(Commentary by Russell Riley, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs) One of the main jobs for any president confronting major crisis is distinguishing merely unimaginable options from the genuinely impossible. Indeed, history indicates that a president relying on gifted help and applying courageous leadership can take a problem that others deem unsolvable and – against overwhelming odds – make it go away.
(Commentary) Which brings us back to the big question for K-12 education: If schools improve, boosting the academic achievement of black students, does that increase their earnings as adults? A 2016 paper from UVA scholars Dajun Lin, Randall Lutter, and Christopher J. Ruhm indicates that the answer is yes. It finds that wages are related to academic skills, as measured at the end of high school – and not just for early career workers, but over the course of a lifetime. Even more importantly, it also finds that African Americans (and Hispanics) see a greater return to cognitive skills than Whit...
“During the Jim Crow era, local white officials routinely manipulated property tax assessments to overburden and punish black populations and as a hidden tax break to landowning white gentry,” said UVA historian Andrew Kahrl.
We know exercise improves everything from cardiovascular disease to one’s cognitive health. Observational studies have also seen physical activity lessen age-related vision loss, but until now it hasn’t been clear how causal that relationship has been. New UVA research is offering the first experimental evidence to show how exercise can directly slow, or even prevent, macular degeneration.
The Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band won’t do its annual round of grants this fall, but it will still be helping nonprofits. The fund is partnering with the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation for the special Community Recovery and Catalyst Grant program, and it is making a $1 million commitment to the program. Bama Works and CACF will leverage the partnership and gifts from UVA Health, Twice is Nice Fund, and the Enriching Communities grant program, to increase funds that are available to make grants.
A Richmond man convicted of a 1996 murder that happened when he was 16 years old, and which he has always maintained he did not commit, was granted a conditional pardon Wednesday by Gov. Ralph Northam. Rojai Fentress, 40, was sentenced to 53 years for the drug-related murder that happened after parole was abolished in Virginia. He was not set to be freed until 2043. His lawyers with the UVA School of Law’s Innocence Project sought a pardon in 2018.
Monuments to African American history are also crucial. Spaces such as the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers in Charlottesville, designed by Mabel O. Wilson in collaboration with Höweler + Yoon design, honor the lives of enslaved people who worked for and built the University of Virginia.
The University of Virginia has surveyed undergraduates as well as graduate and professional students about their preferences for the fall. In the survey, most students indicated that they could adapt to the scenarios that UVA administrators are considering for the fall semester – including a module-based semester and a monthlong delay of the beginning of classes – but it’s not yet clear what decision the university’s leadership will make.
For UVA music professor Fred Everrett Maus, there is much more to music than meets the ear. It presents listeners with the opportunity to understand gender, sexuality, memory, and more.
Since 2010, fewer than half a dozen smartphones have ever incorporated sensors on the rear, and it has never caught on. The reason, according to UVA computer scientist Seongkook Heo, is simply our unwillingness to learn new ways of interacting with devices. “Many users just buy their new phone, turn it on and start using it by touching what is on the screen,” he says. “Not many people look for new features and spend time learning them.”
UVA political science chair Jennifer Lawless spoke about the reports that American officials provided a written briefing to President Donald Trump that Russia paid Taliban militants to kill U.S. troops – and how the President responded.
(By John Edwin Mason, professor of African history and the history of photography) Recent protests in St. Paul evoke the work of Gordon Parks, an influential 20th-century interpreter of African American life and culture.
(By Dr. William Petri, professor of medicine) I am a physician and a scientist at the University of Virginia. I care for patients and conduct research to find better ways to diagnose and treat infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Here I’m sharing what is known about which treatments work, and which don’t, for the new coronavirus infection.
Everette Fortner, associate vice president at UVA’s career center, encourages students to speak up to their managers about their concerns with remote work. “Students are often afraid to ask and jeopardize their internship. Help your employer understand your situation. Don’t try to cover it up. ... It’s a matter of continually communicating with your manager about how to best get your work done in the living situation you’re in,” Fortner said.
A newly empowered Democratic trifecta – the Virginia House, Senate and Gov. Ralph Northam – passed 2,218 bills this session, most of which will come into effect July 1. Many are progressive measures, including making it easier to vote and easier for local governments to restrict guns in public places within their jurisdictions. “Virginia really isn’t the purple state it used to be,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the UVA Center for Politics’ nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns.
Researchers at Salesforce and the University of Virginia have proposed a new way to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings, the word representations used to train AI models to summarize, translate languages, and perform other prediction tasks. The team claims that correcting for certain regularities – like word frequency in large data sets – allows their method to “purify” the embeddings prior to inference, removing potentially gendered words.
A blood test may predict which COVID-19 patients are likely to need a ventilator. This finding could lead to a scoring system that would flag at-risk patients for closer monitoring and to personalized treatments. It may also help explain how diabetes makes outcomes worse, according to researchers from the UVA School of Medicine.
According to a study published by researchers from the University of Virginia, clinicians can examine the blood of COVID-19 patients to identify those at greatest risk of severe illness.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected students at colleges and universities since the outbreak. One program at the UVA Center for Politics gives students a second chance at a summer internship in the public sector.
The Supreme Court elated religious freedom advocates and alarmed secular groups with its Tuesday ruling on public funding for religious education. Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor who co-wrote a brief supporting the plaintiffs on behalf of multiple religious groups, described the decision as “incremental” and “building cautiously” on a 2017 case that ruled a Missouri church could use a state grant to resurface its playground.