UTA In The News — Wednesday, November 8, 2023
No. 2 in the nation
UT Arlington is ranked No. 2 in the nation for veterans, Military Times and Yahoo! News reported.
Road cost tool
Mohsen Shanhandashti, an associate professor in the UTA Department of Civil Engineering, is building a price estimation and visualization tool for the Texas Department of Transportation through a $200,000 U.S. Department of Transportation grant, Dallas Innovates reported. He will be evaluating soil diversity, supply chain delays, climate differences, material and labor costs, and many other things that can impact the budget for a highway project.
Gun buybacks
James Kelsay, UT Arlington assistant professor in the department of criminology and criminal justice, said the main purpose of gun buyback programs is to remove guns from circulation, a Dallas Observer article reported. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot or any strong empirical evidence to suggest that gun buybacks are effective at reducing violence,” Kelsay said.
Property tax relief
Brent Boyea, UT Arlington political science professor, said Texas has some of the highest property tax rates in the country, KERANews.org and Houston Public Media reported. He said Proposition 2, which passed Tuesday, could help alleviate some of that burden.
Middle East solution?
The brutality of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and the ruthlessness of the Israeli response, has made some observers wonder if this time, the severity of the violence will finally force Israelis and Palestinians to come up with a real and lasting solution to the conflict over Gaza, Brent Sasley, an associate professor in UTA’s Department of Political Science, wrote in an opinion column in Politico.
Supreme Court case on gun rights
Should it be legal to take away the guns of people who are under a domestic violence protective order, which aims to shield victims from their abusers? That’s the question posed in one of the biggest cases of the current U.S. Supreme Court term, focused on the limits of individual gun rights, which will be argued before the justices today, Morgan Marietta, a UTA political science professor, wrote in an opinion piece that ran in UPI, the Houston Chronicle, SFGate.com, the San Antonio Express-News and The Conversation.
Women health concerns
A trio of UT Arlington researchers found that women who felt their health concerns were listened to by their health care providers had more positive outcomes compared to those who did not feel heard, Medical Xpress and Bollyinside reported. Tiffany Kindratt and Kyrah Brown, both assistant professors of public health in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation, and Grace E. Brannon, assistant professor of communication in the College of Liberal Arts, were coauthors on the study.