Most scientist accept the RNA world hypothesis, which states that RNA was the first biological molecule due to its ability to copy itself and pass along genetic traits. However, Nicholas Hud, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, wasn’t convinced.

A recent article in WIRED, courtesy of Quanta Magazine, discusses Hud’s experiment with the building blocks of RNA. The experiment made a breakthrough with the discovery of a chemical recipe that points to the existence of a molecule that might pre-date RNA.

Quanta interviewed Stephen Freeland, director of UMBC’s interdiscipinary studies program, for the article. “In my opinion, nothing like this has been seen before,” Dr. Freeland said, before going on to say that the experiment leads to conceptual progress, even if it did not use the exact components of the unknown molecule.

Absolutely nothing!

Except - phenomenal documentaries about both were recently released!

Known respectively as “Mitt” and “The Square”, we at USDemocrazy believe that these documentaries present two important and often misunderstood subjects in a unique and engaging manner. 

If you’re part of the politically attentive public, tired of the same shows on TV, or would just like to learn more about either topic, we think you should give either (or both) of these Netflix originals a chance, and here’s why:

1. The Square

Tagline: The People Demand the Downfall of the Regime

Trailer and official website here. 

Official description: 

As the Egyptian Revolution unfolds, this 2014 Academy Award® nominee for Best Documentary Feature immerses the viewer in the intense emotional drama of young people on the streets of Cairo claiming their rights and creating a society of conscience. As two governments topple, the personal stories of the freedom fighters unfold in an inspiring tribute to the power of citizenship.

Our take on it: 

For many of us, the complexities of US politics alone are hard enough to understand.  Trying to understand the politics of another nation with an entirely different culture?  Talk about difficult!  

The Square follows the Egyptian revolution from the early days in the Arab Spring in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak was overthrown to this past summer (July 2013) when former president Mohamed Morsi was overthrown on his 1-year anniversary in office. 

The Square takes this very current and (to many) ambiguous subject and simplifies it.  How do they achieve this?

Unlike most documentaries, the filmmakers do not schedule interviews with high-profile government officials or sit in on ministerial news conferences.  Instead, the documentary follows Ahmed, Khalid, Magdy, Ragia, Ramy, and Aida.  The unlikely mix is made up of a young street-revolutionary, a British-Egyptian actor, a Muslim Brotherhood member, a passionate human rights advocate, the “singer of the revolution,” and a journalist.

Capturing intimate discussions in the protest-tents in Tahrir Square and heated late night debates in coffee shops, The Square doesn’t tell you what everyday Egyptians are fighting for – it allows them to tell you. 

2. Mitt

Tagline: Whatever side you’re on, see another side. 

Trailer here. 

Official description: 

Following his bid to win the U.S. presidency, most Americans believed they knew Mitt Romney. With unprecedented access, this documentary tracks Romney from 2006 and his first effort to win the Republican nomination, through the 2012 elections, revealing the man behind the sound bites in an authentic view the public rarely glimpsed during the media frenzy of a national campaign.

Our take on it: 

“What do you think you say in a concession speech?”  The film opens with Mitt Romney sitting with his disheartened family when it became clear that he did not win the 2012 presidential election.  

In actuality, filmmakers have followed Romney, his campaign, and his family since his decision to run for the presidency in 2008, up until the night of the 2012 election.  Along the way, you see nearly every angle of his two campaigns, from preparing for debates to spending time with his grandchildren, from speaking at fundraisers to praying with his family before dinner, and making the difficult decision to run for the presidency a second time in 2012. 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is not what it reveals about Mitt Romney, but what the family of an someone running for president has to endure.  There are plenty of tears, both of joy and sorrow, confusion, exhaustion, and elation.  It shows just how deeply the families of presidential candidates are involved in the process, and the burden they bear. 

As the tagline of the film says, whatever side you’re on, see another side.  Don’t allow your political and/or ideological affiliation to let you brush this one aside!  Though it focuses on former republican candidate Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations, this film is not about politics. 

Over the past year I have given a presentation about using the browser for debugging client-side bugs. Throughout the presentation I would focus on using Chrome, as it's my primary browser and I just don't have the time to use multiple browsers while presenting.

Now, I do suggest to others that they try out other browsers, as it can be very helpful. So here's a screencast where I'll show you a few sample applications, with some bugs, and how you can use the Firefox DevTools to debug them and compare and contrast the different tools.

