From James Cargile’s first encounter with UVa on an afternoon in 1960, he has felt the treble of its exalted sounding. He cares deeply for the University of Utah, where he did his undergraduate work, and he has walked the ancient halls of Cambridge University in England, where he earned his doctorate. And yet, for the 77-year-old philosophy professor, there is a mystique that radiates from Jefferson’s masterpiece that he can feel as surely as the gentle touch of a hand.
The use of so-called outside monitors to police financial institutions that have misbehaved has exploded in recent years, as authorities increasingly insist on them as a condition for not pursuing criminal or civil charges against companies. Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and expert on white-collar prosecutions, argues the process should be more public. Monitors “should be chosen by a judge to avoid cronyism concerns,” he says. “Their reports should be provided to the court and the public should know their key findings. Instead, monitoring...
(By Kyle Kondik, the director of communications for the University of Virginia Center for Politics) Week before last, the Florida legislature failed to come to an agreement on a new U.S. House map. The same thing happened in Virginia. Courts that threw out the current maps are now expected to determine what the new maps will look like going forward.
Foreign investors are increasingly buying or leasing large swaths of developing countries in pursuit of food, water, and profit, according to human rights groups and academics, putting people and the environment at risk. Residents are vulnerable because in most of the developing world, traditional people working their ancestral lands lack formal property rights, said Paolo D’Odorico, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia who studies land and water grabbing. “The land might be owned by the state or government and used by the communities and has bee...
(By Jeanne Liedtka, Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business) The signals seem to be strengthening that design thinking is moving mainstream – witness the September Harvard Business Review featured spotlight on the evolution of design thinking and its central role in innovation, including the assertion that design thinking “needs to be a core competence.” Sounds dramatic – but I’d like to push the argument for DT even further and ask: could design thinking be the TQM of the 21st century? In other w...
Film critic Leonard Maltin will host screenings and discussions during this year's Virginia Film Festival. Festival organizers say Maltin also will serve as a guest programmer for the festival's Library of Congress Series. The series celebrates films listed on the National Film Registry.
A large group of researchers set out to repeat 100 experiments published by leading psychology journals to see how often they would get the same results. The answer: Less than half the time. "Any one study is not going to be the last word," said Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.
The field of psychology sustained a damaging blow Thursday: A new analysis found that only 36 percent of findings from almost 100 studies in the top three psychology journals held up when the original experiments were rigorously redone. Many journals have also started to insist on what is known as preregistration. When a researcher preregisters a study, he or she spells out the hypothesis and how it is going to be tested. That helps prevent “passing off an exploratory study as a confirmatory one,” said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia a...
The challenges are “why you get up in the morning. I have the best job because I’m helping to prepare the future of Virginia and I believe the future of the United States, maybe the world,” she said. “Mr. Jefferson wanted an educated citizenry to sustain the republic. I think that’s more important now than ever.”
“The explanation is pretty simple: They’re trying to boost people they don’t think can win the general election,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the election analysis website Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
America loves an underdog, someone who will shake up the system and prove that family connections, fancy schooling and a famous name don't guarantee a win, whether it's in a sports arena or the business world. And yet, the discouraging news for the 2016 campaign's non-establishment candidates is this: you might get people cheering your name at rallies, but they won't necessarily be pulling a lever next to your name at the ballot box. Candidates indeed waste money on bad advice and poorly-crafted television ads, notes Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Ce...
Most analysts say Mr Trump has little chance of getting the GOP nomination and less chance of building a broad-based coalition to win the election. “Republicans this year in particular have an anti-establishment, anti-politician orientation,” says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. “And no name screams louder [establishment] than Bush.”
Scientific studies about how people act or think can rarely be replicated by outside experts, said a study Thursday that raised new questions about the seriousness of psychology research. A team of 270 scientists tried reproducing 100 psychology and social science studies that had been published in three top peer-reviewed U.S. journals in 2008. Just 39 percent came out with same results as the initial reports, said the findings in the journal Science. Study co-author Brian Nosek from the University of Virginia said the research shows the need for scientists to continually question themselves.
Maverick researchers have long argued that much of what gets published in elite scientific journals is fundamentally squishy — that the results tell a great story but can’t be reproduced when the experiments are run a second time. Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. The new paper, titled "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science," was published Thursday in the journal Science. The sweeping effort was led by the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit based in Char...
Scholars and leaders from around the country confronted racial issues during a forum at the University of Virginia Thursday afternoon. The director hosting the panel says it is part of the university's responsibility to prepare its students for the world they'll enter after college. The forum is in response to racial violence that has divided the country, like the massacre at an African-American church in Charleston and police shootings of unarmed black men.
Speakers at the first in a series of panel discussions on race relations at the University of Virginia expressed frustration with recent events that they say highlight ongoing racial inequality and violence against African-Americans, most notably the June 17 shooting in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that left nine people dead.
Students at the University of Virginia are learning some valuable lessons about the dangers of texting while driving thanks to a new partnership between AT&T and DRIVE SMART Virginia.
Donald Trump comes off as a bully. Americans may describe the billionaire businessman's behavior in many ways, but psychologists and experts told USA TODAY that textbook bullying shouldn't be one of them. The greater challenge, the bullying experts say, is explaining the reasons for Trump's popularity in a culture that is supposed to frown on naked aggression. "Bullying is the repeated, intentional harm of another person who has less power than you do,'' said Dewey Cornell, a forensic psychologist and bullying expert at the University of Virginia.
Donald Trump says he's not a bully and, clinically, he may be right. On Wednesday, Trump was again defending himself following the latest in a series of spats with network television personalities — this time withUnivision anchor Jorge Ramos, who Trump's security detail booted from a news conference the previous night in Iowa. "Bullying is the repeated, intentional harm of another person who has less power than you do,'' said Dewey Cornell, a forensic psychologist and bullying expert at theUniversity of Virginia. &quo...
Of course, there's a ton of political diversity in both the reddest and the bluest states, so it makes sense to further narrow the focus. At the county level, red areas seem to enjoy a modest advantage when it comes to marriage and the likelihood of growing up in a two-parent family. What about looking at individuals? University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox recently conducted such an inquiry. I can't say that it made me happy when we learned that Republicans have happier marriages than Democrats by a margin of about seven percentage points.