Donald Norris, professor and chair of public policy, recently spoke with The Gazette for on efforts to create a Maryland House of Delegates single-member subdistrict in Montgomery County, which would ostensibly aid in the election of a Latino lawmaker to represent a largely-Latino area.

Those in favor feel that such a subdistrict would be beneficial in strengthening populations with common backgrounds and interests, while skeptics argue that these efforts could do long-term harm by creating uncompetitive seats and limiting chances to unseat incumbents. Norris listed a number of complexities to the single-member issue, speaking of issues involving parochialism, partisanship, the benefits and drawback of at-large districts and the history of redistricting, among others.

The story, “Single-member districts offer mixed-bag for minorities,” ran on July 13.

In a July 12 piece for Salon entitled “Will Obama’s Bain blows land?” Tom Schaller, professor of political science, analyzed the president’s emerging strategy of focusing on Mitt Romney’s history with the investment firm Bain Capital. Schaller expressed doubts that these critiques will work. ” After all, Obama’s populist record is mixed: undeniably strong on some issues (expanded healthcare coverage, student loans and payroll taxes), and spotty if not weak on others (Wall Street prosecutions and reform, extension of Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and job outsourcing),” he wrote.

Schaller concludes the piece by writing that “even if the president, given his own economic record over the past three-plus years, struggles to advance economic populist critiques along policy lines, the Obama campaign will mount a powerful populist critique of Romney as a businessman and politician who literally embodies all that’s wrong economically with America right now.”

Stephanie Archer-Smith ’85, developmental psychology, was recently named the executive director for Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland.

“We are delighted to be able to hire someone as experienced and capable as Stephanie to lead Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland,” said board president Jonathan Wachs.  “She is well-qualified for the post, and her strengths and abilities are tailor-made to lead our organization into the next phase of growth and sustainability.”

Archer-Smith, who received a graduate degree at the University of Baltimore, has served as senior vice president of operations for St. Vincent de Paul of Baltimore for the past eight years, where “she played a key role in securing capital expansion funding, ensuring quality operations, adding and increasing program growth as well as boosting annual revenues,” according to a press release available on Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland’s website.

You can learn about Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland and its mission in the Baltimore area here.

This post originally appeared in UMBC Insights.

Michael Bok ’14 Ph.D., biological sciences, was featured in a July 8th blog post on the science blog io9.

The piece focused on a video, filmed by Bok and posted on his website Arthropoda, of a dead Longfin Inshore Squid whose chromatophores were still active. Bok set the piece to Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel.

You can watch the video and read other posts by Bok at Arthropoda.

Stephanie Archer-Smith ’85, developmental psychology, was recently named the executive director for Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland.

“We are delighted to be able to hire someone as experienced and capable as Stephanie to lead Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland,” said board president Jonathan Wachs.  “She is well-qualified for the post, and her strengths and abilities are tailor-made to lead our organization into the next phase of growth and sustainabiliy.”

Archer-Smith, who received a graduate degree at the University of Baltimore, her served as senior vice president of operations for St. Vincent de Paul of Baltimore for the past eight years, where “she played a key role in securing capital expansion funding, ensuring quality operations, adding and increasing program growth as well as boosting annual revenues,” according to a press release available on Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland’s website.

You can learn about Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland and its mission in the Baltimore area here.

The Mobtown Players are producing the latest play by Laurel resident and alumna Erica Smith ’03, theater. The play is entitled Come Out and Say It, and was chosen from among three by local playwrights which were given staged readings last fall by the Mobtown Playwrights Group (MPG), according to theater website BroadwayWorld Baltimore.

The synopsis given on The Mobtown Players’ website goes as follows:

“Five people. Four pros. Three murderers. Two lovers. One miscalculation. As Vale deals with the aftermath of a heist gone wrong, he sees his plans—and his life—fall apart before his eyes.  In Come Out and Say It, forgiveness is not quite as simple as it seems.”

The play’s run begins July 13th, and ends two weeks later on July 28th. Tickets can be purchased through Brown Paper Tickets here.

Dan Ritschel, professor of history and director of the Center for History Education, was a guest on Maryland Morning during a July 11th segment on Maryland’s newly-added government assessment test for high school seniors.

The test, which will be first given in 2017, was part of a new law passed by the Maryland General Assembly this spring. Ritschel spoke of the importance of the test’s introduction, but noted also that other fields – including his own – remain somewhat neglected as the high school level.

“There used to be a Maryland performance assessment in history until 2002, and following the introduction of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, the Maryland Department of Education scrapped the testing of history,” he said. “So what we’re left with is the testing of U.S. government at the high school level – and I think it’s a wonderful thing that it’s been returned – but I think we shouldn’t forget the fact that history hasn’t been tested at the state level since 2002.”

The one-year, post-baccalaureate Music Entrepreneurship Certificate Program is modeled around an innovative collaboration between UMBC and The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). This marks the first time that a major American orchestra has collaborated with a university in a new academic program. With the BSO’s public education music program, OrchKids, at the center of the Music Entrepreneurship program curriculum, students will obtain practical experiences in entrepreneurial and educational ventures to make them successful twenty-first century musicians. Applications for Fall 2012 will be accepted through Friday, August 10.

For more information, click here.

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, will be a featured speaker at an August 11 Erikson Institute Creativity Seminar at the Austin Riggs Center on the subject of “The Brightening Glance: Creativity and Childhood.”

“The brightening glance” is a phrase taken from the title of a Spitz book in which she “returns us to the vibrant experience of childhood to explain how the imagination emerges and develops.” The seminar will explore questions such as: What is childhood creativity and what does it tell us about the creative process in general? Are the roots of adult creativity in childhood, and if so, how? What interferes with the creative process in children and what does that tell us about obstacles to creativity in our adult lives? What in our adult creative lives links us to childhood and in what ways?

Other speakers include Daisy Rockwell, a painter and writer; Kelly Smedvig, a musician, model and mother; and Ruslan Sprague, a dancer and choreographer.

More information about the seminar can be found here.

Robert Provine, professor of psychology, appeared on the Irish radio station newsTalk’s Moncrieff program July 5th to discuss laughing’s purpose and its origins in human evolution.

“Laughter is literally the sound of play,” said Provine. “In fact, the human ‘ha-ha’ evolved from the labored breathing of our rough-and-tumble primate ancestors, whereby ‘pant-pant’ became ‘ha-ha.'”

You can listen to the discussion here, in segment 3 from the July 5th broadcast, beginning at 51:20 and continuing in segment 4.