Thursday, June 5, 2014, 6:54am EDT

UMBC, CIC partner to teach cyber entrepreneurs how to pitch

The goal is to help the entrepreneurs tailor their messages to the right audience at the right time, said Jennifer Reynolds, director of venture creation at bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

A main driver behind the program is to help cyber entrepreneurs overcome obstacles they might face when looking for an investor such as knowing the right audience.

“One of the challenges is the audience and [the entrepreneurs] tend to just talk about the product whereas the investor likely wants to know more beyond the product,” said Allison Hartrick, collaboration and business development director of the CIC.

Read more at http://m.bizjournals.com/baltimore/blog/cyberbizblog/2014/06/umbc-cic-partner-to-teach-cyber-entrepreneurs-how.html?r=full

Upal Ghosh, professor in chemical and biochemical engineering has partnered with Newcastle University in the project:

Development of Sustainable Technologies to Investigate, Restore and Protect the Urban Water Environment. Newcastle University, University of Maryland Baltimore County (US), Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (India) and CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute Nagpur (India).

The grant instituted through Newcastle University will support student and faculty research exchanges among the partnering institutions.

The project will examine urban water quality and was summarized by the researchers:

Urban water quality is under enormous pressure around the world because of increasing population density and economic activity in cities. Pollution disturbs the ecosystem functioning of urban streams, rivers, ponds and lakes; poses a risk to public health; decreases the value of surface waters for public recreation; and makes water more costly to treat for use. While faecal and industrial chemical pollution remain substantial challenges, new threats to urban water quality are emerging in highly populated areas from chemicals in widely used consumer and household products such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and biocides. At the same time, existing water pollution control infrastructure is costly and very energy-intensive (i.e. consumes 1.4% of national electricity in the UK) and should be replaced with more energy-efficient or net energy producing alternatives. In their infrastructure expansion, emerging economies like India and Brazil are presented with golden opportunities to leapfrog beyond the traditional wastewater treatment models and install more sustainable technologies that also address emerging challenges. The proposed global partnership between environmental engineers from Newcastle University (NCL), UK, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), USA, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, the CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-NEERI) in Nagpur, India, and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), India, will pool knowledge, skills, technology testing and analytical facilities, and access to field sites and the facilities of industrial partners for the development of innovative methods to detect and monitor existing and emerging threats to the urban water environment, and sustainable technologies to reduce identified pollution releases and to remediate existing pollution deposits. This initiative will seek to recover urban water resources and their recreational and health values for the people living in cities, thus creating more desirable urban neighborhoods and providing new business opportunities.

Walk In Advising Hours June 09 - June 13
Got a question? Need registration clearance? Stop on by!

Monday, June 9th
No Walk in Advising Due to Orientation 

Tuesday, June 10th
10:00 -11:30

Wednesday, June 11th
No Walk in Advising Due to Orientation

Thursday, June 12th
1:30 -3:00 

Friday, June 13th
No Walk In Advising Due to Orientation

Advisors are also available by appointment.

Successful UMBC alum, Greg Cangialosi, is looking for full-time developers and interns to be part of his new team for MissionTix.com (http://www.missiontix.com/). 
    
    If you are looking for a new opportunity or know of any developers looking for a new position, please send your resume to Christine Routzahn, Director of Career Services, at routzahn@umbc.edu.  
    
    The company is seeking new team members who are solid in PHP and mySQL, and who are looking for an exciting opportunity with a growing company, building a product that is heavily used in the market today.
    

“We have the illusion that laughter is a choice, that we speak laughter as we speak any other word. But we don’t speak hah-hah when we laugh. It’s an involuntary action,” says Psychology Professor Robert Provine in a compelling new video exploring why humans laugh. The video is part of The Atlantic Video web series.

Provine narrates the video and it’s broken into parts including segments on the anatomy of laughter and the danger of laughter. During one portion of the video, Provine visits The Commons at UMBC and conducts an experiment simply by sitting down and observing the people around him.

“Breakthroughs in science come from studying things that are simple and easily described. I call it sidewalk neuroscience,” says Provine. In the video, he listens to two people laughing nearby and highlights that social laughter is caused by relationships, not jokes.

Provine has been studying the social and neurological roots of laughter for 20 years and his latest book, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond (2012), is an exploration of neglected human instincts.

To watch the complete video titled, “Why We Laugh,” click here.  

Provine also participated in a recent discussion about laughter on ABC Australia Radio’s “Life Matters” program. To listen to the complete interview, click here.

A recent Washington Times article discusses Maryland officials joining other states in reconsidering school start dates that have been pushed earlier in the summer over the last several years. Some officials say moving the start dates to after Labor Day could benefit the state economically due to additional tourism dollars.

Public Policy Professor and Graduate Program Director Dave Marcotte was interviewed for the article and commented on potential academic effects of moving school start dates to after Labor Day.

“With the state testing schedule, schools that start early have an advantage,” Marcotte said. “In the state of Wisconsin, schools started moving their start dates up in order to do better on standardized tests. The state had to restrict the early start dates because the schools were creeping up into early August.”

Marcotte said that students from lower income families suffer the most from long learning gaps during the summer and tend to lose many educational gains made during the school year.

To read the full article in The Washington Times titled, “Starting school later could generate an extra $7.7 million for Maryland’s coffers, click here.

On Saturday, May 31, C-SPAN 3 aired a talk given by History Associate Professor Anne Rubin at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. The talk was part of the 2014 Civil War Symposium held at the beginning of May.

Rubin discussed Union General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea and the concept of “civilized war.” In 1864, General Sherman marched his troops from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, and Rubin described the destruction along the way as setting the precedent for “total war” tactics in subsequent conflicts.

Rubin opens her talk by discussing basic Google and Internet searches of General Sherman and that many of them represent “a really popularly held view that William T. Sherman and the march through Georgia and the Carolinas in the final months of the Civil War have something to do with the creation of total war.”

You can watch the full talk on C-SPAN 3 by clicking here. Rubin’s book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, won the 2006 Avery O. Craven book prize for the best book in Civil War history. 

Honors College Professor Ellen Handler Spitz is leading the 2014 Austen Riggs Center Creativity Seminar, which will be held from August 1-2. Spitz is the author of six books and brings psychological perspectives to bear on the arts and on children’s aesthetic lives.

The conference has the theme of “Translation,” and organizers have posted the following description on the conference website: “we will learn about the process of translation in different areas of creative endeavor in the visual medium of photography, through the embodied work of translation by an orchestral conductor, via the interpretative work of translation by a psychoanalyst, and by means of the multilayered acts of translation in theater.  Our aim is to understand more deeply the subjective and objective nature of interpretation and translation and to stimulate our use of these ideas in our various clinical, educational, and other settings.” To learn more, click here.

Spitz also published an article in the June 2014 issue of “The Brooklyn Rail,” devoted to art and the unconscious. In her piece titled, “Kris-Crossing,” Spitz explores the unconscious, writing about Ernst Kris, a psychoanalytic art writer, and a personal experience she had in the presence of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s 2008 sculpture, “All That Rises Must Converge / Red,” shown with her series, “The Malcolm X Steles.” To read the full article, click here.