With the hectic pace of contemporary life, time management skills are essential to optimal productivity and stress-reduction. This series of one-hour courses helps you analyze your current use of time, clarify your goals, prioritize your workload, and outline ways to better manage time in accordance with your personality type and energy cycle. You will learn how to prepare useful to-do lists, properly sequence tasks, and estimate time frames so you can meet your deadlines. Additionally, you will learn delegation skills, such as effective task-based communication, techniques to address skills-based delegation problems with employees, and effective practices for dealing with employees who lack confidence and motivation when presented with new tasks.

• Time Management: Analyzing Your Use of Time: pd_11_a01_bs_enus
• Time Management: Planning and Prioritizing Your Time: pd_11_a02_bs_enus
• Delegation Essentials: Overcoming Delegation Problems: mgmt_27_a03_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

The RDF Working Group has published today a set of eight Resource Description Framework (RDF) Recommendations:

• “RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax” defines an abstract syntax (a data model) which serves to link all RDF-based languages and specifications. The abstract syntax has two key data structures: RDF graphs are sets of subject-predicate-object triples, where the elements may be IRIs, blank nodes, or datatyped literals. They are used to express descriptions of resources. RDF datasets are used to organize collections of RDF graphs, and comprise a default graph and zero or more named graphs.
• “RDF 1.1 Semantics” describes a precise semantics for the Resource Description Framework 1.1 and RDF Schema, and defines a number of distinct entailment regimes and corresponding patterns of entailment.
• “RDF Schema 1.1″ provides a data-modelling vocabulary for RDF data. RDF Schema is an extension of the basic RDF vocabulary.
• “RDF 1.1 Turtle: defines a textual syntax for RDF called Turtle that allows an RDF graph to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes. Turtle provides levels of compatibility with the N-Triples format as well as the triple pattern syntax of the SPARQL W3C Recommendation.
• “RDF 1.1 TriG RDF Dataset Language” defines a textual syntax for RDF called TriG that allows an RDF dataset to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes. TriG is an extension of the Turtle format.
• “RDF 1.1 N-Triples” is a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF graph.
• “RDF 1.1 N-Quads” is a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF dataset.
• “RDF 1.1 XML Syntax” defines an XML syntax for RDF called RDF/XML in terms of Namespaces in XML, the XML Information Set and XML Base.

Furthermore, the Working Group has also published four Working Group Notes:

• “RDF 1.1 Primer” provides a tutorial level introduction to RDF 1.1.
• The RDF 1.1 Concepts, Semantics, Schema, and XML Syntax documents supercede the RDF family of Recommendations as published in 2004. “What’s New in RDF 1.1″ provides a summary of the changes between the two versions of RDF.
• “RDF 1.1: On Semantics of RDF Datasets” presents some issues to be addressed when defining a formal semantics for datasets, as they have been discussed in the RDF 1.1 Working Group
• “RDF 1.1 Test Cases” lists the test suites and implementation reports for RDF 1.1 Semantics as well as the various serialization formats.

Learn more about the Data Activity.

Meet Kaitlyn. She is a Psychology major and current URA (Undergraduate Research Award) Scholar. Her research focuses on the psychological sense of community for first-generation Latin American immigrants. She also serves as a research assistant in the Making Words Count Lab.

How did you find your mentor for year research, scholarship, or artistic project?
I am a research assistant in the Making Words Count Lab. My research mentor is Dr. Anne Brodsky. I was really interested in her work on risk and resilience in Afghan communities. I read some of her published research and thought it was really interesting and innovative.  

What project are you working on?
In December 2012, when I began working in the Making Words Count lab, our team was in the process of collecting interviews for our Community and Immigration study. We interview first- and second-generation Latin American immigrants and third-generation or more U.S. born citizens. Our research seeks to understand how these groups experience psychological sense of community, as well as to understand the acculturation practices of immigrants from Latin American countries. Our team has almost finished transcribing and checking our data now, so we’ve made great progress in the past year.  

Do you get course credit for this work?
I have taken Honors 400, Psych 498, and I will be enrolled in Psych 499 in the spring.  

What academic background did you have before you applied for the URA?
I worked for two different professors before I began in the Making Words Count lab. As well, I have taken many psychology classes, including two research methods courses. My English classes provided me with concise writing skills, which is important for the application.  

Was the application difficult to do?
The application was not difficult, but thought-provoking. It was a great exercise in understanding the research methods I planned to use and what direction I wanted my ideas to take.  

What has been the hardest part about your research?
I’m new to the field of community psychology and never had any training in qualitative methods, so that learning curve felt overwhelming at first. If possible, I’d recommend taking classes that are as close to your research methodology and subject area as possible before you begin to ease the process.  

What was the most unexpected thing?
The amount of work that is put into doing “background” preparation for the actual data analysis and write-up is surprising.  

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research?
I would highly recommend getting involved in any and all research opportunities available. Research is an amazing way to both learn about an academic field as well as be a part of contributing to it. In addition, the people you meet through your research can become really great resources. My research mentor and the graduate students in our lab have both been amazingly helpful and supportive of my interests, and having them as role models and academic advisers has been one of my favorite parts of the research experience.

Read her abstract here...

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Gamepad. The Gamepad specification defines a low-level interface that represents gamepad devices. Currently, the only way for a gamepad to be used as input would be to emulate mouse or keyboard events, however this would lose information and require additional software outside of the user agent to accomplish emulation. The Gamepad API provides a solution to this problem by specifying interfaces that allow web applications to directly act on gamepad data. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Regardless of the language you're programming in, we always want to try to produce clean, concise, and correct code. This is a sign of a good programmer and it lets you know your apps are running properly. Linting helps with this by analyzing your code and highlighting common issues regarding syntax and coding conventions based on best practices.

JSLint is one of the best tools for finding common JavaScript errors. So in this screencast, we're going to take a look at how to setup the linting process within your web development workflow using a fork of JSLint called JSHint. Let the show begin:

In Conclusion

Seeing how there weren't many resources out there that explained how to add JSHint to your web development workflow, I hope this has helped streamline that process and made it a little easier for you to get it integrated into your projects. Happy debugging!