Same-sex marriage continues to be a hotly debated and deeply divisive cultural issue in the US.

Recently in Maryland, a vote in the state legislature to legalize same-sex marriage was dropped at the last minute after two weeks of intense lobbying.

Democratic leader Mike Busch says

“The vote would have been very close, make no mistake about it,”

Advocates in favor of gay unions are vowing to make a strong push to get a vote in the 2012 legislative session.

USDemocrazy sat down with UMBC’s Jodi Kelber-Kaye to discuss the issue. She has been actively engaged in the issue paying close attention to the contentious legislative antics in Annapolis. You can check out our interview below.

The submission deadline for OGK2011 has been extended to 17 June 2011.

AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium
Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges
4-6 November 2011 • Arlington, Virginia USA
http://tw.rpi.edu/ogk2011

The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 17, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9, 2011.

Every college student wants a good grade point average (GPA), right? To help get a higher GPA, does every college student take an easy class every now and then?

I think we know the answer to the last question.

Now it appears universities are try to find ways to discourage this “grade-padding” practice. The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights how two Universities are dealing with the problem.

First, the publication reports on University of North Carolina’s plan to publish class medians on student transcripts. In each class enrolled, a student will be ranked by percentile against their peers.

A new rating system called “Schedule Point Average” will be used. It will determine if a student is taking and easy or hard course to achieve their GPA

The Schedule Point Average will give an idea of how rigorous a student’s schedule is and how that student performed compared with others in the same courses. (Think strength of schedule for academics, not just basketball.)

The goal is to discourage students from taking less rigorous classes in the hope of inflating their academic standing.

Cornell University wants to achieve the same goal but they are moving in a slightly different direction.

Faculty at the university have voted to stop  a 15 year practice of publicly disclosing the median grades for each course.

The system was originally designed as a check against grade inflation, but some scholars at Cornell grew concerned that the policy may have backfired, as students allegedly used the data to shop for easy courses.

Median grades for Cornell Students will still be seen on their transcripts just not available to the public.

Do you think these Universities deserve good grades for their efforts?

Ephesians 5

¹⁸ Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, ¹⁹ speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, ²⁰ always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Reflection:

As the people of God, we have the power through Christ to turn away from the patterns and strongholds of this world which only lead to a wasted life.  We have been invited to live according to a completely new rhythm motivated and led by the Holy Spirit living inside of us.  This new pattern of living calls us to relate to and encourage one another in worship, thankfulness, and love.  As we worship the Lord and live in thanksgiving, we remind one another of God’s truth and we build one another up in love by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Our lives are open before God and before one another, allowing the presence of Christ to continually empower and shape us together.  God is already forming in us new grooves of living and relating to one another in His love.

Response:

What an exciting privilege and ability we have to worship the Lord together as the body of Christ!  Unlike with any other organization or interaction in this world, we have the amazing blessing of relating to one another in real love and truthfulness as we are filled with the Spirit during times of worship.  Let’s pray for our churches today - asking God for His presence to increase in greater measure during our times of meeting and worship together.  Pray that during these times, we would grow closer together as a community of believers as we draw nearer to God.  As we eagerly strive to love and serve the Lord in so many different places and ways, may God’s presence knit our hearts together even more.

I was at campus this evening and at around 8:45 the power went out for the entire campus. There were a number of fire trucks and and ambulences surrounding the public safety building as well as a helicopter flying overhead. What on earth is going on?

UMBC Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Illuminates the Tower's Clock

June 2 - 23, 2011
Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, 21 S. Eutaw Street, Baltimore

Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts Management
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

This release is available as a pdf file.

Beginning on Thursday, June 2 and continuing through Thursday, June 23, the clock face of Baltimore's Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower will be illuminated with moving projections created by Kelley Bell, an assistant professor in UMBC's Department of Visual Arts. Bell's project is part of the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower's centennial celebrations taking place during the month of June.

Bell will shine moving images from the inside of the tower through three of the four faces of the clock, creating artwork that can be seen for long distances across the city skyline. She remarks, "The distinct architecture of Baltimore City has been a source of inspiration to me, as an artist and as a designer. Baltimore is a city with wonderful hidden histories, and its urban landscape still continues to grow and change, sometimes for the good sometimes for the bad. It's a terrific canvas and subject to work with, and the opportunity to work in the Bromo Seltzer Tower is (literally and figuratively) one of the highest points of the work I've done here."

The Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, located at 21 S. Eutaw Street, was constructed in 1911. The structure is a historic landmark and important symbol of the Baltimore skyline. The Tower was transformed into artist studios in 2008 and is now operated as a facility of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts.

About Kelley Bell
Kelley Bell incorporates animation, illustration, and many other visual media in her graphic design practice. She started as a freelance artist in New York City, with a diverse portfolio of clients including MTV Networks, The Walt Disney Company, clothing designers Marithe Fracoois Girbaud, and Strictly Rhythm records.

