The top story on today’s UVA Today is about a children’s bilingual astronomy picture book produced as an outgrowth of the “Dark Skies, Bright Kids” outreach program being run by U.Va. astronomy professor Kelsey Johnson and many student volunteers.
I’d like to highlight something from deep down in Fariss Samarrai’s story: the group is trying to win $25,000 in funding from Pepsi to get more copies of the book printed, with the goal of increasing its distribution around the local schools and possibly around the state. (Click on the link above; you can vote up to 10 times a day.)
Check out the new episode of the UVA Today Radio Show, a weekly five minute segment on WTJU radio. Look for new editions of the show every Wednesday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU. Afterward, all of the segments will be posted oniTunesU.
Read more about the stories featured in this week’s program:
Meredith Woo, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, made some interesting remarks to incoming students and their families on Saturday, which she has posted on her blog.
She recalled the experiences of noted American historian Henry Adams, and his observations about the quickening pace of American life at the turn of the 20th century. Adams fancied himself as being more of a creature of the 18th century than the 20th, and wondered about his place in the world — much as the students’ parents may be marveling at the pace of change in the 21st century and wondering if they will be able to keep up with their children and their children’s children.
“Adams heard the roar of the rushing waterfall at the turn of the last century. I hear it today, coming even faster, bringing with it a similar fear, terror, and exhilaration at the speed of new knowledge,” Woo said. “In what complexities will the Class of 2014 think? We don’t know, but we do know they will be twenty-first century men and women, people for whom (quite unlike us) the twentieth century is of the past.”
Guanxi is one of those culturally significant words that can’t be adequately translated without losing some of its rich and layered meaning. As I learned from Wikipedia, Guanxi is about one’s social network (encompassing the concepts of relationships and connections), and one element of Guanxi is the power of a social network to perform action. (I invite our readers to better explain this concept.)
Chen’s engaging essay discusses how, in some ways, the increasing “connectedness” provided by cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. actually can impair people from forming meaningful relationships through the chance and routine encounters of daily life on Grounds. Promoting such face-to-face contact was one of the goals of Jefferson’s design of the Academical Village, and “we could foster a stronger sense of community at the University if people take the effort and time to show more compassion and build personal relationships.”
Chen’s essay is not available online except in the PDF of the full issue of V Ke, so we have reproduced it below. Enjoy.
“Got Guanxi?”
by Paul Chen
In the world of cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging where superficial networking prevails, building deep personal relationships through old school communication becomes particularly important because relationships not only preserve our humanity but also help us succeed in life. Continue reading…
It’s been a little while since the Boston Globe’s influential Ideas column featured a U.Va. professor. This week, an article on “the surprising moral force of disgust” includes plenty of research and quotes from psychology professor Jonathan Haidt. He is portrayed as a leading voice in one camp of moral reasoning scholars who argue that moral reasoning is simply an after-the-fact story we create to explain our instinctive emotional reactions, such as a strongly held but arbitrary feeling of disgust:
“Moral reasoning is often like the press secretary for a secretive administration — constantly generating the most persuasive arguments it can muster for policies whose true origins and goals are unknown,” [Haidt] wrote in a 2007 paper in Science.
Check out the new episode of the UVA Today Radio Show, a weekly five minute segment on WTJU radio. Look for new editions of the show every Wednesday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU. Afterward, all of the segments will be posted oniTunesU.
Read more about the stories featured in this week’s program:
A group of 10 rising third-year Jefferson Scholars recently returned from a three-week service learning project in Tanzania.
Working with Jifundishe, a nonprofit organization that promotes literacy, education, health care and cultural exchange in rural Tanzania, the students tutored and taught underprivileged children who could not afford to regularly attend school.
On June 12, the U.Va. students, led by biology major Kirsti Campbell and nursing major Laura Hansen, taught a basic field first-aid class to local teachers and soccer coaches, covering relevant issues from snake bites and burns to water quality and malaria, as Jifundishe’s July newsletter (PDF download at bottom of this page) explains. Continue reading…
Check out the new episode of the UVA Today Radio Show, a weekly five minute segment on WTJU radio. Look for new editions of the show every Wednesday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU. Afterward, all of the segments will be posted oniTunesU.
