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.
UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute noted, “The stay-at-home order and other community mitigation strategies undertaken in Virginia successfully flattened the curve and prevented hospitals from being overwhelmed. … The model estimates that by taking a cautious approach to reopening, and improving testing and tracing, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria [region] has avoided 123,711 cases since May 15.”
The Innocence Project at UVA has launched a social media campaign to free a 40-year-old man who was locked up at the age of 16 for a murder it now appears he did not commit. The proof came in a surprising way.
Our dear Logan went into the arms of Jesus Wednesday, June 24, 2020. He had a kind and compassionate heart, particularly toward children and dogs. As a young child and onward, he would point them out and wanted to visit with them. Logan excelled in his studies, attending the University of Virginia. He was studying business in the Commerce School.
Charlottesville resident Rob Grainger isn’t a public health official, but as a biology researcher at UVA, he can read scientific data, and he’s alarmed by the increase in COVID-19 cases in Charlottesville and Albemarle.
UVA law professor Kim Forde-Mazrui explained that the Supreme Court ruling directly protects people only against disparate treatment on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status, though he said it seems likely that their reasoning opens the door to disparate impact claims on the basis of these categories, as well.
Researchers from the UVA School of Medicine are using blood tests to predict how the coronavirus can affect a person’s body. This discovery examines cytokines, which are proteins produced by immune cells, and the role they play in severe over-reactions by the immune system.
Professors and students at UVA’s Curry School of Education teamed with Charlottesville City School to open the city’s first Freedom School this summer. The free, virtual program is for third- through fifth-grade students in Charlottesville and Albemarle County public schools. Participating students will receive online instructions from Servant Leader Interns from the Curry School. They will also be given free books, supplies and meals, if needed.
The NFL has provided funding to four groups working to create safer helmets as part of the NFL Helmet Challenge initiative that launched in 2019, including the University of Virginia. A release from the league shows that they have distributed $1.37 million in grants to support the creation of prototype helmets by July 2021.