(Video and transcript) Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, UVA associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss the latest on COVID-19.
(Commentary by law professor Richard C. Schragger) On June 8, the Virginia Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases involving the Robert E. Lee statue still standing on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Lee remains because two sets of litigants sued Gov. Ralph Northam when he originally ordered the removal of the statue, owned by the commonwealth since 1890. They argue that Virginia received the statue and the land on which it sits conditioned on a promise that the commonwealth would “faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.”
(By A.D. Carson, assistant professor of hip-hop) A few years back, when I called Clemson, South Carolina home, I drafted a letter to my mother – “just in case” – leaving her instructions in the event of my death. As a Black man living in these United States of America, the general possibility of being found dead, unexpectedly, with no explanation or rationale, has never seemed outside the realm of possibility.
Michael Menaker, an internationally renowned researcher, generous mentor and retired biology professor at the University of Virginia, died recently at the age of 86. A giant in the field of circadian rhythms, Menaker was widely considered one of the pioneers in the physiological analysis and identification of circadian pacemakers in the vertebrate nervous and endocrine systems. He died on Februay 14, 2021.
UVA basketball big man Jay Huff walked the Lawn on Friday morning to receive his master’s degree in educational psychology and social foundations. After redshirting his first year in Charlottesville, Huff took up the mantle as the “old guy” on the team, following in the footsteps of former five-year players like Isaiah Wilkins, Malcolm Brogdon, and Jack Salt. The joke around the team with Huff and those guys that came before was always about how long they had been on Grounds. Well, fans of opposing teams took note over the years, lamenting every time that the “Hoonicorn” came back for another ...
The entire Completers’ Ceremony will be available for viewing on CATEC’s YouTube page beginning on June 2. It will include student speeches, a year-in-review slide show, and a keynote speech from Laura Duckworth, the director of Occupational Programs for UVA Facilities Management.
Brooks is betting that his loyalty to the former president, voting record, and Huntsville roots will propel him to the Senate. “Huntsville is about to pass Birmingham as Alabama’s most populous city, so even if he has more opponents in his primary, geographically, he has a pretty nice base up in Northern Alabama,” said J. Miles Coleman, an assistant editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA’s Center for Politics.
UVA political analyst Kyle Kondik says Kentucky will continue to be an uphill battle for Democrats. Republicans enjoy a super majority in the state legislature and hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of the six U.S. House seats. “I’d say it’s worth it for the DNC only in the sense that there is an incumbent Democratic governor in Kentucky and I think Democrats are going to be very focused on protecting him in 2023,” said Kondik.
Barbara Perry, the UVA Miller Center’s director of presidential studies, told Forbes it was ludicrous to take “two days of long gas lines” and compare the two presidents, adding it’s “unlikely” inflation will surpass the 10-13% level of the late 1970s. Biden is “anthesis of Jimmy Carter,” Perry added, noting Carter–a one term governor from Georgia–”didn’t understand Washington” while the current president has a firm grasp of the mechanizations of the federal government after working more than 40 years in D.C. as a senator and then vice president.
Cynthia Nicoletti, professor of history at the UVA School of Law, said that while she was unaware of the Oregon-Idaho case, the U.S. Constitution (Article IV, section 3) allows for states to be subdivided if the affected states’ legislatures consent and U.S. Congress approves, while the Supreme Court has also gotten involved in border cases.
Dozens of constitutional experts are sending a letter telling congressional leaders they have the authority to make the nation’s capital the 51st state. “As scholars of the United States Constitution, we write to correct claims that the D.C. Admission Act is vulnerable to a constitutional challenge in the courts,” write the 39 signatories, who include Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.
“Dante’s imaginative comparisons and vivid descriptions of the afterlife have sparked the imaginations of innumerable artists,” Deborah Parker, professor of Italian at the University of Virginia, said. “Many artists introduce changes, some subtle, others more striking,” she continued. Gustave Doré and Sandro Botticelli–she cites as examples–while generally faithful to Dante’s text, also introduced changes to their works. Doré, for example, added more women among the damned. “Artists don’t just depict, they interpret,” she said.
In 1880 the census showed six people of Asian heritage living in just two Virginia counties – Princess Anne (now Virginia Beach) and Henrico – but by 1890 there were small Asian communities in Hampton Roads, Richmond, Southside (Pittsylvania and Campbell County), Roanoke and as far southwest as Washington County. Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, helped us dig up that data and offered this analysis. The list of localities above might seem random but they’re not. They are all along railroads. That’s where the jobs were. Lombard tells us: “Just a...
529 plans can generate conflicts of interest. UVA law professor Quinn Curtis argues that since states reap revenue from 529 plan fees to support activities that don’t necessarily help students, state administrators may not have incentives to lower costs.
The evidence convinced many pediatrics experts that monitoring respiration for signs of SIDS probably wasn’t worth it. Among them was Dr. Rachel Moon, a pediatrician and SIDS expert at UVA Health who oversaw the AAP guidelines. “There’s no technology that’s going to tell you if a baby’s going to die,” she said. “Because there’s no warning signs that we know of.”
UVA professor Brian Nosek, who runs the Open Science Collaboration to assess reproducibility in psychology research, urged caution. “We presume that science is self-correcting. By that we mean that errors will happen regularly, but science roots out and removes those errors in the ongoing dialogue among scientists conducting, reporting, and citing each others’ research. If more replicable findings are less likely to be cited, it could suggest that science isn’t just failing to self-correct; it might be going in the wrong direction.’
Social science papers that failed to replicate racked up 153 more citations, on average, than papers that replicated successfully. “The finding is catnip for [research] culture change advocates like me,” says Brian Nosek, a UVA psychologist who has spearheaded a number of replication efforts. But before taking it too seriously, it’s worth seeing whether this finding itself can be replicated using different samples of papers, he says.
(Blog) Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia law professor, a MacArthur Fellow and author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” addressed a wide spectrum of privacy concerns such as cyber surveillance and the unauthorized sharing of intimate information on digital platforms. “We’ve always been under surveillance by companies in ways that we can’t even fathom,” contends Citron. “We can’t feel data when we give it up – it doesn’t ping.”
Margaret Riley, a professor of health law at the UVA School of Law, breaks down some of what people may see going forward. “A business can ask for any information from any people who wish to be on the premises of the business that helps them keep both their employees and other people who are accessing the business safe,” she said.
Margaret Foster Riley, a health law expert at the UVA School of Law, said businesses can undertake precautions to protect employees and customers, as long as those precautions aren’t discriminatory. “In effect, there’s a quid pro quo–if they want to come into the business, they must adhere to the business’s requirements to keep everyone there safe–and someone who is not vaccinated will pose fewer risks to the other people if they then instead wear a mask,” Riley said.