A newly empowered Democratic trifecta – the Virginia House, Senate and Gov. Ralph Northam – passed 2,218 bills this session, most of which will come into effect July 1. Many are progressive measures, including making it easier to vote and easier for local governments to restrict guns in public places within their jurisdictions. “Virginia really isn’t the purple state it used to be,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the UVA Center for Politics’ nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns.
Researchers at Salesforce and the University of Virginia have proposed a new way to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings, the word representations used to train AI models to summarize, translate languages, and perform other prediction tasks. The team claims that correcting for certain regularities – like word frequency in large data sets – allows their method to “purify” the embeddings prior to inference, removing potentially gendered words.
A blood test may predict which COVID-19 patients are likely to need a ventilator. This finding could lead to a scoring system that would flag at-risk patients for closer monitoring and to personalized treatments. It may also help explain how diabetes makes outcomes worse, according to researchers from the UVA School of Medicine.
According to a study published by researchers from the University of Virginia, clinicians can examine the blood of COVID-19 patients to identify those at greatest risk of severe illness.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected students at colleges and universities since the outbreak. One program at the UVA Center for Politics gives students a second chance at a summer internship in the public sector.
The Supreme Court elated religious freedom advocates and alarmed secular groups with its Tuesday ruling on public funding for religious education. Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor who co-wrote a brief supporting the plaintiffs on behalf of multiple religious groups, described the decision as “incremental” and “building cautiously” on a 2017 case that ruled a Missouri church could use a state grant to resurface its playground.
UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute noted, “The stay-at-home order and other community mitigation strategies undertaken in Virginia successfully flattened the curve and prevented hospitals from being overwhelmed. … The model estimates that by taking a cautious approach to reopening, and improving testing and tracing, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria [region] has avoided 123,711 cases since May 15.”
The Innocence Project at UVA has launched a social media campaign to free a 40-year-old man who was locked up at the age of 16 for a murder it now appears he did not commit. The proof came in a surprising way.
Our dear Logan went into the arms of Jesus Wednesday, June 24, 2020. He had a kind and compassionate heart, particularly toward children and dogs. As a young child and onward, he would point them out and wanted to visit with them. Logan excelled in his studies, attending the University of Virginia. He was studying business in the Commerce School.
Charlottesville resident Rob Grainger isn’t a public health official, but as a biology researcher at UVA, he can read scientific data, and he’s alarmed by the increase in COVID-19 cases in Charlottesville and Albemarle.
UVA law professor Kim Forde-Mazrui explained that the Supreme Court ruling directly protects people only against disparate treatment on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status, though he said it seems likely that their reasoning opens the door to disparate impact claims on the basis of these categories, as well.
Researchers from the UVA School of Medicine are using blood tests to predict how the coronavirus can affect a person’s body. This discovery examines cytokines, which are proteins produced by immune cells, and the role they play in severe over-reactions by the immune system.
Professors and students at UVA’s Curry School of Education teamed with Charlottesville City School to open the city’s first Freedom School this summer. The free, virtual program is for third- through fifth-grade students in Charlottesville and Albemarle County public schools. Participating students will receive online instructions from Servant Leader Interns from the Curry School. They will also be given free books, supplies and meals, if needed.
The NFL has provided funding to four groups working to create safer helmets as part of the NFL Helmet Challenge initiative that launched in 2019, including the University of Virginia. A release from the league shows that they have distributed $1.37 million in grants to support the creation of prototype helmets by July 2021.
One afternoon in 1970, then-UVA student Charlie Papazian was lazing around his Charlottesville apartment, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, when a friend mentioned that he’d run into a neighbor, an “old-timer” in his early 70s, who’d learned to brew beer during Prohibition, and was apparently still making it, right there in his basement. “I remember going, ‘Wait, what the heck is homebrew?’ I had no idea such a thing was possible,” Papazian recalled.
Some scholars see the current waves of activism that sprouted primarily from the Black Lives Matter movement as a precursor to overdue structural reform. “The racial justice movement currently underway is unprecedented and can be considered a game-changer. The way many people look at the world has literally changed in weeks,” said Kevin K. Gaines, UVA’s Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice.
There’s been a lot of buzz about antibodies and coronavirus. Should you get tested for them to see if you’ve had the virus and didn’t know? If you have antibodies in your system, are you basically in the clear? Dr. Eric Houpt, an infectious disease specialist at the UVA School of Medicine, digs into these questions.
A few months ago, Albemarle County Supervisors released a community survey with the help from the Center for Survey Research of UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Now, the results are in and painting a better picture of what people want the county to look like moving forward.
Nonprofits of all kinds are typically ineligible for government-backed small business loans, but the Trump administration made an exception in its COVID-19 relief efforts. Although sympathetic to the plight of religious institutions, some law and religion experts were disturbed by this policy move. By sending taxpayer money directly to churches, officials violated a generally accepted ban on funding religious activities, UVA Law professor Micah Schwartzman said.
(Audio of Rita Dove, a professor at the University of Virginia, Pulitzer Prize winner and a former U.S. Poet Laureate)