(Commentary co-written by UVA law Micah Schwartzman and Richard Schragger) During the American Revolution, four times more black Americans served as loyalists to the Crown than served as patriots. They joined the British in high numbers in response to promises of emancipation. And yet the enduring memory of black participation in that war would become the image of the faithful slave.
Seventy-five percent of Australians hold an implicit bias against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a study has found. The study, published in the Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, is based on more than 11,000 unique responses to an implicit association test over 10 years. The data comes from an implicit association test that was established as part of a collaboration between Project Implicit, a global project founded by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia.
UVA professor Tomonari Furukama and his team of engineers are working on a new robot that uses ultraviolet light and heat rays to kill COVID-19 pathogens.
UVA will spend nearly $400,000 to purchase masks and protective gear in an effort to safely reopen in the fall. The university has ordered 25,000 “welcome back kits” from Bright Ideas LLC, a business in Troy. It also has ordered face masks.
The University of Virginia says it will be providing all staff and students masks prior to the start of the fall semester. UVA recently announced faculty and staff will receive two face masks, one gray and one black. In addition to masks, students will receive a full welcome back kit that contain a drawstring bag, hand sanitizer, and a tool to help open doors and press buttons without the use of fingers.
A large Black Lives Matter protest and march occurred Monday afternoon. Hundreds of protesters began along Main Street near the University of Virginia Medical Center, and protesters marched toward downtown, then returned to UVA. The protest, organized by a black resident at the UVA School of Medicine, was organized with goals such as releasing more people from prisons and jails due to high risk of COVID-19, demilitarization and defunding of the Charlottesville Police Department and removing CPD from Charlottesville City Schools.
(Commentary) Eighteen years ago, John Edwin Mason, who teaches African history and the history of photography at UVA, began making photographs at Eastside Speedway, a minor-league drag racing outpost in Waynesboro. There, to his surprise, he found a multiracial community of racers, fans and track personnel, united by their love of racing, with tight, interracial friendships going back decades.
Researchers from UVA, Virginia Tech and Australia’s University of New South Wales have come across a new molecule that manipulates the metabolic process so that the body burns off more fat than is actually necessary, reducing body fat in mice without changes to their diet.
(Commentary) Given the challenges in bringing these cases and getting convictions, is there a better way to prevent unjustified force by the police? UVA law professor Barbara Armacost presents an alternative approach to preventing excessive force by police officers.
In an election most analysts believe will come down to a handful of closely divided states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, even minor defections or a dip in turnout among the Republican ranks could imperil Trump’s chances. “It probably should be concerning for the president, even though it’s reasonable to say he still maintains strong support among Republicans,” said Kyle Kondik of UVA’s Center for Politics.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, media studies professor at the University of Virginia, says: “Mark Zuckerberg has been unwilling to stand up for the interests of Facebook users over the interests of Donald Trump.” Many point to fear of antitrust, content and privacy regulation around the world as the motive for the decision. But Vaidhyanathan argues that Facebook faces an even “blunter threat” from strongman leaders such as Trump, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
The Monument Fund, plaintiffs in a long-running civil suit against the city of Charlottesville that sought to stop the city’s removal of its Confederate statues, is asking the judge who ruled in their favor last year to partially dissolve a key part of that decision. “At this point there’s not actually a real reason for the current judge, Judge Moore, to maintain that permanent injunction," UVA law professor Richard Schragger said, “because the law under which it was granted is no longer in existence.”
(Subscription required) UVA law professor Rachel Harmon, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who specialized in criminal cases against law-enforcement officials, said she knows of no federal law requiring U.S. officers to identify their agency, either visually or verbally.
A group of artificial-intelligence experts, including computer vision researcher and lead author Erik Learned-Miller of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences, and co-authors including computer scientist Vicente Ordóñez of the University of Virginia, recently proposed a new model for managing facial-recognition technologies at the federal level. They propose an FDA-inspired model that categorizes these technologies by degrees of risk and would institute corresponding controls.
In the past couple of decades, we’ve had satellites trained on Earth’s ice sheets, documenting climate change-induced losses. But those years are a small sample when it comes to understanding the range of behavior these frozen areas can exhibit over the eons of geologic time. Adds Lauren Simkins, a glacial geologist at the University of Virginia, who was not involved with the study, “Some people are going to think that’s probably the wrong interpretation.” Simkins says that it's possible those ridges formed in other ways.
(Commentary) Whatever one thinks of the specific debates regarding police tactics or allegations of institutional and systemic racism, it’s obvious there is a significant, shameless disparity between blacks and whites in America. Remedying that requires more than self-comforting public gestures expressing solidarity with the black community or BLM protesters. This is especially the case when the proportion of black children raised in single-parent families is 65%, more than double the number of white children. As UVA sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has often argued, family instability...
Diet and gut microbiota can affect the outcome of chemotherapy – and likely many other medical treatments – because of ripple effects that begin in our gut, new research suggests. University of Virginia scientists found that diet can cause microbes in the gut to trigger changes in the host's response to a chemotherapy drug. Common components of our daily diets (for example, amino acids) could either increase or decrease both the effectiveness and toxicity of the drugs used for cancer treatment, the researchers found.
The Propel Management Consulting Program is a collaboration between the CVSBDC and the UVA Career Center. Students who had industry internships canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be able to use their skills to help businesses transition online in response to the pandemic. The projects will target Fluvanna, Louisa, Orange and Greene counties.
More than a thousand people marched from downtown Charlottesville to the University of Virginia on Sunday evening to demand justice and affirm that black lives matter. The march was led by UVA students Tyler Tinsley and Joshua St. Hill, who, upon reaching the Rotunda, urged the crowd to keep pushing for police accountability even after “BLM” is no longer trending online.