On Thursday, the small plaque marking a century of slave auctions suddenly went missing, stirring consternation and controversy in a city already struggling with its history. “It was disturbing,” said Jalane Schmidt, a UVA associate professor of religious studies. “Although this slave auction plaque was so small and set in the ground and you could walk over it, it was the only thing we had to commemorate the slaves whose lives were torn apart there.”
University of Virginia students are putting aside a big rivalry to test technologies that may one day be found in self-driving cars. On Saturday, they teamed up with students from Virginia Tech to test drones in the air and on the ground at Milton Field in Albemarle County.
Students from the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech are working together to compete in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition in Dubai on Feb. 26. The team met up at Milton Field on Saturday to test their unmanned air and ground vehicles for the challenges they'll face in the competition.
As health organizations around the world try to shut down the spread of the virulent coronavirus that has killed more than 800 people in China, a group of computer science majors who were high school friends has developed a website to track reported cases worldwide. Trackcorona.live is the creation of University of Virginia undergraduates James Yun and Soukarya Ghosh; Bilguunzaya Battogtokh, of Stanford University; and Austin Stout, of Virginia Tech. The four are friends from Arlington’s Yorktown High School.
(Commentary by Ruth Mason, Edwin S. Cohen Distinguished Professor of Law and Taxation) France and the U.S. have managed to avoid turning their recent trade skirmish into a war – for now. The dispute involves France’s decision last summer to unilaterally reach outside the United States-French tax treaty framework to tax U.S. tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. Calling the French tax an illegal trade practice, the U.S. vowed to retaliate with 100% tariffs on a broad range of French products.
(Commentary by Nicole Hemmer, research associate at UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs) The Democratic presidential primary has been under way for more than a year. But it wasn't until last Monday that voters got their first chance to weigh in on who should be the party's nominee. The storied Iowa caucuses – which have kicked off the Democratic race since 1972, in large part because of their complex rules – seemed especially important this year, given the large Democratic field. So all eyes were on Iowa on Monday night.
The embrace of Trump is for better or worse. Trump retains a propensity for controversy, and there is the potential for new, damaging information from lawsuits and investigations or an economic slowdown triggered by an outside event, such as a significantly wider spread of the novel coronavirus. “The danger for Republicans is the president collapses in the fall and he drags his party down with him,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball election forecast at the University of Virginia.
“Buttigieg is only popular in heavily white states. He’s likely to crash and burn in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia politics expert.
The revolutionary drums don’t sound in the Buttigieg campaign, but a melody of ideals and hope of air obamaniano. For J. Miles Coleman, an analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, the comparison is evident. “His appeal to values, optimism, the elevation of speech … It is also similar in his approach to place himself as a new sap against the usual Washington,” he explains.
Political observers note that House incumbents generally win primary elections. “But every cycle, there usually is an upset or two,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor for Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It is hard to know what the real state of play is in the TX-12 primary, but the amount of money being spent and the involvement of outside groups like the Club for Growth suggests that this may indeed be a competitive race.”
Analysts say it's no surprise that women express more anxiety about a woman defeating Trump, given that through personal experience, they're familiar with the barriers of sexism. “Women are more likely to have experienced or observed gender discrimination or sexism,” said Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
The secession of a county or city would require approval from the Virginia and West Virginia legislatures and Congress, said John Harrison, a UVA School of Law professor and an expert on constitutional law. “There’s a way to do it, but the counties can’t just do it on their own,” he said. “It has the three steps, although again, if everyone wanted it to happen, it would happen easily.”
A.E. Dick Howard, a leading scholar on the U.S. and Virginia constitutions and UVA Law School professor, says Vexit is a way for people distressed over the Democratic takeover in Richmond to make a statement. “But it’s hard to take this proposal seriously except as a talking point,” said Howard, who oversaw the rewrite of the current Virginia Constitution.
Patients in UVA Health’s outpatient clinics can enroll on-site through agreements with 42 localities, according to Albemarle’s Department of Social Services. The number of uninsured patients referred to UVA’s Medicaid Unit has increased from 2,118 in fiscal year 2018 to 3,390 in fiscal 2019. Of the additional referrals, 1,117 were approved for Medicaid coverage. Of those, 279 lived in Albemarle. The enrollments already are helping to improve health outcomes in the state, according to researchers.
The vast majority of woolly mammoths went extinct at the end of the last ice age, but small, isolated populations managed to hold out for a little while longer. New research from a team including UVA scientists uncovers the extent to which at least one of these final mammoths suffered due to its many mutations.
A new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business has found that companies that appoint more women to their boards are able to fuel groundbreaking innovation, improve efficiency, spur growth, increase competitiveness and reduce risk. “Women tend to be more cautious, long-term oriented, and more community-driven, while men might be more driven by reputation, wealth and personal success,” said UBC Sauder professor Kai Li, who co-authored the study with fellow UBC Sauder professor Dale Griffin and Ting Xu from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
In the fall of 2017, a University of Virginia assistant professor and two graduate students used a ground-based autonomous robot to scan and map the tunnel using Lidar (light detection and ranging, also known as 3-D laser scanning). The result was a three-dimensional map of the tunnel that can be used for restoration or construction projects in the future.
A prominent national organization has upgraded the chances of two Republican congressmen who are running for reelection in Florida. Last week, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics unveiled its latest look at the 2020 U.S. House races. In its latest “Sabato’s Crystal Ball,” the center kept Democrats as the favorites to retain control of the House but gave a boost in almost a dozen races to Republicans looking to keep seats in the GOP column.
The ad cites Sen. Gary Peters' ranking as one of the most “effective” senators according to the nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University. The GOP has sought to counter Peters' bipartisan pitch by saying he votes with Democratic leadership “95% of the time.”