Contact:
Chelsea Haddaway
Communications Manager
(410) 455-6380
chaddaway@gmail.com

Susan McDonough, assistant professor of history, has been awarded a Fellowship at the Newberry Library by the Audrey Lumsden Kouvel/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Fund. The fellowship provides funding for her to spend the 2010-2011 academic year at Chicago’s Newberry Library.

While at the Newberry, McDonough will continue work on her book, entitled Judging Your Neighbor: Making a Culture of Neighborliness in a Late Medieval Port Town. The book examines the fifteenth century civil court records from a small town in France.

“The witness testimony from Marseille’s court records offers a small window into the neighborhoods of Marseille, but more, the testimonies reveal how humble people, often women, used the role of witness to become the arbiters of their communities,” she said.

“The fellowship is a great recognition of her status as a promising young scholar,” said Kris Lindenmeyer, chair of the history department. McDonough has been teaching at UMBC since 2005, when she received her Ph.D. from Yale. Judging Your Neighbor is a continuation of her dissertation project.

McDonough is examining records of trials in which witnesses provided testimony.

“There's a magic to reading words spoken by a sailor's widow or a woman suing her cousin for control over a sizeable estate. Even if the words are translated [from the vernacular into Latin] by the notary, I think it's possible to get a sense of the person behind the words.”

In addition to giving McDonough time to focus on her research, the fellowship will provide McDonough with access to the Newberry’s extensive collection of medieval manuscripts. McDonough plans to use these sources to to contextualize the behavior that she has found in the witness testimony.

“It is also a place known for the generosity of the scholars in residence, so it will be a great place for me to work out my ideas in a community of folks who are able to focus on their research,” she said.

McDonough will head to Chicago in September, and be there until June. While in Chicago, McDonough will also be looking for a publisher for the book.

This is a test of the xpost plugin.

Advancing Science

For their prestigious scholarship, Robert Provine, professor of psychology, and Michael Summers, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, were named fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The AAAS fellowship is an honor shared only by top leaders in science.

Provine is a neuroscientist engaged in studies of the development, evolution and neural mechanisms of behavior. His approaches are comparative and interdisciplinary, and, at various times, he has studied the neural basis of embryonic behavior, the development and evolution of bird flight and machine intelligence and control. His recent work, which has been highly praised in numerous international publications, is focused on laughter, yawning, tickling and behavior contagion in terms of long-term behavior development and evolution. His work has been mentioned in The New York Times, Time and Newsweek, among others.

“I believe in following the path of discovery – wherever that leads – regardless of discipline,” said Provine. “AAAS represents that same spirit as does their prestigious journal, Science.”

Summers is unraveling the internal architecture of HIV (the retrovirus that causes AIDS), striving to understand how it and other retroviruses assemble and how they package their genetic material so that they can infect other cells. He and his team have solved the three-dimensional structures of three proteins that make up the virus, and they are now using this information to decipher the way HIV proteins interact with each other and with the cells they infect. Recently, they have made discoveries in terms of understanding how parts of the virus get to proper sites in the cell. In addition, two of his National Institute of Health grants were competitively renewed.

“This means an enormous amount to me,” said Summers. “AAAS is one of the few national organizations that pays attention to issues of education and policy in the U.S. as they pertain to science.”

AAAS seeks to advance science, engineering and innovation throughout the world. Provine and Summers join the ranks of other well-distinguished UMBC researchers and educators who are AAAS Fellows including President Freeman Hrabowski; Sandra Herbert, professor emerita of history (and Darwin expert); Anthony Johnson, professor of physics; Thomas Cronin, professor of biological sciences; Govind Rao, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering; and G. Rickey Welch, dean emeritus.

Both Provine and Summers feel honored to the join the fellows. AAAS includes a variety of science disciplines and issues – something important to both Provine and Summers. They share their recognition with all undergraduate and graduate students, past and present, who have worked in their labs.  

“I look forward to contributing to AAAS,” said Summers, “and I hope to take information with me about what our students – what the young people in science do here – that can help the nation do the same.”

(7/30/10)

Washington Technology, which describes itself as “the online authority for government contractors and partners”), has an article by Carlos A. Soto on 5 technologies that will change the market. They are:

1. Mobile
2. Search and the Semantic Web
3. Search and the Semantic Web
4. Virtualization and cloud computing
5. Virtualization and cloud computing

These are reasonable choices, thought I’ve have not done the double counting and added “machine learning applied to the massive amounts of Web data now available” and “social computing”.

But it’s gratifying to see the Semantic Web in the list. Here’s some of what he he has to say about search and the Semantic Web.

The relationship between search technology and the Semantic Web is a perfect illustration of how a small sustaining technology, such as a basic search feature on an operating system, will eventually be eaten up by a larger disruptive technology, such as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has the potential of acting like a red giant star by expanding at exponential rates, swallowing whole planets of existing technology in the process.

The technology started as a simple group of secure, trusted, linked data stores. Now Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web and then build vocabularies or write rules for handling the data. Because all the data by definition is trusted, security is often less of a problem.

The task of turning the World Wide Web into a giant dynamic database is causing a shift among traditional search engines because products such as Apture, by Apture Inc. of San Francisco, Calif., let content publishers include pop-up definitions, images or data whenever a user scrolls over a word on a Web site. The ability to categorize content in this manner could have significant implications not only for Web searches but also for corporate intranets and your desktop PC.

These types of products will continue to expand, initially in the publishing industry and then to most industries on the Web in the next two to three years.

