At a rate of one or two a week, Swiss banks are doing what was once unthinkable: revealing to the world how they helped wealthy Americans cheat on their taxes. Broadening the push, the U.S. in 2013 offered to forgo prosecuting any Swiss bank that came clean on tax-evasion tactics. So far this year, the 41 banks paid combined penalties of $354.5 million, with BSI SA paying the lion’s share, or $211 million. It’s the most non-prosecution agreements negotiated together, according to Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies corporate prosecutions. ...
With a reporter's eye and an artist's heart, Svetlana Alexievich writes of the catastrophes, upheaval and personal woes that have afflicted the Soviet Union and the troubled countries that succeeded it. Her writings, characterized by plain language and detail so visceral it's sometimes painful to read, won her this year's Nobel literature prize. "Her goal is to communicate the history of human feeling. The very fact that it transcends any easy category is part of what makes it great," said Andrew Kaufman, a Russian literature scholar at the University of Virginia.
President Obama also nominated Channing D. Phillips for the District of Columbia on Thursday. Phillips has been deputy assistant associate general for the Attorney General since 2010. Phillips received a law degree from Howard University School of Law and a B.A. from the University of Virginia.
(By Andrew D. Kaufman, Russian literature scholar at the University of Virginia) As Belarusian author and journalist Svetlana Alexievich wins the Nobel Prize in Literature amid political turmoil at home, and Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to drop bombs in Syria, Belarusians and Russians alike have a lot to think about these days. Here’s an annotated list of the cream of Russian literature.
Research results are starting to come in on the impact of the health care reform law often referred to as “Obamacare.” Among them is a new study out of the University of Virginia that looks at one specific group: low-income patients that are HIV positive.
"Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?" asks a working paper from University of Virginia that analyzes the heightened focus on academic skills reaching the earliest grade levels. When educator Tim Walker began to investigate how Finland educates its earliest learners, he discovered a fluid schedule that still emphasized the things that have been pushed out of America's classrooms.
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...