Economics Professor Dennis Coates was recently a guest on an Econ Journal Watch podcast discussing his research that found economists mostly frown on government subsidies for professional sports franchises, facilities and events. He was a guest on the program with Brad Humphreys, an associate professor of economics at the University of Alberta.

During the interview, Coates commented on claims that sports stadiums bring economic benefits and prosperity to cities and their immediate metropolitan areas.

“The evidence is that they are minimal at best, and may in fact even be negative,” Coates said. “We think of tangible benefits as job creation and income growth, and any benefits that occur, they occur in a form that is not job creation or income growth or tax revenue growth.”

To listen to the full podcast on Econ Journal Watch and for more on the research by Coates and Humphreys, click here.

A New CD of the Works of UMBC Professor Stephen Caracciolo

Anna Shields, an associate professor of modern languages, linguistics and intercultural communication, is part of a three-person team that has been awarded a Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) grant for a collaborative reading workshop in 2015.

Shields, along with two colleagues at Cornell University and the University at Albany, were co-organizers of the grant, which was submitted in November. They were awarded $10,000 for the reading workshop, at which they will be studying the historical development of what “literary competence” meant in the Tang dynasty, looking at historical and literary texts from the 7th-9th centuries. The goal will be to produce a set of articles that they can then publish in a single issue of a journal or perhaps as a stand-alone volume.

Three other colleagues from the University of Colorado, Indiana University and Beijing University will also participate, and the workshop will be held at Cornell University in June
2015.

The flowers are starting to blossom, the air is getting warmer, the days longer – what does all this mean? It’s time for a spring vacation, even if it’s just for the weekend. Do it now before cabin fever gets the best of you.

If you are a UMBC alum, you have special perks awaiting. UMBC and Enterprise have paired up to give you a ride and a discount to wherever it is you’re aching to go this spring season. Take advantage of this perk while the weather is right.

Pick UMBC and Enterprise; we’ll cut you a deal and they’ll pick you up!

Pack your bags and get the details now!

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1. The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Comments are welcome through 22 April 2014. Learn more about the Style Activity.

12 finalists named in InvestMaryland Challenge

Nick Sohr —  March 25, 2014

BALTIMORE, MD (March 25, 2014)– The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED) announced today that 12 startup companies have advanced to the final round of the InvestMaryland Challenge, the State’s national business competition. The finalists are competing for $100,000 top prizes in four categories — Information Technology, Life Sciences, General Industry, and, new this year, Cybersecurity. All companies who entered the Challenge are eligible for more than $300,000 in other prizes, including grants, software and lab and incubator space. The winners will be announced in May.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a Working Draft of Navigation Timing 2. This specification defines a unified interface to store and retrieve high resolution performance metric data related to the navigation of a document.

The Group also updated the Candidate Recommendation of Resource Timing, which defines an interface for web applications to access the complete timing information for resources in a document. The main change is that onresourcetimingbufferfull is now an event handler instead of a callback function. A diff document is available.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.