For example, human resources sites could use them to pop up a picture and a résumé blip when a recruiter drags a mouse over an applicant’s name. Medical and financial sites such as the National Institutes of Health could use it to break down jargon and help with site exploration.
…
Government sites around the world, such as Zaragoza, Spain, and medical facilities, such as the Cleveland Medical Clinic, are using the vocabulary features of the Semantic Web to create search engines that reach across complex jargon and tech silos to offer a high degree of automation, full integration with external systems and various terminologies, in addition to the ability to accurately answer users’ queries.
…”

(h/t @FrankVanHarmele)

Creative Review has a really great article talking about Logo design in 2010. I love the way that they have separated out different ‘trends’, it makes you more appreciative for the logo designs within their own trend.

They state ‘Transparency in logo design has become a bona fide design tool, like type or colour, not a trend. It’s too ubiquitous anymore to be considered a direction: it just is.’. I’m really interested in when this happened. You see re-branding happening pretty often nowadays, and if you pay attention you do see transparency and negative space being highly utilized.

If you look at the examples they give of innovative logos, you’ll notice that it is not longer a play on words, but more a play on space, texture, shapes, and your own mind. Advertisers and designers are counting on you to sort of fill in the blanks they have left us. They are creating puzzles within design, and allowing us to come to our own conclusions. Advertising and design is no longer an in your face approach, and it ponders the question: What’s next?

Find/Post by Katie

If you're reading this, the group works!

Thanks for taking a second to check out the myUMBC Fan Club group.  We're going to use this group as our way to stay connected to you UMBC community.

So What's Going On With myUMBC?

I'm glad you asked.  A lot.

First off, let me apologize for any inconvenience over the past few weeks as we had to turn some features of myUMBC off in order to upgrade them for the Fall.  The new myUMBC is about a bazillion times more complicated than the old one and we're trying to ensure that when students flood back in late August that everything is going to work smoothly.  We're still expecting a few hiccups, but we're working hard to minimize them.

We have an official launch window: Aug 14th - 15th.  Its called a window because we're going to try and do it on the 14th, but if things go wrong (and they will), it may take until the 15th to get things back up and running.

There is still a ton of things left to do, though. Until the start of the semester, every day or two we will try and push out new features, content and bug fixes.  If you run into any problems with the new myUMBC, let me know as soon as you can.  We'll try and get the bugs squashed ASAP.

What's This Groups Thing?

Groups are the biggest and most ambitious new feature of myUMBC.  They will hopefully provide a simple and easy way for the UMBC to connect and collaborate.  Groups can be used for student org advertising and planning, simple websites for organizations, or collaboration areas for committees.  We've purposefully made the tools in Groups simple and straightforward, because we don't need to be the best (there are plenty of tools online that are better at any given task), we just need to help the parts of the community that need help.  As the community uses Groups, we'll be paying attention and adding and modifying features in order to best meet UMBC's needs.

As I've mentioned, each group consists of a set of "tools" you can use:

• Home - a simple page showcasing the latest content from your group
• Spotlights - spotlights, but just for your group
• News - a blog
• Events - a calendar
• Pages - a wiki

We've recently pushed out the two biggest (and most critical) tools of groups: Members and Discussions.

• Members lets you manage the members of your group... that's all, but its kinda important.
• Discussions lets you have discussions with your members.  Its like a forum, but with some added myUMBC mojo.  You can create three types of discussions:
• General - talk about stuff in a free form discussion
• Question - ask a question, then select one of the replies as an answer
• Poll - ask a question and let people to vote on their preference

Going Public

An important function of groups is the ability to make your content "public". Any spotlight, news, event, discussion, media can be marked as public and will appear under their respective section of the Community menu.  This makes it easy for your group to advertise their content to the entire UMBC community.  Once content is made public, it can be pawed and commented on by anyone logged in to myUMBC.

So, if your group is planning an event, post it to your group calendar with tentative dates while you work out the details and when things are finalized, make it public, and then send your group members out to paw the event so it appears on the myUMBC Start page.

Coming Soon

We're now working on the last remaining parts of groups:

• Media - Share the videos and photos you've posted on various sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
• Categories - Allow you to categorize content within your group.  Think of them as Topics, but just for your group.
• Subscriptions - Automatically pull in content from external sites, like Blogger or Tumblr via RSS.  You can also pull in content from other groups, which provides a great way for groups to work together to cross-advertise news and events.  You can even subscribe to YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr feeds and the images/videos appear in Media.

Thanks for everyone's understanding and support,

Collier

PS - The image is by one of my favorite artists, David Lanham.  I think it accurately represents what the past two years have felt like as we've worked on myUMBC.

Google Chrome has been showing me a malware warning page today as I try to visit normally trusted and benign sites. I got this one just now as I tried to got to Planet RDF.

Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!

The website at planetrdf.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.

For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for bin.clearspring.com.

Learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software online.

[ ] I understand that visiting this site may harm my computer. PROCEED

Clearspring claims it’s a technical problem, although they admit they were using a service that was compromised with files redirecting users to a certain malware domain. I’m a bit fuzzy on what clearspring does and where they are being used on the Planet RDF site. I don’t see it in the page source, for example.

update: Maybe the problem stems from flash cookies in blog content being syndicated by Planet RDF that have flash objects mediated by clearspring.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Advice for Young Creatives

“Never content to accept conventional wisdom, creatives love to learn things the hard way. But is it absolutely necessary? We chatted with a handful of 99% Conference attendees about the things they wished someone had told them when they were just starting out. A shortlist of the takeaways: never sacrifice what you love, find great collaborators and share your ideas, learn how to say no and stay focused, and always, always stick to your guns.”

find/post: Jenna