K. Jill Barr, assistant dean for Graduate Enrollment Management, recently returned from a consulting trip to Qatar University. Barr was asked by the American Bar Association to provide guidance on the development of student services and a career services office for the law school at Qatar University. She will return this fall for a follow-up visit.

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, recently returned from Belgrade, Serbia, where she spoke on her book “Art and Psyche.”  The book was recently translated to Serbian.

While in Belgrade, Spitz lectured at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade; the Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad; the Institute for Mental Health, Belgrade; and Kolarac Hall.  The themes of her discussion were art and psychoanalysis, and children, space, and imagination.

Stories about Spitz’s visit appeared in the Serbian press both before and after her visit.  An example of a story can be seen here.

Madeline Hall ’12, geography and environmental systems, is featured in the documentary Circus Dreams, which will air on Maryland Public Television on April 9 at 10 p.m.

Circus Dreams documents a year in the life of Circus Smirkus, one of the best traveling youth circuses in the world. The film immerses viewers into the lives of the 12 to 18 year old performers, capturing their intense work ethic, passion for performance, deep friendships and budding loves.

Hall performed in the circus for two summers, after having spent the previous seven summers at the circus’s summer camp. Since 2005, she has also performed at the Maryland Reniassance Festival. A video of Hall discussing her time with the circus can be seen here.

The March issue of Birding features the work of Kevin Omland, an associate professor of biology.

The author, Paul Hess writes that, Omland and his colleagues, “take an opposite view from several papers that recommend splitting the Common Raven into two species.”

The new study demonstrates a need for multiple criteria — not only genetic, but also morphological, behavioral and ecological to judge whether a population deserves full-species status.

The Baltimore Sun and the Washington Times covered the UMBC chess team this week as they competed in the 2012 President’s Cup.

The team tied with the University of Texas at Dallas for second place, behind Texas Tech and ahead of New York University. The competition, known informally as the Final Four, was held March 30 to April 1 in Herndon, Va., at the Westin Dulles Hotel.

Teams qualified for the match back in December, during the 2011 Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship. In that match UMBC came in second, ahead of Texas Tech and New York University and behind the University of Texas at Dallas. All four teams advanced to the Final Four. In that event, UMBC and UTD both earned 7.5 points, with Texas Tech scoring 8 and NYU 1.

Constantine Vaporis, professor of history and director of the Asian studies program, will participate in a panel disccusion at the Freer Gallery on Saturday, May 5 as part of the “articulations” series.  The purpose of the series is to “broaden… perspectives on art and culture through conversations from multiple viewpoints.”

The topic of conversation will be “Visual Culture and Social Upheaval: Imaging Change in Late Edo Period Japan.”  The panelists will explore the intersection of pop culture and spiritual concerns in late Edo society with leading scholars. Attendees will discover the reasons behind the acclaim for Kano Kazunobu’s phantasmagoric paintings of Buddha’s legendary disciples and Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print series of Mount Fuji, and learn how the popularity of these iconic images endures in contemporary Japan.

In addition to Vaporis, the panel includes:

• James C. Dobbins, Fairchild Professor of Religion at Oberlin College
• Patricia Graham, independent art historian
• Freer|Sackler curators James Ulak and Ann Yonemura

The event will take place on May 5 at 2 p.m. in the gallery’s Meyer auditorium.

As election season moves into high gear, UMBC faculty are providing media with insight into both local and national political developments.

Laura Hussey, assistant professor of political science, commented for AP on Maryland state Sen. Anthony Muse’s campaign to oust U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin. Muse has promoted himself as a better advocate on issues such as consumer protection, but Hussey notes that Cardin maintains an incumbent’s advantage, benefiting from name recognition, prominent endorsements and strong financial support.

Hussey argues that if the seat were open, rather than occupied by an incumbent, demographic and geographic differences between Muse and Cardin would play a greater role in the election. Muse has suggested that Maryland is poised to elect an African-American to the U.S. senate at a moment when there are no black U.S. senators.

Don Norris, professor and chairman of UMBC’s Department of Public Policy, predicted for the National Journal that “there won’t be any surprises” in the Maryland and D.C. Republican primaries—Romney is likely to easily take the lead in both.

“The Republican electorate in Maryland is a little more moderate”—and Romney-friendly—“than in other states below the Mason-Dixon line,” says Norris. Although the primary might be less exciting in Maryland than other states, the delegates are just as important. “Romney’s waging a war of attrition against Santorum and Gingrich,” Norris argues. “Every time he wins a delegate…[it] goes into the plus column to eventually get to the 1,144 that he’s got to have.”

The Washington Post this weekend featured a reflection on the turbulent development of Nationals Park, home to the Washington Nationals. The article concluded with a comment by UMBC economics professor Dennis Coates, who wrote a report opposing the stadium deal in 2004.

Coates argued that sports facilities redistribute (rather than increase) leisure spending and asked: “Does it make sense to spend all those tax dollars on a stadium that will just attract the entertainment dollar from Georgetown or Adams Morgan to the ballpark area?” However, he also suggested the investment might pay off if the District’s goal was to attract suburbanites’ leisure spending.

Recent findings indicate that this might indeed be what is happening: 60% of game attendees are from Virginia, 25% from Maryland and 15% from the District, which means Virginians are disproportionately contributing their leisure funds to D.C.’s coffers.

UMBC and Marie desJardins appeared in the New York Times. The article, “Computer Science for the Rest of Us,” describes the idea that all students should learn how to ‘think computationally’ and discusses the growing number of new efforts to teach non-majors how to do that, with or without learning how to program in conventional programming languages like Python or Java.

Marie desJardins, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says her department uses Scratch in its “Introduction to Computers and Programming” course, in which students can try a few basic concepts. About 25 percent of the semester is spent on programming.

Explaining why Scratch is used at the college level, she says that all students arrive on campus having taken high school classes in English, math, biology and so on, but that many have not taken a computer science class.”

Bill Shewbridge, director of UMBC’s New Media Studio, spoke to Urbanite about the role technology plays on campus and in the lives of students.

“There is a tendency to think that students are digital natives,” says Bill Shewbridge, the director of the new media studio at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). “But uploading a picture to Facebook doesn’t make you a producer, much less an informed consumer.”

A television producer-turned-professor, Shewbridge discovered this after embarking on UMBC’s digital storytelling project eight years ago. To tell digital stories—short videos, usually for a particular class, that combine scriptwriting, interviewing, and research—students first needed to be taught video editing, audio recording, and image processing. Now, UMBC offers a multimedia literacy lab, a one-credit course taken concurrently with another class, where students learn those skills.

The article, “The Wired Campus,” appeared March 30 in Urbanite.