How long will it be until gay marriage is legal everywhere in the United States?

If recent events are anything to judge by, it could be sooner than you think.

Last Thursday, a federal judge struck down Virginia’s ban on gay marriage in the latest of a series of court rulings that have invalidated state constitutional provisions in conservative states like Utah and Oklahoma.

According to these judges, gay marriage bans amount to state-sponsored discrimination that is prohibited by the 14th Amendment.

These rulings have all relied in part on the Supreme Court’s decision last year in United States v. Windsor to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, which required the federal government to only recognize marriages between a man and a woman.

The Virginia decision was stayed pending appeal — meaning that gay couples in Virginia can’t get married until a higher court affirms the decision.

But if the appeals of these decisions reach the Supreme Court, it could finally resolve the controversial issue nationwide. The same court majority that ruled for gay Americans in Windsor could establish a right to gay marriage in all 50 states.

Will the Supreme Court settle the question of gay marriage once and for all? Are states like Utah ready to accept gay marriage?

Which of the following conditions allows a student to be exempted from a standardized test?

a.) Blindness

b.) Aphasia

c.) Having an incomplete brain

d.) None of the above

Unfortunately for 9-year-old Michael, the answer is D. He cannot see, speak or process information and was born with only half a brain. Yet he is still required to take the Florida Alternative Assessment — the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) designed for students with disabilities.

Michael has the mentality of a 6 month old baby. He loves music and listening to people talk to him. When he was a baby, he was abandoned by his parents and adopted by the owner of a school for students with severe disabilities.

At The Russell House for Atypical Children, Michael meets with a teachers for a few hours a week. He was required to take the FAA last year — a teacher read him a story and he was asked questions about the pictures for several hours. The test administrator essentially interpreted Michael’s answers by his hand movements.

He received a score of 1. And this year, he is required to undergo the same process. According to Orange County School Board Official Rick Roach,

Michael can’t see, he can’t cognitively interpret that particular test and so teachers are almost being forced to move the hand into one of three boxes and then they to make the determination did he move he hand or did I move the hand. If I didn’t laugh, I’d probably cry.

Michael’s adopted mother decided not to pursue an Individual Education Plan (IEP) waiver so he wouldn’t have to take the test. Why not? Because the waiver process is too difficult and Michael would likely be denied, even after providing the following documents:

…in general the waiver process is intended for students who, due to a recent occurrence, cannot participate in the state assessments. As an example, if a student lost their eyesight due to an accident a month before testing, the student would be eligible for a waiver from testing for that academic year. Waivers do not apply to students with a chronic situation.

Light Point Security Advances to Round 3 of the InvestMaryland Challenge

We are excited to announce that Light Point Security has advanced to Round 3 of the InvestMaryland Challenge  in the IT category. This places Light Point Security in the final 10 to win an award of $100,000. The InvestMaryland Challenge is a business competition hosted by the State of Maryland. One winner will be selected from each of three categories, and each winner receives $100,000.

A total of 259 companies applied to the challenge. In the first round it was narrowed down to about 20 companies for each category. In the second round it was narrowed down to the top 10 in each category. The  third and final round will be judged in a face-to-face interview on Mar 5. Each company will have 15 minutes to pitch their company to a panel of judges, followed by a 10 minute Q&A session. The winner of each category will be announced on April 15 at the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony.

There are still a lot of good companies in the running, and we are proud to be among them. Good luck to all the finalists!

ARTWEEK ‘14 HIGHLIGHT
International Award Wining Cartoonist, Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher

Coming Tuesday, March 4th, 2014
7:00pm-9:00pm
The Skylight Room, 3rd Floor (next to the elevators), The Commons

In a lively and entertaining illustrated presentation, Kal will provide insight to his 35 year stint as an international award winning cartoonist. Kal will discuss his unique and challenging profession and his 8000 barbed commentaries that have engaged readers and leaders around the globe. The presentation will be capped off with live drawing of Kal’s favorite targets (plus a book signing of Kal’s newest collection Daggers Drawn, perhaps).

Free food will be provided!

Facebook Event || myUMBC Event || ArtWeek Website || commonvision@umbc.edu

Linguistic and System Support for Structured Parallel Programming

Dr. I-Ting Angelina Lee
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

12:00-1:00 Thursday, 20 February 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

Parallel programming is hard, due to issues such as scheduling and synchronization. Most parallel programs today deal with these issues using low-level system primitives such as pthreads, locks, and conditional variables. Although these low-level primitives are flexible, they, like goto statements, lack structure and make it difficult for the programmer to reason locally about the program state. Just as the use of goto has been mostly deprecated in favor of structured control constructs, we can simplify parallel programming by replacing these low-level primitives with linguistics that enable well-structured parallel programs.

To enable structured parallel programming is not merely a matter of linguistic design. The underlying system must also efficiently support the linguistics. In this talk, I will describe my work on pipeline parallelism, a parallel pattern commonly used in streaming applications, as an example of linguistics for structured parallel programming. I will also draw examples from my research to demonstrate how novel mechanisms in operating systems and hardware, not just the runtime, can help provide efficient support for the linguistics.

I-Ting Angelina Lee is a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, working with Prof. Charles E. Leiserson. Her areas of interest include designing linguistics for parallel programming, developing runtime system support for multithreaded software, and building novel mechanisms in operating systems and hardware to efficiently support parallel abstractions. Her work on “memory-mapped reducers” won best paper at SPAA 2012. Intel has released an experimental branch of Cilk Plus that incorporates support for parallel pipelining based on her work. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Charles E. Leiserson. She received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2003.

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