Ground has been broken on a new interdisciplinary building that will be going in at the Dell on Emmet Street. According to a UVA release, the Contemplative Commons will include outdoor spaces such as contemplative gardens, a tree-lined courtyard and a pedestrian bridge across Emmet Street. A ceremony was held Friday to celebrate the groundbreaking, which began with a meditation session led by David Germano, the executive director of the Contemplative Sciences Center, which will be part of the Commons.
The UVA endowment’s 49% investment return for the year ending June 30 helped raise the total value of its investment portfolio to $14.5 billion. The University of Virginia Investment Management Company reported that the gains were led by private equity investments, which returned 98.7% for the fiscal year, while public equity and real assets returned 51.4% and 49%, respectively. Private equity is the endowment’s second-largest asset allocation at 26.4%, behind its 29.9% asset allocation to public equity.
Even in Indian summer, a soda, pop, energy drink, sweet tea or fruit-flavored punch might sound good when doing that end-of-season mowing or fall raking. UVA researchers and Mountain Empire Older Citizens hope to convince adults in Southwest Virginia that those drinks may taste good, but have bad health outcomes in a new program, iSIPsmarter.
In his new book, UVA historian Peter Norton punctures the claims of autonomous vehicle companies and warns that technology can’t cure the urban problems that cars created.
Dr. William A. Petri, an immunologist at the UVA School of Medicine, answers this week’s questions from readers on COVID-19.
Roshida Dowe has always been a hard worker. From her early days as a receptionist to her decision to go to law school [at UVA] and spend years as a consumer automotive finance lawyer in Silicon Valley, she is well-accustomed to the grind. But in 2018 at age 39, everything changed when she was laid off and decided to capitalize on her newfound joblessness by taking a year to travel the world.
(Commentary) I proudly serve on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Advisory Board for the One Love Foundation, which was founded in honor of Cockeysville native Yeardley Love, who was tragically killed by her former boyfriend in 2010 while they were students at the University of Virginia. Yeardley’s death, like Gabby’s, received copious media coverage; she, too, was a beautiful white woman. But the foundation created in her memory is dedicated to ending relationship abuse across a diverse spectrum, understanding that to make a profound difference in the lives of the next generation, we need to commit t...
(Commentary by Catrin Waters, student and volunteer with the High Atlas Foundation) Before you read this, I challenge you to pause and ask your body the question: how do you like the thoughts I think about you? When we make an active choice to listen to ourselves, we access the power of introspection. But as you likely realized within the first sentence of this article, that often isn’t comfortable. It is almost taboo to honestly ask yourself how you are, and even rarer to have the skills needed to be able to listen to the response.
Republican likely voters are more enthusiastic about voting in this election than Democratic likely voters 61% to 55%. J. Miles Coleman, a political analyst at the UVA Center for Politics, said that’ll be telling. “They may just want it more,” said Coleman.
(Subscription may be required) Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the Crystal Ball, a UVA political analysis newsletter, said these races are now part of the national conversation as much as elections for Congress or governor. "Election administration in general has become a bigger topic because of Donald Trump's frankly irresponsible claims about the integrity of the election, but also Democrats and others defending themselves against those claims," he said.
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, an election handicapper based at the University of Virginia, provided a similar analysis, noting that Biden's agenda, while popular in some districts, could be a liability in others where Republicans will attack the safety net expansion as government overreach. “Having some success to point to always seems preferable to failure,” Kondik said. “But let’s say the Democrats pass the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation package — maybe it helps them, or maybe it gives Republicans something to point to as they argue for checks and balances next...
(Video) Jennifer Lawless, chair of the University of Virginia politics department, appeared on GoLocal LIVE, where she discussed the latest in national politics – including how in recent years Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has continued to be brought before Congress to address the company’s actions.
The steps taken by the Swedish academy are “like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping and infected wound”, added Kelsey Johnson, an astronomer at the University of Virginia.
(Commentary; subscription may be required) Spurlock said she hates hearing people say that phonics is too difficult for anyone but experts. The technical vocabulary is scary to many parents. She said: “The ‘leave phonics to the experts in the schools’ attitude is leaving poorer children behind.” Some experts would object to that statement. University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham told me parents may find the sequential phonics books helpful, but they ought to be careful. “It’s easy to get wrong, and possibly send your child down a path where they really dislike reading,” he told m...
(Transcript) Ruth Mason is professor of law and taxation at the University of Virginia, and she and I talked about what President Biden has called a race to the bottom when it comes to corporate taxes.
(Commentary) One of my favorite writers, Matthew Crawford, has taken up these questions. Crawford, a political philosopher-turned-motorcycle mechanic-turned research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, advocates for human agency in his first book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” There, he laments the loss of manual competency after discovering that he derived more satisfaction from wrenching on a bike than from his brief tenure as head of a think tank.
(Subscription may be required) The heartbeat law bans abortion after the fetal heartbeat is detected, allowing individuals to sue anyone who violates the law. A federal judge has halted its enforcement, but Texas is appealing. Lois Shepherd, a health law professor at the University of Virginia, says she expects to see litigation against S.B. 4, noting the Food and Drug Administration allows the medication to be used for up to 10 weeks – not seven.
(Subscription may be required) Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, isn’t convinced that creating a new federal agency would solve the Facebook problem. “People keep going back to the 20th century to try to figure out how to address this phenomenon we’ve never seen in human history,” he said, adding that it was a “regulatory infrastructure that assumes good faith” on behalf of platform companies.
(Commentary; subscription may be required) Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor at the University of Virginia and foremost expert on the social and cultural implications of Facebook’s political dominance. On a recent podcast with Virginia Heffernan, another media scholar, Siva characterized Haugen’s testimony as equivalent to the smoking gun documents that felled the tobacco industry.
(By Richard Ross, assistant professor of statistics) Teaching courses with high enrollments (more than 200 students in a semester) is a daunting task for a variety of reasons – and giving feedback to students is particularly challenging. One-on-one conferencing is practically impossible, and it seems to me that many students learn just as much from the feedback that I give as they do from completing assessments. Subsequently, these courses pose the question: How can we give meaningful and rich feedback at such a scale?