John Cleese came to Charlottesville this week not to reprise famous roles with Monty Python, but to introduce paranormal research being conducted at UVA.
Kudos to NC State, University of Missouri, University of Virginia, University of Georgia, and the University of Michigan for placing top ten for both the men’s and women’s teams. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all four these teams share a women’s and men’s head coach: Braden Holloway at NC State, Greg Rhodenbaugh at Missouri, Todd DeSorbo for Virginia, Mike Bottom at Michigan, and Jack Bauerle at Georgia.
The University of Virginia will be a hotbed of softball action this weekend. The Cavaliers will take on ACC rival Virginia Tech in a three-game weekend series at The Park, while the 10th annual Cavalier Classic will welcome some of college softball’s top club teams to Charlottesville on Saturday and Sunday.
The 12-point swing is one of the largest shifts in support toward Democrats that the Reuters/Ipsos poll has measured over the past two years. If that trend continues, Republicans will struggle to keep control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, in the November elections, potentially dooming President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. “The real core for the Republicans is white, older white, and if they’re losing ground there, they’re going to have a tsunami,” said Larry Sabato, a UVA political scientist who closely tracks political races. “If that continues to November, ...
“When an apology keeps being issued over and over and a transgression keeps being repeated, the apology comes to have less meaning and less impact," said Gabrielle Adams, a professor at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. "When over and over [Facebook] keeps doing things that infringe on user privacy, at some point, apologies become empty words."
In Silicon Valley, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor whose book about Facebook, “Antisocial Media,” is due out in September, “Tools are technologies that generate other technologies.” When I asked an engineer friend who builds “developer tools” for his definition, he noted that a tool is distinct from a product, since a product is “experienced rather than used.” The iTunes Store, he said, is a product: “there are lots of songs you can download, but it’s just a static list.” A Web browser, by contrast, is a tool, because “the last mile of its use is underspecified.”
New businesses always face a significant risk of failure – especially when its founders are starting a business for the first time. “That’s why the most successful entrepreneurs are those who start early,” said Jason Brewster, incubator program director for UVA’s iLab. Brewster shared that advice with 600 students from local high schools and middle schools at the Tom Tom Founders Festival’s Youth Summit on Wednesday.
"Trump remains quite strong with Republicans at a time when Republican voters remain skeptical of their leaders outside of the White House," says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, a political newsletter published by UVA. "Indeed, GOP base voters' anger at their own leaders helps explain the Trump nomination in the first place."
Stephen Braga, a white-collar-criminal-defense professor at the UVA School of Law, said that the payment had potential ramifications for ongoing criminal probes of Trump, particularly given the claims of Cohen’s involvement.
Kyle Kondik, a political analyst with the UVA’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball, wrote Wednesday that “many will view Ryan’s retirement as a concession that Republicans are resigned to losing the House in the fall.”
The focus of the competition was the west end of the Downtown Mall – what used to be Vinegar Hill, a predominately African-American neighborhood that was bulldozed in 1964 in the era of urban renewal. “This was not a project where the site’s blocked off, the construction happens,” UVA professor Beth Meyer, who also served on the competition’s jury. “We’re in a community that does not have authentic community engagement processes.”
A UVA neuroscience lab has found that the brain directly connects to the immune system of the body. This means the doctors could load the brain with custom blends of immune cells to fight genetic disorders like Alzheimer's.
Some local entrepreneurs are walking away with some big prizes after the Tom Tom Founders Festival Crowdfunded Pitch Night on Wednesday. Another entrepreneur that took home a prize Wednesday night was Bennett Reck. His company, called Ripe Gelato, will get a mentorship with the i.Lab at the University of Virginia.
The Tom Tom Founders Festival is highlighting the future of innovation across the commonwealth. On Thursday, 14 college startup companies from 11 universities will be pitching their ideas for the chance to win over $20,000 in prizes. Groups like UVA startup Kestrel: their idea came from learning millions of babies born prematurely each year that are at risk of brain damage when moving between hospitals by ambulance or helicopter.
One obvious impediment to economic growth in Virginia is that there aren’t enough workers to fit the needs of the new economy. That’s why Gov. Ralph Northam, has proposed a significant expansion of UVA’s College at Wise.
(Commentary by Kyle Kondik, political analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics) The political world was rocked Wednesday morning by House Speaker Paul Ryan’s decision to not seek reelection to his southeastern Wisconsin House seat.
The UVA Athletics Department announced that they’ll introduce the first “Wahoowa Weekend” on April 27-29, featuring home sporting events in football, track and field, baseball, and potentially the ACC men’s lacrosse tournament.
Privacy changes Facebook made to its platform in 2015 made it harder for third-party groups to get users’ data, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, the director of UVA’s Center for Media and Citizenship. And in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Facebook announced still more changes meant to further safeguard privacy.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has promised to protect user privacy before. Will this time be different?
"Facebook wants us to forget that it has been explicitly and openly in favor of every one of us exposing ourselves maximally for years," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies and author of an upcoming book on Facebook, “Antisocial Media.”
Brig. Gen. Kenneth "Ed" Brandt, a high-ranking chaplain in the U.S. Army National Guard, appears to have violated a little-known federal policy that bars active-duty military personnel from engaging in partisan political speech. A. Benjamin Spencer, a UVA law professor and an officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the U.S. Army Reserve, said the DOD's directive is intended to avoid the appearance of impropriety.