(Commentary by Eric Loth, chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering) A network of 56,000 turbines, which are producing nearly 100,000 megawatts nationwide, has propelled the wind industry to new heights. The next potential for tremendous growth will be along our coasts, where the energy resources are even higher since the wind is faster and more consistent.
The president’s re-election could hinge on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, said Kyle Kondik at UVA’s Center for Politics. Trump never visited Michigan to stump for James in 2018 – Vice President Mike Pence did – but James earned the president’s endorsement before the Republican primary.
Lead author Julia Lee of the University of Michigan said the research was inspired by the prevalence and high cost of employee fraud. Estimates put the cost at up to $3.7 trillion worldwide of dishonest behavior by employees. Lee and her co-authors Madeline Ong of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Bidhan Parmar of the University of Virginia and Elinor Amit of Brown University and Tel Aviv University, conducted three studies to measure whether thinking honesty takes effort could predict subsequent dishonest behavior because it helps people justify their behaviors.
States manage and oversee 529 savings plans and collect fees to do it. UVA law professor Quinn Curtis argues that since states use some of those management fees for other programs, they have little incentive to keep costs down. But the subsidies at both the state and federal level are having an impact. Between 2010 and 2017, the number of 529 accounts grew 30% to 13.6 million. The accounts now hold 30% of all college savings—with plan assets in 2017 totaling $294 billion.
On Tuesday, the UVA Health System sent an alert about a confirmed severe case of adenovirus “within the university community.” Pamela Sutton-Wallace, the CEO of the health system, said she notified readers in an abundance of caution.
In a blog post last June, UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham pointed out that, contrary to the emerging “failure to replicate” claim attached to the 30-million-word gap, “the conceptual idea that socioeconomic status and volume of caregiver-to-child speech has been replicated” numerous times.
In many ways, rural parts of Virginia are thriving. Median household income in rural Virginia is rising faster than in urban parts of the state. And poverty in rural Virginia is falling faster than in metro Virginia. “Rural areas are aging faster. They’re losing a lot of their adults who are retiring, and they’ve also lost a lot of young adults who are moving out," says Hamilton Lombard, a researcher at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
When Bronco Mendenhall and wife Holly stepped up and made the first contribution to a new Virginia football facility, the reaction ranged from surprise to disbelief to astonishment.
Another lesson to be learned is the power of financial aid. Affordability is “probably the biggest factor” raising graduation rates, said Ben Castleman, education professor at the University of Virginia.
“This movement is interesting because they tend to be neutral in terms of politics,” said Robert Fatton, a Haiti analyst and politics professor at the University of Virginia. “In one way, that gives them strength. But it also gives them a rather weak hand, because the people who are accused have more power than the people who are accusing them. We’ll see what will happen, whether political parties in the opposition are going to hijack the movement for their political purposes.”
A major public health initiative aimed at preventing cervical cancer in at-risk Appalachian families from West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia is underway with support from an $11 million National Cancer Institute grant. The WVU Cancer Institute is collaborating with 10 health systems throughout Appalachia to conduct this research in close partnership with The Ohio State University (the lead institution), the University of Kentucky and the University of Virginia.
The Virginia Sea Grant is already working with the University of Virginia Institute for Environmental Negotiation, the Virginia Coastal Policy Center at William & Mary Law School and Old Dominion University to help smaller towns and counties further north in the Chesapeake Bay become more resilient to flooding and other coastal storm hazards.
Now Evans’ achievements extend beyond Telluride: he has received a prestigious Thomas Jefferson Scholarship, conferred by the University of Virginia, and plans to attend UVA next year. The scholarship has been in existence since 1980; applications for the honor flow in to UVA from all over the world. Evans will receive a total of $280,000, which will satisfy the full cost of attending UVA for four years including tuition, fees, books, supplies, room and board and personal and travel expenses.
Walter Hauser, professor emeritus in history at the University of Virginia, died in the care of his family and Hospice of the Piedmont on June 1, 2019, at the age of 91.
UVA student Sarah Daley has deep connections with China. She has a sister who was adopted from China in 2009, and Sarah spent the summer of 2018 teaching local students English in Hebei province. Both experiences left her with positive impressions of Chinese people and long-lasting friendships. Those connections led to Daley being honored by the Chinese embassy in the U.S., after she shared her stories to the world through an event hosted by the embassy and China Daily.
Considering the life Poag has lived, it’s impressive, bordering on amazing, that he has managed to graduate from high school with a 4.06 GPA and is headed to UVA.
Dean’s selection shows that House Democrats are “taking a long-term view” as they broach the question of whether to impeach Trump, said Ken Hughes, an expert on Watergate at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “They’re not trying to rush to any conclusion, they want to put this into historical perspective for the vast majority of the American people.”
The rest of the Democratic field is breaking down into Biden rivals and Biden replacements, as Kyle Kondik at UVA’s Center for Politics explained to me recently. “The Biden rivals are the candidates who hope to emerge as the main alternative to Biden and who can mobilize the support of younger, more liberal voters,” Kondik said.
Donna Chen, a professor at the University of Virginia, found that at the peak of rush hour, tolls on the Virginia Beltway HOT lanes run between $1.50 and $1.80 per mile. If drivers were to pay the same rates on Hogan’s proposed I-270 lanes, they would pay upward of $45 for the 25-mile trip from Frederick to Shady Grove.
Despite nearly 10 years of national economic growth—in what would be the longest U.S. expansion on record by the end of June 2019—states haven’t fully erased the effects of the recession. Instead of reaching the light at the end of the tunnel as the lost decade ends, some see the tunnel simply getting longer. This project benefited from the insights and expertise of external reviewers including Raymond C. Scheppach, professor of public policy, University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and former executive director of the National Governors Association.