For better or worse, Hillary Clinton’s success in November will be closely tied to what people think of President Obama. “She will win if Obama is still popular in November. And she will lose if he becomes – for whatever reason – unpopular,” said Larry Sabato, director UVA’s Center for Politics.
There are plenty of Olympians with unique backstories, but not too many who entered from the sports media world. That’s the case with U.S. rower Meghan O’Leary, though. After playing both volleyball and softball at UVA, O’Leary worked in programming and production at ESPN for five years.
When the Olympics begin in earnest on Friday in Rio de Janeiro with the opening ceremonies, two current and 11 former UVA athletes will be competing. In addition, UVA coaches Steve Swanson and Kevin Sauer will be on the sidelines.
UVA has 14 athletes, two coaches and two alternates in Rio to participate in the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Together, they’ll be representing seven countries across six different sports. Here’s a full list of all the Cavalier connections in Brazil.
Trump, who started the campaign with 4 million followers, now has over 10.6 million, while Clinton, who began with about 1 million, now has 8.1 million. Trump has posted 32,800 tweets; Clinton has just 7,260 tweets to her name. With more than three months to go until the election, Larry Sabato, founder of UVA's Center for Politics, cautions to “keep it all in perspective." Yes, the candidates have a large social following, but far more people voted in the primaries, some 28 million (13 million for Trump, 15 million for Clinton) and even more, 135 million...
Republican Party leaders are increasingly concerned about recent national and state polls that show the Democratic nominee surging into a lead over Republican Donald Trump. "He is going to have to start convincing people that he is qualified for the presidency and has the temperament for the presidency," UVA political analyst Kyle Kondik said.
Rohini Sethi, vice president of the University of Houston's student-run government, was punished on Aug. 1 for writing this Facebook posting: "Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like #AllLivesMatter." Doug Meyer, a UVA professor, added that "all lives matter" is coming from some people who think "talking about race is a form of racism."
Larry Sabato of UVA’s Center for Politics stopped by “The Kelly File” on Fox News Thursday night with his newest prediction for the national Electoral College, and it ain’t pretty. Well, not for Donald Trump, anyways.
Tourists who want to take photographs at the prime meridian often stand at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. But improved technology reveals that the actual site of the imaginary north-south line that cuts the Earth in half at zero degrees longitude lies 334 feet east of the historical marker. "Most people stand on the stripe and have their picture taken, with the sundial in the background," UVA astronomer Ken Seidelmann said. "If they stood there with their GPS receiver, it wasn't zero degrees."
UVA researchers quizzed 2,425 pairs of male and female twins from the state of Washington about how often and how much they drink. When they looked at twins where one was married and the other single, they found married men and women tend to drink less than those who were single or divorced.
The "ban the box" movement aims to help Americans with prior arrests or convictions get a foot in the door with employers. What if the policies hurt more people than they help? That's the question posed by new research from UVA professor Jennifer L. Doleac and University of Oregon professor Benjamin Hansen.
The hacking challenge included 96 rounds in which computers were charged with examining software programs, identifying bugs, patching them and finding ways to attack rival machines. Second place went to a program created by security experts from UVA and GrammaTech Inc, earning $1 million.
A quest to build a smart computer system that finds and patches bugs faster and more efficiently than humans is off to a good start with teams in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge performing very well. … In second place was the TechX team from GrammaTech and UVA, setting them up for a $1 million payday.
When you offer kids rewards, there's the potential for them to think, "The reason I read is because I'm offered a reward." Therefore, what's going to happen when you eventually stop the reward? The child is going to figure, "There's not really any point to reading. I wasn't reading because I liked it. I was only reading to access the reward," UVA psychology professor Daniel Willingham said.
UVA psychologists plan a clinical trial this fall to find out if it’s possible to improve people’s happiness. Samantha Heintzelman and UVA colleagues have come up with a 10-week program to make happiness a habit. She hopes to enroll more than 100 volunteers.
For those of us non-athletes, having some flexibility is important for healthy living, said Jay Hertel, a UVA kinesiologist and professor of sports medicine. "You need to be able to go through a functional range of motion from the standpoint of being able to do activities of daily living."
While meditation is still often portrayed in pop culture as an esoteric art, it’s now common at Google, Apple and the Pentagon. The surprisingly simple practice – stepping back to focus on the breath and notice thoughts and sensations – cannot only help a public servant deal with a stressful situation like a hostile hearing, but also to devise strategy and solve problems. UVA psychology professor Timothy Wilson has argued that the human brain is poorly equipped to handle the roughly 11 million bits of information that arrive in any given mom...
Congresswoman Barbara Comstock doesn’t need to reconsider her endorsement of Donald Trump in light of his comments about a Gold Star family. That’s because she never made one. That would be the most competitive race in Virginia, where Geoff Skelley at UVA’s Center for Politics says Comstock’s approach is risky, but understandable.
In an unusual legal action, federal prosecutors in San Francisco drastically cut back the potential criminal penalties they were seeking in the trial of utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric Co. which is accused of violating pipeline safety laws in the wake of the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion. As UVA law professor Brandon Garrett told the Associated Press, "Obviously, if a company does not have to pay a fine that is larger than its gains, then its crime becomes profitable."
Brian Nosek, a UVA psychology professor and executive director of the Center for Open Science, argued that data should be made more widely available, especially if the research is publicly funded. “It makes a lot of sense for the federal policy-makers to get interested in open data because we paid for it with taxpayer dollars. It’s a return on investment,” he told Vocativ.