“For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little.”

Rachel Carson

Thanks to Wikicommons.

President Obama (perhaps copying Facebook’s attitude) has changed the US governments policy on homosexual marriage.

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act defined marriage as

only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ’spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

Mr. Obama declared yesterday that this act was unconstitutional as it failed to provide equal protection under the law. Although this does not repeal the law (that is a job for the courts) it does mean that the Federal government will not fight legal challenges to the law.

This reversal is getting attention of people on both sides.

Republican Rick Santorum issued a strongly worded statement that

President Obama’s refusal to defend a law that was overwhelmingly supported on both sides of the aisle and signed into law by a president of his own party is an affront to the will of the people. This is yet another example of our president’s effort to erode the very traditions that have made our country the greatest nation on earth

The Human Right Campaign, America’s largest gay rights organization, hailed the Presidents decision with the organizations president, Joe Solomese, stating that

This is a monumental decision for the thousands of same-sex couples and their families who want nothing more than the same rights and dignity afforded to other married couples

Before anyone gets too excited (or up in arms) change is not coming immediately and may not at all.

For one thing, as a spokesman for the President noted, this only changes the legal defenses of the law as

the enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act continues — the President is constitutionally bound to enforce the laws and enforcement of the DOMA will continue.

The law’s future is now out of Obama’s hands and into those of the nations courts.

UMBC will host a two day “Pre-Spring Break Dissertation House” on Friday, March 11 and Saturday, March 12, 2011. Breakfast, lunch, and a snack will be served daily. This Dissertation House session will be held in lieu of the annual Dissertation House and Community Building Retreats at Coolfont and Rocky Gap. The event will take place from 9:00am to 5:00pm in the UMBC Commons.

At Dissertation House, Ph.D. students from Maryland’s research campuses learn the skills of thesis-writing success. During the immersive twice-yearly four-day program, a group of about twenty graduate students share experiences, set transparent goals, and map out ways to get to the finish line of the doctoral dissertation.

Interested Ph.D. students should follow the application guidelines and apply by Friday, 4 March 4 2011. For more information see the Dissertation House Blog.

Current and prospective undergraduate Computer Engineering majors are invited to an informal open house meeting from 11:30am to 12:50pm on Wednesday, March 2nd in ITE 456. CSEE chairman Gary Carter and CMPE faculty will present information on the undergraduate program and its tracks and courses as well as offer academic and career advice. There will be ample time for questions, feedback, comments and discussion. Lunch will be provided.

We are also recruiting current majors for a student advisory panel to review the CMPE program and courses. To volunteer for the panel, please attend the meeting or contact the CMPE undergraduate program director, Professor Curtis Menyuk (menyuk at umbc.edu).

The Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is holding a new data challenge using a new dataset from that includes about three TB of social media data collected by Spinn3r between January 13 and February 14th, 2011.

The dataset consists of over 386M blog posts, news articles, classifieds, forum posts and social media content in a month including events such as the Tunisian revolution and the Egyptian protests. The content includes the syndicated text, its original HTML as found on the web, annotations and metadata (e.g., author information, time of publication and source URL), and boilerplate/chrome extracted content. The data is formatted as Spinn3r’s protostreams – an extension to Google protobuffers. It is also broken down by date, content type and language making it easy to work with selected data.

See the ICWSM Data Challenge pages for more information on the challenge task, its associated ICWSM workshop and procedures for data access.