Vulnerable Republicans have abandoned re-election bids from Florida to California, with more congressional retirements this year than at any point since World War II, except for 1992, according to Kyle Kondik, an analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics. "Democrats should be able to pick up a significant chunk of the 24 seats they need to win the House just from open seats," Kondik said.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg CEO spent two days testifying before Congress this week about the social media platform's privacy issues and massive data breach, but UVA media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan summed up the issue in a single sentence. "The problem with Facebook is Facebook," he said.
Last year, some Virginians who got their insurance through Optima Health, a company owned by Sentara Healthcare, saw a massive spike in premiums. They’re still trying to figure out why their rates rose up to 170 percent. Dr. Rick Shannon sits at his desk at the University of Virginia, studying a map of the state that appeared in the local paper. As head of Health Affairs at UVA, he’s concerned about a dramatic increase in premiums for individual and single-family coverage in communities served by Sentara. That’s the parent company of insurer Optima Health and hospitals in five different parts ...
Well-coached, Zuckerberg offered his apologies, but Facebook has offered them repeatedly in the past. Indeed, he has become a professional apologizer. Democrats and Republicans both noted that the Facebook CEO has promised changes before and that nothing significant ever seems to happen. Other observers were similarly blunt. “When over and over [Facebook] keeps doing things that infringe on user privacy, at some point, apologies become empty words,” Gabrielle Adams, a professor at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, told The Washington Post.
The new legislation offered Wednesday would allow judicial review of Mueller's dismissal or that of any special counsel, to ensure it was for "good cause." Some law professors, such as UVA’s John Duffy, say the proposal conflicts with the principle that the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, "not just some fraction of it." Duffy said the framers of the Constitution believed impeachment the sole remedy for any presidential wrongdoing.
Legal experts said Concord’s apparent attempt to challenge Mueller’s charges could be a way for documents and details about the special counsel’s investigation to be released in discovery. Russia could potentially glean information about how the U.S. gathers intelligence, or even about its sources, according to Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, a UVA professor of law and Miller Center Senior Fellow. “Two things could happen. Now that they know this is being contested the government could decide it’s not worth us revealing this information and we’re not going to prosecute these people,” Prakas...
The Community Investment Collaborative and UVA’s iLab also awarded mentorships to two contestants. The iLab awarded the team behind Whipped Cream LLC a spot in their summer incubator program. The skin care company began when Christina Brock-Fortune, who had eczema, grew frustrated with her prescribed treatments.
According to the ratings done by UVA’s Larry Sabato, only 90 House seats out of 435 are considered competitive, with the incumbent party having even a risk of losing the seat. The other 80 percent of the body are in safe Democratic or Republican seats – and in many of the Republican ones especially, you have to take extreme hardline positions to survive a primary, stances with which even most Republicans don’t always agree.
Cognitive scientists have known for decades that simply mastering comprehension skills doesn’t ensure a young student will be able to apply them to whatever texts they’re confronted with on standardized tests and in their studies later in life. One of those cognitive scientists spoke on the Tuesday panel: Daniel Willingham, a UVA psychology professor who writes about the science behind reading comprehension.
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.”