On Thursday, UVA’s Center for Politics hosted its 19th Annual Democracy Conference. Panelists discussed President Trump's first year in office, the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election.
Under the new standards, students will no longer have to take state an exam in social studies to graduate. They will still have to take tests in English, math and science. Those changes, coupled with a greater focus on career and technical or advanced training, represent “an important shift away from testing toward opportunities,” Robert C. Pianta, dean of UVA’s Curry School of Education, said in an email.
A study looking at how constitutions around the world have evolved has revealed patterns that could help people predict the best moment to introduce such changes. The study validates computational techniques that could be applied to pressing questions about how constitutions reflect and affect societies, says Mila Versteeg, a legal scholar at the University of Virginia. “These methods might be able to move the ball if applied to the right questions,” she says.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of UVA’s Center for Media and Citizenship, listed computer science and engineering schools “that take this very seriously,” and noted that “others all have faculty and programs devoted to critical and ethical examination of data and algorithms.”
The demographers at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service recently crunched some numbers and came to this sobering conclusion: Even if nobody moved out of the coal counties, their populations will still shrink by 1,300 to 1,800 people a year — because that’s how much deaths will outnumber births. Since people will move out, the population collapse is going to be even steeper. This is a death spiral.
UVA’s Larry Sabato has characterized 2017 as the most volatile political year he’s seen since the late 1960s or early 1970s. The founder of UVA’s Center for Politics offered that assessment during the 19th annual “American Democracy Conference” at Alumni Hall.
Charlottesville Area Transit and Bus Lines are encouraging area writers to use their imagination with the latest Bus Lines poetry contest. Through a special partnership with Special Collections at the University of Virginia Library, all winning Bus Lines poems are deposited into UVA's permanent collections.
On Nov. 30, UVA will host its 17th annual Lighting of the lawn, in which all of the buildings in the Academical Village are decorated with thousands of LED lights.
The innovations of young inventors were honored Nov. 3 at the 2017 Collegiate Inventors Competition, an annual competition for college and university students. Bronze medal winners included UVA’s InMEDBio in the undergraduate category.
For more than 30 years, colleges and universities have leaned on an obscure tax rule that allows sports boosters to make tax-deductible contributions to their teams. Athletic fundraisers around the country say that’s an advantage that generates millions in annual revenue – and one that’s threatened by Republican tax legislation.
Jeanne Liedtka is a strategy professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business, where she works with MBA students and executives on design-led approaches to innovation and growth. The author of five books and a very popular online class on design thinking, she is passionate about helping leaders learn the skills, tools and mindsets of a designer by routinely posing the question, “What would be different if managers thought more like designers?”
The UVA Health System cut the ribbon Thursday on its new Medical Imaging Research Center, which could lead to faster and more precise diagnoses.
Graduate students famously make very little money, trading Spartan living circumstances for higher degrees and earning potential. A Republican tax plan that passed in the House of Representatives on Thursday would demand a much higher portion of their stipends in taxes, throwing students at the University of Virginia into a panic.
A new app launched in Charlottesville on Wednesday aims to ease the process of finding reliable babysitters and help college students earn money. "It brings together two segments of a community, college students and young families, that really want and need to connect but traditionally have had trouble doing that," said Ginger Mayfield, who co-founded the Wyndy app with her husband, Tommy Mayfield, a UVA law alumnus.
A Democratic wave washed over Old Dominion and wrested at least 15 House seats away from the GOP, throwing control of the chamber into question; several races are under recount, with Democrats just one seat away from a 50-50 split of the chamber. Fiddler, who predicted her party would flip no more than eight seats, told me she was “overcome with abject joy” as the results rolled in. Political analysts Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, of the UVA Center for Politics, wrote at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “The Democratic gains in the Virginia House of Delegates were nothing short of extraordinar...
In Virginia, exit polls showed that many voters were motivated primarily by their opposition to the president. "The fact that the president is so polarizing and so unpopular with approval ratings generally under about 40 percent, and Democrats are going to be extra-motivated to come out," said UVA political analyst Kyle Kondik.
Virologist Marie-Louise Hammarskjold of the UVA School of Medicine, who sat on a National Institutes of Health panel that approved the strategy, agrees that the safety data are convincing. “They had pretty good evidence, based on animal and cell culture experiments, that the off-target effects wouldn't be such a high risk that [the trial] was not worth trying,” she said.
In the wake of another massacre, American voters today support 95 - 4 percent, including 94 - 5 percent among voters in households where there is a gun, universal background checks for gun purchases, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. UVA’s Larry Sabato, a prominent political scientist, responded to the Quinnipiac results by marveling at the “near-unanimity” on universal background checks. He lamented, however, the “crickets in D.C.”
When you’re not paying attention, bad things happen. Or as William Lucy, a UVA professor, summed it up to ABC News: “Go where you think it’s unsafe and you’ll probably make a better choice.”
(Commentary by Mark Edmundson, University Professor, English department) Every week, and sometimes every day, Donald Trump provides a new installment in the entertainment spectacle that is his presidency. … Many factors led to the election of the Boy King, but there is one I find most salient. We grew bored.