A group called Fear2Freedom was at the University of Virginia to help students pack care kits for victims of sexual abuse. When a victim of sexual assault goes to the hospital, it is not unusual that their clothes have to be taken into evidence. U.Va. students, along with Fear2Freedom, and the student group One Less assembled 250 kits for adult and child victims of sexual assault and inter-partner violence.
The University of Virginia is hosting three town hall meetings as part of a push to improve safety at the university with a focus on sexual assaults. Faculty, staff, and students at the University of Virginia are working on ways to improve the school's response to sexual assaults.
Training first-year students at the University of Virginia in bystander intervention, consent and alcohol risks could go a long way toward preventing sexual assault, according to a university working group charged with looking for ways to prevent sexual assault and misconduct on campus.
Individual soldiers can be held responsible for war crimes they commit, but who would be accountable for the similar acts executed by robots? University of Virginia ethicist Deborah Johnson and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences philosopher Merel Noorman make the salient point that "it is far from clear that pressures of competitive warfare will lead humans to put robots they cannot control into the battlefield without human oversight. And, if there is human oversight, there is human control and responsibility."
In a recent study published in the journal Circulation, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine found that a molecule can boost exercise capacity and provide a significantly protective defense from diabetic cardiomyopathy, a severe heart condition that affects people with diabetes. “This is a proof of concept. It shows that an antioxidant coming from skeletal muscle that can be induced by exercise training can provide profound protection against an important detrimental disease condition,” study author Dr. Zhen Yan said.
Putting urban neighborhoods under a microscope, a University of Virginia researcher has concluded that the traditional urban "donut" pattern — a ring of thriving suburbs surrounding a decaying city center — is being replaced by a new pattern: a thriving urban core surrounded by a ring of suburbs with older housing, older residents and more poverty. "For most cities, the downtown was the poorest, least educated place" a generation or two ago, said Luke Juday, a research and policy analyst at U.Va.'s Weldon Cooper Center Demographics Research Group. Now, he sa...
Department of Justice officials are expected to discuss with state and city leaders Tuesday an ongoing federal probe into the police department, which means an announcement about whether the city will face legal action for civil rights violations could come within days, sources say. Rachel Harmon, a former prosecutor in the civil rights division of the Justice Department and criminal law professor at the University of Virginia, says the Justice Department has worked with departments to minimize costs and no police departments have gone out of business.
The US State Department's press release following the assassination of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov in Moscow on Friday consisted of eight lines. "It certainly was a formal and correct diplomatic response," said Allen Lynch, a Russia scholar at the University of Virginia, of the official US response. But, he added, it was also one that was pretty much devoid of any emotional connection to the event and did not convey a real sense of Nemtsov's political legacy.
Barbara A. Mikulski, 78, announced Monday that she would not seek re-election. The five-term senator will be remembered by many as a feisty challenger of the status quo and a role model for younger women looking to enter politics. She spoke bluntly, with a Baltimore accent redolent of her blue-collar roots. "We forget that when she started out, it wasn't easy at all for a woman to get elected. There was all sorts of prejudice," said Larry Sabato, a national political analyst and director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "The place was totally male-ori...
A new study published by the Demographics Research Group of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service analyzes the demographic trends of 66 major U.S. metros, measuring how they change with distance from the city center. The report's charting tool helps visualize the data on an "objective, intuitive spatial scale" rather than on subjective "urban"/"suburban" categories, says Luke Juday, the author of the report.
Last Thursday, Walker made a gaffe during an appearance at CPAC in suburban Washington when he compared his handling of a protest rally by Wisconsin state employees in 2011 to how he might handle ISIS threats if he were president. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” he said in an offhand manner, though many took him seriously. University of Virginia political scientist Larry J. Sabato said Walker’s comments aren’t likely to hurt him much among GOP voters. “In fact, if an opponent chooses to use it against him, it will simply ...
Researchers at the University of Virginia now know why chronic stress plays a crucial role in causing Type 2 diabetes. Doctors say the release of adrenaline in response to stress, can actually hurt the body when that stress is constant. Adrenaline prompts the body to breakdown fat for energy, but that continual breakdown can inhibit the body's use of insulin. “Losing fat by breaking it down is good, overall, in the long term. But there are different ways of causing fat to be lost and stress-induced breakdown of triglycerides can certainly lead to consequences in proper regulatio...
In a Mississippi courtroom in February, three young white men were sentenced for a hate crime: beating up a black man in a parking lot one June night in 2011, running over his body with a truck and leaving him to die. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, who heard the case, asked the young men to settle into their chairs before he delivered their sentence. He had something to tell them. With a 2,500-word speech that's since been read a million times — and counting — on our site, Reeves invoked the dark days of the state's past, when the killers would likely have fa...
The United Way of Central Virginia received a donation of nearly 10,000 copies of a children’s book written by New York Jets offensive lineman and University of Virginia alumnus D’Brickashaw Ferguson.
(By Deborah G. Johnson is the Anne Shirley Carter Olsson Professor of Applied Ethics in the Science, Technology, and Society Program in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Virginia) The discourse around robots, drones, and other autonomous machines may be setting us up to believe that in the future humans will not be responsible for the behavior of such machines. Will no one—no human—be responsible? Or will there be some schema in which the machines themselves are responsible?
Downtown Phoenix is undergoing major demographic shifts — including a doubling of its white population — but significantly trails other Western cities when it comes to attracting college-educated young adults. That is according to a new study by the University of Virginia examining population, economic and demographic trends in the U.S. cities between 1990 and 2012.
The University of Virginia is taking its next steps to fight sexual assaults on and around its historic grounds. The first in a series of town hall meetings was held Monday afternoon. The work session focused on prevention efforts - bystander training, peer-education, and physical safety – as well as adding camera systems and security officers.
The foundation that supports the University of Virginia Curry School of Education has launched an $11 million initiative to identify and scale promising education innovations. The "Jefferson Education Accelerator" will offer mentoring, analysis, networking opportunities, access to financing and evaluation of products and services to companies in the education sector at the "growth" stage.
In this week’s UVa Today segment, Madeline Curott visited the Brody Jewish Center to discuss an exhibition by UVa alumna Anne Grant (CLAS '12). The exhibition is the result of her ongoing Jewish Studies project called Shmattes.
The University of Virginia School of Nursing is taking to the airwaves around the nation to highlight a new initiative that aims to keep nurses from getting overwhelmed with the daily stresses of their profession. UVA's Compassionate Care Initiative is dedicated to empowering nurses to help them to stay centered in their high-stress career. "We have yoga several days a week. We have guided meditation several days a week. We have Tai chi. We have reflective writing and art and a massage program," said Compassionate Care Director Susan Bauer-Wu.