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(01/29/10 5:08am)
Despite having only a few months left in their terms, the members of the Honor Committee continue to examine what they can accomplish, specifically focusing on two amendments that could alter jury composition at an accused student's trial.
(01/29/10 5:06am)
As the spring semester opens, the University Judiciary Committee will look to continue its progress increasing its outreach and transparency efforts.
(01/25/10 6:46am)
In its first meeting of the semester, the Honor Committee discussed a proposed constitutional amendment that would increase transparency between the Committee and the University community.
(12/04/09 5:02am)
As a semester filled with discussion and potentially impactful changes comes to a close, Honor Committee members already are planning a series of forecasted spring election amendments that aim to improve debated aspects of current trial and juror processes.
(11/24/09 5:56am)
The Honor Committee is currently looking at two changes to its constitutional bylaws and general policies that would have a significant impact on the honor system as a whole.
(11/23/09 6:32am)
Throughout the semester, the Honor Committee has re-worked and re-examined many of its education efforts in the hopes of increasing awareness and knowledge about its system.
(11/16/09 6:23am)
The Honor Committee voted 20-0 last night in favor of Committee Chair David Truetzel's proposal to modify the current Semester at Sea trial procedures for students who are found guilty of committing an honor offense aboard the program's ship.
(11/02/09 6:52am)
The Honor Committee last night considered a possible supplement to its "green book," the Committee's handbook that defines its policies and procedures, that would further detail and define plagiarism and paraphrasing.
(11/02/09 6:51am)
University Judiciary Committee members last night reviewed a proposed amendment that would define term length for the First Year Judiciary Committee and add this new definition to the committee's constitution and bylaws.
(10/28/09 5:13am)
The University Judiciary Committee introduced the new First Year Judiciary Committee at its weekly meeting last Sunday. First-year College student Emily Forrester was elected as FYJC chair and first-year College student Charity Harrell as vice chair.
(10/26/09 6:47am)
Last night, the Honor Committee continued its ongoing discussion about a re-examination and possible amendment of its current Semester at Sea processes.
(10/20/09 4:54am)
At its weekly meeting Sunday night, the Honor Committee heard concerns raised by a recently created support group for students accused and convicted of honor offenses.
(10/19/09 5:32am)
Last night, the University Judiciary Committee released demographic statistics about its recent recruitment efforts. The numbers indicate a high level of interest from first-year and College student populations compared to other segments of the University.
(10/12/09 6:37am)
Honor Chair David Truetzel presented a proposal at last night's Honor Committee meeting that would give expelled Semester at Sea students the right to request a new trial if found guilty of an academic honor offense during the program. The proposal also would give students found guilty aboard the program's ship the chance either to be readmitted to the University or, in the case of non-University students, the option to apply to the University at a later date.
(09/30/09 5:16am)
The University continues to move forward with changes made to its Patent Foundation, UVAPF, in hopes of increasing revenue and conversion of patents to licensing deals.
(09/28/09 5:30am)
The Honor Committee heard and addressed its first community concern of the semester last night. Barbara Pierson, the parent of a student expelled on honor charges last academic year, spoke before the Committee to address concerns about her daughter's honor trial, as well as make some possible suggestions for the Committee.
(09/22/09 5:11am)
The Honor Committee discussed a proposal to redefine plagiarism at its weekly meeting Sunday night.
(09/14/09 5:52am)
In response to concerns about the fallout of cases not brought to trial, Honor Committee members discussed last night the possibility of sending a letter to offense reporters after a case has been dropped to describe why the case was dropped and invite discussion if desired.
