Another panelist, Rita Koganzon, assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, focused her comments on the “political theory” behind the secular attack on religious schools. She said that it holds that education should aim at opening “as many doors as possible” for children and young people. Education that precludes many life alternatives is regarded as “a bad education.” She referred to the legal philosopher John Rawls, who said that children should be educated for an “open future, or for autonomy.” They should be able to “critically examine and revise their conceptions of th...
Many doctors aren’t impressed with doctor-recommendation sites. “I’m a physician, and maybe I’m a little sensitive, but their comments, positive or negative, can get overblown,” says Mohan Nadkarni, a professor of medicine and chief of general internal medicine at UVA Health.
Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center, pulled the Census tracts and blocks for Haymarket, Clifton and Middleburg and compared the numbers to 2010. Clifton lost 39 residents and Middleburg lost four, which Lombard said seems to be symbolic of the problems with numbers in small areas. In Haymarket, however, one particular tract stood out, so Lombard used county real estate records and satellite imagery to examine the area. Based on that look, it appears that although Haymarket may have been affected somewhat by the algorithm, it was overcounted in 2010 by showing nearly...
Andrew Block, a professor at the UVA School of Law and the director of the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice from 2014 to 2019, said, “Cases like these are in many ways the hardest cases because you [often] have the adult-like nature of what the child has done but also the fact that they are still very young. … That adult system is not good at rehabilitating kids.”
Following the traumatic year Haiti has seen, many Haitian scholars are calling out what is most familiar in pop culture: performative advocacy in the form of heartbreak emojis, prayers, and hashtags on social media. Marlene Daut, a professor of African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, recognizes the public outcry as opportunistic and meaningless, highlighting the role of disaster capitalism on other Caribbean islands, like in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria. “I think a lot of people when they do charity, they want it to be easy,” she said. “If you really want to d...
Nicki Minaj’s mostly young, very online fans – known as the Barbz, after her alter ego Harajuku Barbie – found themselves called to defend her. Their defense of Minaj’s rhetoric isn’t really about politics. It’s about their shared affinities and their sense of self. “I think we’re now more likely to read political intent behind fan actions that might not be political in and of themselves,” says Lori Morimoto, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who studies fan culture. “When [a] celebrity is attacked, it can feel personal in a very real way.”
According to Douglas Laycock, a UVA professor of law who specializes in religious liberties, it’s unclear whether there’s even a legal basis for such exemptions.
With many ICU beds full, UVA Health doctors are encouraging people to get ahead of COVID-19 and flu season. UVA’s intensive care unit is seven beds short of being at full capacity.
Dr. Taison Bell with UVA Health says this is a big move to keep frontline health care workers healthy, especially with a nationwide shortage of nurses and hospital staff. “Now we’re in a situation where our staffing is so crucial that if you have a health care worker who calls in symptomatic from disease and they can’t work, that could potentially put a strain on the health care system,” Bell said during a press briefing Friday.
A painful childhood health problem is on the upswing in Charlottesville. UVA pediatrician Dr. Abigail Kumral says a combination of social distancing and masking kept ear infections at a record low in Charlottesville last year. With more relaxed COVID-19 regulations, cases are popping up, but there is a way to turn it around. “The biggest thing right now is probably getting a flu shot for all kids over 6 months old. We know that in little kids, up to about 40% of them can get an ear infection when they get the flu,” Kumral said.
“Nebulized hydrogen peroxide is not effective for COVID-19 and is potentially dangerous,” Dr. Taison Bell, director of UVA Health’s medical intensive care unit, said via email. “If you want to protect yourself, get vaccinated.”
(Subscription required) A new national Covid-19 commission plans to join the search for the pandemic’s origin in the next few months, said Philip Zelikow, director of the commission’s planning group and a UVA professor of history. The new commission, supported by several foundations, is forming a task force that will include experts in emerging disease epidemics and scientists with experience in and concerns about high-risk laboratory research, said Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9/11 Commission. “We are very interested in the origins issue,” he said. “We all think there is a chanc...
(Commentary by Mehr Afshan Farooqi, associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures) Naqsh Faryaadi is the first ghazal in the 1816 manuscript of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s Divan. In the 1821 manuscript, it has the original seven verses and there are two additional verses in the margin, in handwriting that’s definitely not Ghalib’s. They were added to the ghazal in the 1826 Divan as verses seven and eight, for a total of nine.
(Subscription may be required) Valley Health this week reinstituted what hospital officials called “crisis measures” first put in place at the height of the pandemic, including limiting visitors and postponing elective surgeries. Winchester Medical Center has had to send patients as far away as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia when the facility is full, and University of Virginia, Inova and Hopkins hospitals are too full to take transfers as they would otherwise.
Intensive care units at the UVA Medical Center are almost full, officials said Friday. Eighty-six of the hospital’s 93 ICU beds are currently occupied. About one-third of those in the ICU are COVID patients. “It’s a highly dynamic number, but our ICUs are nearing capacity,” Wendy Horton, the chief executive officer of the medical center.
This discovery led Robert Orth to start a series of experiments in collaboration with the University of Virginia, first transplanting eelgrass from other areas into the bay in 1999. Once the eelgrass survived, Orth and his team began scattering seeds across a total of four bays: South Bay, Cobb Bay, Spider Crab Bay, and Hog Island. Not only did the seeds grow into plants, the plants thrived and spread. South Bay even successfully reintroduced bay scallops for the first time in nearly a century.
A new study by researchers from UVA and the University of Southern California provides insight into how employees think. The researchers found that staff would be willing to track them, and may even welcome it, if the information collected was analyzed by a technical device and not by humans. According to the researchers, people view technical analysis as valuable information, which can help them do their jobs better. The study found that surveillance that only provides information to employees increases their sense of autonomy and motivation, and causes them to resign less.
The U.S. is home to more than 40 species of bats, but habitat loss, climate change, and disease have taken a toll on populations with many species facing potential extinction. Bats often nest under bridges or overpasses as a way to seek shelter, but lack of awareness about their presence can cause repair projects to unintentionally disrupt or kill groups of these threatened species. To address this issue, a team of UVA researchers has created an artificial intelligence system that can quickly and efficiently detect bat presence without the need for human inspections.
As a more human-centric approach has gained momentum in recent years, there is an incentive to understand how people perceive and respond to their surroundings. UVA’s Center for Design+Health used mobile electroencephalography, or mobile EEG, to explore “what happens in the brain as it navigates the city,” essentially registering the emotions and behaviors triggered by the built environment.
It appears Virginia has reached the peak of the current surge, UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute reported Friday. The path forward contains many roads portrayed by varying models. “Case rates are leveling off, and we could see a significant decline in the coming weeks,” researchers wrote in Friday’s report.