In Baltimore, she established an independent graphic design studio, KBell Design, focused on print media for non-profit organizations in the Baltimore-Washington region. Past clients include youth media group Wide Angle Media, the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the Maryland State Teacher's Association.

Her animated work appeared in and literally on Baltimore City in two series of public guerilla-style projections: White Light, Black Birds and Rise and Fall of the Land of Pleasant Living. These projects compared the benefits and downsides of urban development through imagery and animations projected on specific sites facing transformation (or destruction) due to economic and cultural factors. Bell's animations have been screened locally and as far away as Berlin, Germany. Screenings include the American Visionary Arts Museum, the Annapolis Film Festival, the Transmodern Arts Festival, and the University of Maryland, College Park. She was a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in 2004, and a semifinalist for the Sondheim Art Prize in 2010.

Bell holds an M.F.A. from UMBC in Imaging and Digital Arts and a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from Pratt Institute.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! are cooperating on an approach to representing structured data in Web pages via the launch of schema.org. The approach is microdata and the schema.org site documents the schemas that are supported today.

“This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure. A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.”

That’s the good news. The bad news, or at least the less good news, is that it based on microdata and not RDFa. Microdata is a relatively new way to embed semantic information in HTML and designed to be part of the HTML5 suite. It is less expressive than RDFa but also simpler. It’s main advantage over microformats is that it is extensible — you can define new semantic vocabulary terms. Here is how the three companies described the choice.

Google: “Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data.”

Yahoo!:“Today’s announcement offers tremendous opportunity for growth. In addition to consolidating the schemas for the vocabularies we already support, there are schemas for more than a hundred newly created categories including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. We will continue to expand these categories by listening to feedback from the community and will continue publishing new schemas on a regular basis. Don’t worry if your site has already added RDFa or microformats currently supported by our Enhanced Displays program, that site will still appear with an Enhanced Display on Yahoo! – no changes required.”

Bing:“At Bing we understand the significant investment required to implement markup, and feel strongly that by partnering with Google and Yahoo! on standard schemas webmasters can be more efficient with the time they invest… Bing accepts a wide variety of markup formats today (Open Graph, microformat, etc.) for features like Tiles and will continue to do so, but by standardizing on schema.org we are looking to simplify the markup choices for webmasters and amplify the value the receive in return.

The scheme.org site has a FAQ that includes the question “Q: Why microdata? Why not RDFa or microformats?” which is answered thusly:

“Focusing on microdata was a pragmatic decision. Supporting multiple syntaxes makes documentation for webmasters more complex and introduces more overhead in terms of defining new formats. Microformats are concise and easy to understand, but they don’t offer an open extensibility mechanism and the reuse of the class tag can cause conflicts with website CSS. RDFa is extensible and very expressive, but the substantial complexity of the language has contributed to slower adoption. Microdata is the most recent well-known standard, created along with HTML5. It strikes a balance between extensibility and simplicity, and is most suitable for building the schema.org. Google and Yahoo! have in the past supported both microformats and RDFa for certain schemas and will continue to support these syntaxes for those schemas. We will also be monitoring the web for RDFa and microformats adoption and if they pick up, we will look into supporting these syntaxes. Also read the section on the data model for more on RDFa.”

Guha has a generous comment in his post on the official Google blog:

“While this collaborative initiative is new, we draw heavily from the decades of work in the database and knowledge representation communities, from projects such as Jim Gray’s SDSS Skyserver, Cyc and from ongoing efforts such as dbpedia.org and linked data. We feel privileged to build upon this great work. We look forward to seeing structured markup continue to grow on the web, powering richer search results and new kinds of applications.”

I’ve not studied microdata yet, so don’t know how I feel about the expressiveness/simplicity tradeoffs it has made. I wonder if it is possible to add an OWL-like layer on top ofMicrodata, for example.

Via the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship:

In the spirit of entrepreneurship itself, the Alex. Brown Center is pleased to announce a new minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation this fall. This new minor will not be housed under any one major, allowing any student to declare it and any faculty member to incorporate it in their curriculum. Faculty Fellow Bill LaCourse says the initial spark for the minor was to “infuse entrepreneurship into the university, looking for methodology and pathways that don’t disrupt the system.” He goes on to explain that everyone at UMBC is an entrepreneur – everyone here is in the “business of education,” from learning and teaching to grant writing and research.

Two new entrepreneurship courses will be introduced this fall. Both courses will give students a good entrepreneurial mind set and skill set that will be invaluable to them as they head into their own disciplines. Entrepreneurial Mindset, taught by guest instructor and serial entrepreneur Gib Mason ’95, will give students the tools necessary to apply entrepreneurial thinking to their studies, work and life. Through case studies, texts, projects, magazines and blogs, students will explore what it means to think like an entrepreneur, and how they can establish and leverage an entrepreneurial mindset to achieve career success. Mason says, “I am a very passionate person. My hope is that I can instill in the folks that take the class a passion behind one’s ideas and desires.” He is excited to return to a campus he knows very well and to “unlock the entrepreneurship in all of us.”

Learn more…