The issue of how minority youth are perceived and treated by society was the topic of discussion Thursday at a conference at the University of Virginia. The “Youth of Color Matter” conference hosted over 100 college students and faculty members to tackle the inequalities that ethnic minority youths face.
More than 20 new films have been added to the Virginia Film Festival lineup, festival officials announced Wednesday. Tickets to screenings of the new additions will go on sale at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The festival, scheduled for Nov. 5 to 8 in a variety of Charlottesville venues, is presented by the University of Virginia and the Office of the Provost and Vice Provost for the Arts.
A defining feature of the world economy over the past 15 years was the unprecedented accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves. Central banks, led by those in China and the oil-producing states, built up enormous hoards of other countries’ currencies. Global reserves swelled from $1.8 trillion in 2000 to $12 trillion by mid-2014. That proved to be a high point. Since then reserves have dropped by at least $500 billion. Controlling for the range of things that influence interest rates, from growth to demography, economists have attempted to gauge the impact of reserve accumulation. F...
In her books, 67-year-old Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich is known for layering the voices of real people whose stories she collects and edits together, in books exploring topics such as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet–Afghan War and the lives of Soviet women who volunteered on the front lines in World War II. Russian literature expert Andy Kaufman of the University of Virginia tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson that Alexievich has created a unique genre that is “somewhere between history and fiction, history and art,” rewriting ...
Big data is also bringing innovation to government agencies and to universities. Donald E. Brown, director of the Data Science Institute at the University of Virginia, is working with the Department of Homeland Security to determine which supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in energy are vulnerable to attack. In addition the University of Virginia is using big data algorithms to predict energy usage for campus buildings. The university’s Big Data Institute collects about a terabyte of data a day on the school’s electric grid.
Not only do boys of divorced parents usually suffer the loss of a male role model in the home, some also receive insufficient attention and discipline from a weary single mother tasked with playing two roles. “Crime rates are higher in cities, neighborhoods and states that have fewer married parents,” said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “While most kids raised by single parents turn out just fine, boys are more likely to struggle with violence when they don’t have both parents. While there are some common-sense ...
Last year, we recruited 29 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question with the same data set. Teams approached the data with a wide array of analytical techniques, and obtained highly varied results. Next, we organized rounds of peer feedback, technique refinement and joint discussion to see whether the initial variety could be channelled into a joint conclusion. We found that the overall group consensus was much more tentative than would be expected from a single-team analysis. Together with psychologist Brian Nosek, director of the Center for Open Science in Cha...
The University of Virginia brought together psychiatric experts to talk about why people link mental health issues with gun violence and mass shootings. Wednesday’s forum examined the often stereotypical and misjudged reasons mental illness is associated with homicidal behaviors.
After the mass shooting at an Oregon Community College, the issue of gun control and mental health is taking center stage once again. At a panel discussion, professors came to the Jordan Hall Conference Center Auditorium at the University of Virginia School of Medicine to look at links between mental illness and gun violence.
Pediatricians from the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital have developed a test that takes into account numerous risks factors of heart disease. But these individuals are also at very high risk for growing type 2 diabetes and CVD, stated Dr. Mark DeBoer.
Maybe a recession is just what the doctor ordered. Economic downturns, it turns out, appear to be good for health, according to a study released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research by Christopher Ruhm, a professor at the University of Virginia, builds upon earlier studies looking at the impact of economic downturns on health. “There is considerable evidence that harmful behaviors–like heavy drinking and smoking–decrease in bad economic times, whereas health-enhancing activities such as exercise and social interactions increase,” Mr. ...
Studies show habits picked up as a child, can lead to developing diabetes and heart disease later in life, and a new test can predict a child's future risk of those illnesses. Dr. Mark DeBoer, MD, of the University of Virginia Department of Pediatrics, and Dr. Matthew Gurka, West Virginia University's School of Public Health, created the Metabolic Syndrome Severity Calculator. It predicts a teen's future risk by evaluating their blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol. The test creates a scale, showing exactly how at risk the child is for developing a cardiovasc...
A new diagnostic test developed by a University of Virginia Children’s Hospital pediatrician and collaborators from West Virginia University and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital is giving physicians nationwide the ability to assess more accurately an adolescent’s risk for cardiovascular disease.
In the science fiction thriller “Minority Report,” a police force known as PreCrime uses mutated human psychics to identify criminals before they act. The U.S. Army is working toward a similar goal — not by reading minds but by crunching data. Using the military records of all 975,057 soldiers who served during a six-year period, researchers have developed an algorithm they hope can help prevent severe, violent crimes by identifying those at greatest risk of becoming perpetrators. An intensive violence-prevention program “would make sense only if the interven...
A new study has found that while recessions are unfortunate for the economy, they're great for your health. Mortality rates actually decrease substantially during recessions, found Christopher J. Ruhm at the University of Virginia in a new study, and the physical health of the American public actually improves.
Early academic training has become an obsession among child development experts and teachers of young children as the Common Core standards have encroached upon the earliest years of schooling. Kindergarten has already undergone a radical transformation. University of Virginia researchers Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem found that in 2006, 65% of kindergarten teachers -- more than double the number in 1998 -- thought most children should learn to read on their watch. Meanwhile, the exposure to social studies, science, music, and art -- the staples of a well-rounded early childhood education ...
What will happen to digital collections of books, movies, and music when the tech giants fall? When you purchase a movie from Amazon Instant Video, you’re not buying it, exactly. It’s more like renting indefinitely. This distinction matters if your notion of “buying” is that you pay for something once and then you get to keep that thing for as long as you want. Increasingly, in the world of digital goods, a purchasing transaction isn’t that simple. For streaming purchases, the unfortunate fate of one’s collection is pretty straightforward: “Let’s...
Washington, D.C., introduced bill on Tuesday that would make it the first US city to mandate paid family leave for all its residents. Meanwhile, both Republicans and Democrats are embracing paid family leave as a campaign issue. “If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said no chance,” says Christopher Ruhm, a leading researcher on the impact of paid leave policies and a professor of economics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “But I’ve gone from thinking it’s extremely unlikely to thinking there’s a reasonable chance, and there’s ...
Fellow members of the civil rights community and former colleagues who filled Washington’s historic Lincoln Theatre on Tuesday honored late civil rights icon Julian Bond for his commitment to social justice and to his family and his work exposing younger generations to the movement. After Bond lost his bid for Congress, he spent his life on the speaking circuit and taught at a number of universities, most recently at the University of Virginia. “Above all, he taught his students that the kind of politics that brought us war, joblessness and homelessness was ‘not the kind of p...
Wealthy figures certainly have ascended to the White House before. Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, for instance, are famous scions of vast fortunes. Trump “stands out because he’s not just a businessman,” said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “He’s the Flo Ziegfeld or the P.T. Barnum of politics. He’s an impresario. He’s genuinely unique.”