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.)
There will be a U.Va. grad on “The Apprentice” when it debuts Sept. 16 on NBC.
She is Mahsa Saeidi-Azcuy, 29, who earned an undergraduate degree in biology at U.Va., then went on to get a film degree from the New York Film Academy and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School. She’s now an assistant DA in New York.
“The Apprentice” is a reality-style game show in which 16 contestants vie for a job with the Trump Organization. Each week, one or more are elimnated, with Donald Trump himself issuing the dreaded line, “You’re fired.”
There seem to be dozens of college rankings out there, many of them appearing in August. This one, though, is truly skin-deep.
A website, ShermansTravel.com, included U.Va. as one of its “Top 10 College Campuses to Visit” in rankings released Tuesday. (Oddly enough, the site seems to have used only used one photo, from No. 4 Stanford, to illustrate its website, though an accompanying slideshow has shots from each school.)
The complete top 10, and a few more comments, after the break:
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:
The Dirt, a publication of the American Society of Landscape Architects, on Tuesday published a long-form interview with Kristina Hill, who chairs the landscape architecture department at U.Va.’s School of Architecture, on her ideas about managing the effects of climate change. It’s an interesting read.
Hill notes that Americans — and by extension, their political leaders — seem to be less concerned about the effects of climate change than Canadians and Europeans, and suggest that preparations to mitigate those effects may be lacking.
Here’s something that should reassure those “Velcro parents” a little bit, from the Washington Post’s “Campus Overload” blog: A new study from the National Communication Association finds that more than three-quarters of peers would at least try to prevent a female friend from embarking on a drunken sexual encounter with a stranger, and in some cases would directly try to prevent it.
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…
A new Atlantic article, “Showtime: Television for Women, for Everyone?” examines how Showtime has found success producing shows that center around a female main character with a “problem.” (Examples: Weeds, Nurse Jackie, United States of Tara, and The Secret Diary of a Call Girl) Cut from the same template, Showtime’s newest series, The Big C (trailer below), starring Laura Linney as a teacher with terminal cancer, premiered Monday.
To explain what Showtime is doing right (and different), Kevin Fallon turns primarily to U.Va.’s Andrea Press, chair of the media studies, professor of sociology and author of Women Watching Television. Showtime’s shows bring in a larger audience than other shows tackling “women’s issues,” Press says, because they cover challenges faced by modern American women – post-divorce financial struggles or finding time for children amidst demanding work schedules, for instance – as one level of a broader narrative that also covers family and workplace drama.
Now, if I can just get some of these Showtime series through Netflix on-demand…
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:
The Alaska plane crash that killed former U.S. Sen Ted Stevens also claimed the life of attorney and lobbyist William Phillips Sr., the father of U.Va. football player Colter Phillips (pictured). Among the injured was Colter’s 13-year-old brother, Willy.
In a statement distributed this morning, U.Va. football coach Mike London said: “A member of our football family, Colter Phillips, lost his father William ‘Bill’ Sr., Monday in a plane crash that claimed several lives. Our thoughts
and prayers are with the Phillips family and all the other families affected by this tragedy. Colter is currently with his family and we are committed to supporting him in any way possible.”
Colter Phillips, a second-year tight end on the Cavalier squad, has two more brothers who play Division I football. His older brother Andrew is a senior offensive guard at Stanford, and his younger brother Paul is a freshman tight end at Indiana.
(Top: A crossroads store, bar, “juke joint,” and gas station in the cotton plantation area. Melrose, Louisiana, June 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Bottom: Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Clinton, Iowa, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
News | Wednesday, August 4th | By: Dan @8:43 am | 0 Comments
Lauren White, a rising third-year biomedical engineering major, is taking part in the University of Virginia’s Engineering School’s Science and Technology Policy Internship Program, which places student interns in policymaking organizations at home and abroad. White is working at the Pan American Health Organization and the Institute of Epidemiological Studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has agreed to share her weekly reports with us.
Week 7: I dedicated this week to compiling all the survey results from my 27 interviews. Although entering data into Excel can be tedious, capturing the emerging trends and some enlightening comments from interviewees kept the task motivating. It was very exciting to take a step back from the one-on-one interviews and view the responses within a larger context.
There will be a U.Va. grad on 
Every issue of 
The Alaska plane crash that killed former U.S. Sen Ted Stevens also claimed the life of attorney and lobbyist William Phillips Sr., the father of U.Va. football player Colter Phillips (pictured). Among the injured was Colter’s 13-year-old brother, Willy.
Lauren White, a rising third-year biomedical engineering major, is taking part in the University of Virginia’s Engineering School’s 