(09/07/09 9:27am)
The University Judiciary Committee entered the world of new media Aug. 26, launching its own Youtube channel to better educate students about the organization's frequently misunderstood system.\nThe channel is currently home to five videos that range in topics from "Filing a Complaint" to "Judge Information." Each video acts as an instructional video, in which either University students or UJC members learn the steps necessary to navigate through a certain area of UJC's Web site, co-Senior Data Manager Gavin Reddick said. Reddick narrates the five videos, providing a verbal, as well as visual, lesson.\nWhile UJC originally created the videos last year and posted them on its Web site to cover different parts of its online system, Reddick said UJC decided to switch to Youtube after the popular Web site started displaying high definition videos.\nMany of the videos currently found on the channel also act as training materials for support officers and judges, Reddick said.\n"It can help guide members trying to use our online system," UJC Chair Michael Chapman said.\nCo-Senior Data Manger Yiding Li, who also helped put the videos online, said the channel will help the committee make fewer mistakes and decrease the amount of training time for committee members.\nAside from educating committee members, though, Chapman said the real intention of the videos is to reach out to the University community.\n"It's a really innovative idea that I don't think other organizations have pursued yet," Chapman said. "It helps the University as a whole understand what we do and what our processes are."\nFor students unfamiliar with the system, the short two- to three-minute videos may provide a much clearer and user-friendly system than navigating through a Web site.\n"I think that would be way better than reading through tons and tons of pages," fourth-year Engineering student Archie Raval said.\nLi added that the Youtube channel also acts as a way to increase transparency within UJC, so that students not only know how to accomplish tasks, such as filing a complaint on the UJC Web site, but also can view the steps and actions taken by UJC members.\n"Right now, we view the channel as a portal of the UJC, and this can shed more light on how the committee works," Li said. "Currently, there are some complaints that UJC is not as transparent as it should be and with this students can see how it works."\nSome students, however, would still like to see more videos added to the channel that are meant specifically for University students not part of UJC.\n"I would like to see videos that are more personal or exciting to watch," fourth-year College student Jason Duke said.\nAs of now, though, the channel remains in its beginning stages. Committee members hope to add new videos throughout the semester, and Reddick has already said he plans to upload dorm talk videos and other presentations as they become available.\n"We're looking for new ideas as to what to put on there," Chapman said, "It's something we're actively working on."\nStudents can find the channel, "TheUJC," on www.youtube.com.
(09/01/09 8:31am)
A study co-authored by University environmental sciences professor emeritus William Ruddiman concluded that the agricultural methods of ancient human populations may have had an effect on global climate change.\nRuddiman built his conclusion off of a hypothesis made more than five years ago, which stated that humans started having a measurable effect on carbon dioxide values as populations started practicing agriculture about 7,000 years ago. According to the hypothesis, this increase in carbon dioxide values resulted from the large-scale deforestation practiced at that time. Ruddiman also conjectured that methane was released into the atmosphere when humans started raising livestock and growing rice 5,000 years ago.\n"One of the criticisms [for the original hypothesis] is very basic and it sounds very plausible," Ruddiman said, noting that many experts doubted whether there were enough farmers at that time to have an effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Current estimates state that there were around 10 to 20 million people alive about 6,000 years ago, Ruddiman said.\nClaiming that this population was too small to affect the global climate, however, would assume that past populations had the same environmental impact per person as does the modern population. This assumption is "simply not true," Ruddiman said, noting that several archaeological and anthropological studies show that people in antiquity used much more land than people do today.\n"Go back 6,000 years ago, the average farmer would go out into the woods, take an axe, girdle a notch into a tree [to kill it], girdle an acre's worth of trees, they all die ... go away for a few years, come back, set fire to them [and] burn them," Ruddiman said.\nThis slash-and-burn approach gave early farmers a large quantity of fertile soil with plenty of sunlight but it encouraged farmers to simply abandon old fields and clear away more forest, Ruddiman said. Eventually, this method led to a usage of 10 times as much land per-capita as modern populations use.\n"If there were 10 to 20 million people back then, but they had the effect of 10 people [today], that's enough to just become detectable in the carbon dioxide curves, according to our calculations, and become more and more detectable over time," Ruddiman said.\nIn the past, people chose to burn and clear land to such a large extent either because they did not understand how to replenish nutrients or because they simply did not want to do the labor, said co-author Erle Ellis, associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.\n"It's a lot easier to burn a forest than build a field," Ellis said, noting that because there was not a land shortage at the time, people used more land for less labor.\nAlthough the study concluded that populations thousands of years ago began the process of altering the climate, "that doesn't change what we've done today," Ellis said.\n"It took them thousands of years to do what we did in five years," Ellis added, referring to the atmospheric release of greenhouse gases that could increase the planet's overall temperature. "What they did was profound but is insignificant to what we've done today"