia on Wednesday. He signed bipartisan legislation establishing the Enslaved Ancestor College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program.
Gov. Ralph Northam made a stop in Charlottesville Wednesday morning to sign a bill that will honor descendants of enslaved laborers. Northam signed a bill that establishes the Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program. It will provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved people who helped build the University of Virginia and other colleges in the commonwealth. At a small ceremony in front of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, Northam called this bill – which will provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved laborers – a huge step in the right direction.
With institutions more focused than ever on diversity, equity and inclusion, so too has QS in a revamped list of top U.S. colleges and universities. The company that oversees the esteemed World University Rankings felt it was important again to highlight the category and showcase “which are doing most to reduce sectoral gender and racial inequities.” [UVA ranks in the top 50.]