Jennifer McClellan, 47, won a Senate seat in 2017, previously serving 11 years as a delegate for the 71st district for the commonwealth. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she also serves as the vice-chair of the Democratic Party of Virginia.
Three years ago, while testing an artificial intelligence model for automatically labelling images from the web, Jieyu Zhao spotted a trend: it repeatedly associated images of people in kitchens with women, even when they showed men. Suspecting social biases might play a part, Zhao, then a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, teamed up with several peers to investigate. Their findings, published in a 2017 paper, were shocking. Even though images used to train the model showed 33% more women than men in kitchens, the AI more than doubled this disparity to 68%.
Crowded field of challengers hopes to take on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar
Candidates – Democrats and Republicans – who have lined up to challenge three of the most high-profile freshman House Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. “The fame and notoriety of these members can be a double-edged sword – it helps their fundraising, but also draws attention and competition,” said Kyle Kondik, an election analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics.
The economic crisis is compounded by the American family crisis – the number of children raised by their biological parents has dramatically declined, while children raised by a single parent has tripled since 1960. University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, among others, has noted the disastrous consequences of these trends.
Bryan Lewis, a research associate professor for UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, said that if people are in a setting where they could be exposing themselves to the virus, they should continue to wear a mask. For someone going on a jog alone outside, however, a mask may not needed as much, he said.
“No doubt, COVID-19 played a role in the depressed turnout,” said Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics. But if Trump can’t fill an arena in a state he carried overwhelmingly, Sabato said, “you have to wonder how he’s going to fare in swing states that may have turned against him.”
The idea of removing Confederate monuments from public view has been around for years, but the national conversation about the role of the statues heightened in 2018 after a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville turned violent. “I always looked at the monument in Charlottesville as a piece of a memory,” said Caroline Janney, a UVA history professor. “... To me there was historical value to these monuments. It tells us about the people, their values at the time when they went up. ... But we have to understand that different groups have different views of the past.”
Cynthia Hudson, former deputy attorney general, along with co-chair and UVA law professor Andrew Block, are leading the board and a team of student researchers from the UVA School of Law. The researchers had actually already set their sights on several policy areas in anticipation of their work continuing.
But there are limits to political leaders’ ability to shape opinion and action, as presidents throughout history have discovered. “Our leaders cannot command us; they can only lead us,” Mary Kate Cary, a onetime George H.W. Bush speechwriter who teaches at the University of Virginia, said last week.
“Frankly, at this point, the Republicans are still able to win elections, even though they’re fielding such a paltry share of female candidates,” Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said. “Unless there are electoral consequences, it doesn’t really seem likely that there’s going to be a fundamental shift.”
But some maintain that, at its core, the platform is ungovernable, and that not enough has changed in time for November. “I’ve seen Facebook implement a series of superficial changes,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar who directs UVA’s Center for Media and Citizenship. But the platform is too sprawling, and has too many users in too many places speaking too many languages with too much cultural nuance to be moderated effectively, he says.
Why is Northam taking a more cautious approach? There are multiple factors to consider, according to Dr. William Petri, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia. For one, the national outlook is different, with 27 states reporting increases in cases. Then there’s the state’s own data, which shows a decline – but not a total stop – in new transmissions. “I think it’s the right decision,” Petri said. “The main message is that we’re not out of the woods quite yet. So, to me, it seems the prudent thing is to go in a slow, measured way.”
Rachel Harmon, a former federal prosecutor who now directs the Center for Criminal Justice at the UVA School of Law, said the Justice Department has almost never enforced existing laws against racial discrimination by withholding funding from police departments. But there are other ways to change grant programs that could help, she wrote in an email.
“[State Rep. Charles Booker] has surged at just the right moment,” said Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics. “Is it large enough to overcome her lead [that of retired Marine and Democrat Amy McGrath]? Maybe, although I wouldn’t bet on it. ... It’s one thing to surge. It’s another thing to win.”
Dr. Cameron Webb works in Charlottesville treating coronavirus patients. His days are a mix of coordinating testing in different parts of the community – he’s the director of health policy and equity at the University of Virginia – and, of course, campaigning to represent Virginia in the House of Representatives.
“In this moment, when many of these same companies have said they stand with their Black employees and they are horrified by the murder of George Floyd and so many other Black people, then it’s also a moment to acknowledge the racism baked into the economy of this nation, and the conditions under which Blacks have had to live in order to build the country,” said Laura Morgan Roberts, a professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business and author of “Race, Work and Leadership: Positive Organizing in a Global Society.”
(By Jacqueline Jodl, special assistant to the dean and associate professor in UVA’s School of Education and Human Development) Relationships are important for all learners, says strategic education advisor Jackie Jodl, but they are particularly important to those who are at risk. When it comes to promoting engagement and sustained performance, the research shows that boys are more dependent on these student-teacher relationships than girls.
A collaborative program developed at UVA Health to work with local long-term care facilities control COVID-19 is saving lives and offers a model for communities across the country, a new scientific paper reports.A collaborative program developed at UVA Health to work with local long-term care facilities control COVID-19 is saving lives and offers a model for communities across the country, a new scientific paper reports.
Case mix index, which refers to how sick a specific group of patients is, has been declining for COVID-19 patients, UVA Medical Center spokesman Eric Swensen said. COVID-19 patients appeared to be at the sickest levels the week of May 4, after a high number of patients from hospitals with maxed-out ICUs were transferred to UVA.
The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association has pledged its support of training programs and students enrolled in the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.