Read more about the stories featured in this week’s program:
Today I temporarily turn the blog over to Nicole Gugliucci, a grad student in astronomy (who also blogs for the Discovery Channel, to allow her to shamelessly tout her summer school class:
Are we alone? It is a question that humans have been asking themselves for millennia. The ancient Greek philosophers argued over the plurality of worlds, and whether or not they would be inhabited. Scholars of the enlightenment were sure that the cosmos was populated with reasoning beings like men on Earth. Today, despite 50 years of searching for a radio signal from some intelligent species, an eerie silence leaves us feeling quite alone, despite the hundreds of planets that have been found orbiting other stars in our galaxy.
Are we alone? Will the aliens be like us? Are microbes inhabiting moons and planets of our own solar system? Have we already been visited by space travelers? Will we one day be the aliens on another world?
This summer, at UVa, we will be exploring these topics and more in the class “Life Beyond Earth.” Every day will be a chance to discuss a new facet of this intriguing topic. You don’t have to be a science major, or have even taken an astronomy course before. Go beyond the pop culture movies and the tabloid headlines and investigate the history, sociology and science of extraterrestrial life. Find out which U.Va. professors have searched for ET, and what efforts are going on now to expand the search. Learn even more about our own biology and evolutionary history and how that can focus our search for life. Discuss the history and current progress of human spaceflight, and imagine the places we will go.
(Photo: The 85-foot telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., the very first telescope to look for life.)
Meredith Woo, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, turned her blog over to Michael Suarez, an English professor and Jesuit priest, on Monday. He wrote a thoughtful perspective on the death of Yeardley Love, based upon his class’ discussion of Thomas Gray’s poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
I’ve written before about “BackStory with the American History Guys,” the somewhat widely syndicated public radio show that features U.Va. history professors Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh and University of Richmond President Edward Ayers discussing various facets of American history.
One week from today, they’re taking their show on the road. The Virginia Historical Society, at 428 North Boulevard in Richmond, is hosting a live taping of an upcoming show. Admission to the 6 p.m. show is free; no reservations are required, but seating is first-come, first-served.
The topic is “Paying Up: The History of Taxation from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Tea Party Movement of 2010.” The panelists will take questions from the audience, so give it some thought beforehand.
This just in from UVA Today science correspondent Fariss Samarrai:
Last week more than 200 volunteers, organized by U.Va.’s environmental sciences department and the conservation organization Trout Unlimited, sampled about 458 stream sites in 34 Virginia counties, representing about 80 percent of the forested mountain headwater streams in the state that support reproducing brook trout.
This week, the samples are being organized and analyzed at U.Va. for pH, a stream’s ability to neutralize acidity, and for dissolved ions.
This information helps scientists determine the health of headwater streams throughout western Virginia. The data and findings are used by the EPA and other national and state agencies for resource management and to develop, evaluate and recommend national air pollution control policies.
This is the third regional survey conducted by U.Va. and Trout Unlimited. Previous surveys were done in 1987 and 2000. The current plan is to continue long-term monitoring by conducting surveys every 10 years.
For more, you can read the full UVA Today article here.
Stephanie Nakasian, a member of the voice faculty in the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Music and one of the leading jazz singers today, was recently interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air.”
The broadcast, “Stephanie Nakasian: Paying Tribute To Billie Holiday,” which aired originally on April 28, is available online.
UVA Magazine has a quirky piece in its online issue this month on the Class of 2010’s “110 Things to Do Before You Graduate.” (You can read the whole list here.) There’s still time to work most of them in, but it’s too late to view the Lighting of the Lawn if you somehow missed it.
Brad Cox, a U.Va. professor of physics who has been involved with the planning and instrument design for the LHC since its inception in 1993, said his group “is very gratified and tremendously excited to see that the Large Hadron Collider has achieved proton-proton collisions at the world record energy of 7 TeV, thereby moving into the realm of new physics. I expect new discoveries in the next few years as we accumulate data at these huge energies. This is what we have been waiting for and working toward.”
Meredith Woo, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, made some interesting remarks to incoming students and their families on Saturday, which 
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Are we alone? It is a question that humans have been asking themselves for millennia. The ancient Greek philosophers argued over the plurality of worlds, and whether or not they would be inhabited. Scholars of the enlightenment were sure that the cosmos was populated with reasoning beings like men on Earth. Today, despite 50 years of searching for a radio signal from some intelligent species, an eerie silence leaves us feeling quite alone, despite the hundreds of planets that have been found orbiting other stars in our galaxy.
I’ve written before about 
