No, not Panem. This year’s winner makes “The Hunger Games” look like a day at the beach. The nation in question describes itself as a

“Genuine workers’ state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression.”

 You probably know it as North Korea.

According to Gallup, fewer Americans approve of North Korea than any other nation.  More seriously, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently released a report accusing North Korea of

“Systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations.“ 

So what did North Korea do to deserve this denunciation? To summarize the United Nations:

1. North Korea does not allow its people the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, or even “freedom of thought.”

2. The government educates children and adults in its “all-encompassing indoctrination machine.” No independent sources of information are permitted. 

3. Hunger is widespread, but the government frequently refuses aid organizations’ offers of assistance. Food is used ”as a means of control over the population.”

4. Anyone accused of dissent, and sometimes several generations of their families, can be sent to a labor camp indefinitely without trial. Torture, starvation, rape, and executions all occur regularly in these institutions. (Google recently began labeling these camps on google maps.)

The full list is far longer, but even four bullet points should deter any would-be North Korean immigrants. Sadly for its current citizens, emigration is another practice forbidden by the government. North Korea has long been considered something of a joke by outsiders: just check out the Onion’s remarkably successful “sexist man alive” parody. Inside its borders, however, nobody’s laughing. 

The UMBC ACM Student Chapter will kick off the Spring Hi-Tea series this week at 3:00pm on Friday, February 20. Hi Tea is a student-run social event held (nearly) every Friday from 3:00 to 3:30 in the third floor hallway of the ITE building outside the CSEE Department suite (325 ITE). All students, staff, faculty and friends of the CSEE Department are welcome to attend. Each week, a group of students will plan and assemble simple refreshments for the event. See our photo sets for pictures of past Hi-Tea events.

This week the event host is the IEEE Student Branch and next week it will be the Ebiquity Research Group.

This time we are changing the competition model to bring in more participants and give away more prizes. We are also modifying the judging process to bring in more votes from the faculty, staff and students who are attending the event. We will continue to have faculty and/or staff judges at the same time, that would help us find a right balance for the judging process. Although the competition rules remain the same, we are now going to have four winners and instead of a knockout tournament format we will have points based ranking format. Here are the rules:

• Form groups of one to three members. Teams do not have to have all members from the same lab. So feel free to form a group with any of your friends from the CSEE Department.
• Create a name for your team or use your lab’s name.
• The winning team will be chosen from a weighted combination of points given by judges and attendees.
• Each week one or more teams may participate. All of them would get points on the judging criteria from the judges and attendees.
• Points obtained through the semester would be ranked and the top four team would receive the prizes.
• Each team should limit their presentation to $25. Each team MUST save their receipts to obtain their reimbursement. We will inform you how to get the reimbursement.
• Teams will be judged on creativity, presentation, and budget planning. It is preferred that you list how you managed your expenses for the judges to verify limit-to-$25 rule.
• The Hi-Tea competition will proceed through the semester and at the end of the semester the winners would be announced.

For questions, comments, and registration, send email to one of the Hi-Tea committee members: Genaro Hernandez Jr. (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ), Primal Pappachan (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Sunil Gandhi (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

I’ve written a post on US visas on Sourcing.io’s blog.

Gather a group of foreigners together in San Francisco, and the topic of conversation invariably turns to visas and immigration. For many of us just getting to America is a feat in itself. Overcoming the regulation, hurdles and bureaucracy that encompasses the US visa system is a shared and painful experience we can all relate to.

Five years ago, when I was working back in England, I wanted nothing more than to emigrate and join a tech startup in San Francisco. The trouble was I had no qualifications, no degrees and no connections. It’s only through a great degree of persistence, determination, and the support of some wonderful people that I’m living out in SF.

Read more…

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Syntax Module Level 3. This module describes, in general terms, the basic structure and syntax of CSS stylesheets. It defines, in detail, the syntax and parsing of CSS – how to turn a stream of bytes into a meaningful stylesheet. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and the SVG Working Group invite implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Compositing and Blending Level 1. Compositing describes how shapes of different elements are combined into a single image. There are various possible approaches for compositing. Previous versions of SVG and CSS used Simple Alpha Compositing. In this model, each element is rendered into its own buffer and is then merged with its backdrop using the Porter Duff source-over operator. This specification will define a new compositing model that expands upon the Simple Alpha Compositing model by offering: additional Porter Duff compositing operators; advanced blending modes which allow control of how colors mix in the areas where shapes overlap; compositing groups. In addition, this specification will define CSS properties for blending and group isolation and the properties of the ‘globalcompositeoperation’ attribute as defined in HTML Canvas 2D Context, Level 2. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of The Screen Orientation API. The Screen Orientation API provides the ability to read the screen orientation state, to be informed when this state changes, and to be able to lock the screen orientation to a specific state. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.