Conclusion

Now, I've only showed you what I've been using personally within the DevTools, but you can do a heck of a lot more with them, checkout the documentation. Lately, I've been thinking of moving over to Firefox as my main browser as I'm really enjoying the Firefox DevTools.

Thanks for watching!

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9263940 - Substitute - School/Residential Program - Linwood Children's Center
9263922 - Administrative Assistant/Bookkeeper - Property Management Associates, LLC
9263890 - Youth Soccer Coach - Soccer Shots
9263861 - In-Home Instructors for Children with Autism - Trellis Services
9263849 - Bilingual Patient Access Associate - Sinai Hospital of Baltimore

The following on-campus positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9263846 - Business Manager - The Retriever Weekly
9263917 - Database Assistant - Office of Technology Development
9263894 - Desktop Support - Division of Information Technology
9263935 - Editorial Assistant for Website Development - Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
9263938 - Student Receptionist - techcenter@UMBC

Summer 2014 - Research Experience for Undergraduates

Sensors and Sensing: From Molecules to Applications
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Florida International University
The main objective of the REU program is to expose undergraduate students to interdisciplinary research in the field of sensing, monitoring and detection.

During the 10 week program (5/19/14-7/26/14) the participants will closely work with faculty and graduate students on cutting edge research projects that bridge traditional chemistry disciplines. Beside full time research, participants will be involved in weekly seminars and workshops focused on modern problems in the chemistry of sensing, monitoring and detection, ethics in science, professional growth, and the role of the scientist in modern society.

The REU program provides a $ 5,200 summer stipend. In addition, housing and travel, (including travel for presentation of work in conferences) is provided by the program . Sophomore, junior, and rising senior students are encouraged to apply.

DEADLINE MARCH 1, 2014

Fostering Advancement & Careers through Enrichment Training in Science (FACETS)

FACETS (Fostering Advancement & Careers through Enrichment Training in Science) is a school-wide 4-week summer program set to begin June 16, 2014.

The program provides participants with exposure to the range and applicability of public health.  Participants will receive introductory coursework in epidemiology and biostatistics, formal lectures from different faculty within HSPH. Participants will also engage in a group research project with an assigned HSPH faculty member. These faculty members will be based in the Departments of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Health Policy and Management, Environmental Health, Nutrition, or Genetics and Complex Diseases. Students have the opportunity to select areas of interest on the FACETS application.

For more specific training, HSPH currently offers 3 department-based summer programs, which include the Summer Program in Epidemiology (Department of Epidemiology), Summer Program in Quantitative Sciences (Department of Biostatistics), and the Summer Program in Biological Science in Public Health (Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases).

FACETS participants will receive summer salary, housing, and funded travel.

Please find the online application here!

The application deadline is March 15, 2014

Whenever you start a project, you have to repeat certain tasks and set up certain structures: Create new folders, choose a framework, set up your development tasks. But configuring settings once and reusing them would be simpler. An easy way to achieve this is by using some kind of generator — for example, Yeoman Generator — or tools such as INIT, which can perfectly coexist with and even be used through a generator.

You might already have used Yeoman Generator’s Web app. It kickstarts a project, hooking into HTML5 Boilerplate and adding things like Compass, Sass Bootstrap, a preview server with LiveReload, CoffeeScript, JSLint, Bower and more. While it’s a good starting point to automate your initial configuration of a project, you will likely need to adapt it extensively to your needs.

Keep in mind that it is intended for Web apps, so the lack of a build workflow might trouble you if you try to build a whole Web page architecture with it.

As is customary in the open-source world, you can extend Yeoman any way you like, modifying the available generators to your needs. But what exactly would you put in a custom generator? Have you thought about a good workflow and about which tools provide the most convenience?

Introducing INIT

First, allow me to introduce INIT. INIT is a set of tools that provide a sensible workflow and structure on which to base your Web projects.

INIT wants to provide you with a decent workflow and structure within your web project.

Based on the popular HTML5 Boilerplate project, INIT adds modern tools — such as Sass, Grunt, RequireJS and Karma (for automated testing) — and is easy to customize and extend. You no longer have to worry about those few things that you have to do manually — or that you forget to do at all.

You no longer have to copy a project’s default files or download dependencies that you use in most projects, such as jQuery, Modernizr and Normalize. INIT works on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux and supports all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 8 and nearly all mobile browsers.

INIT also provides a staging workflow. As you develop a page, you’ll want to refer to unminified CSS; after deployment, however, you’ll want to point to the versioned, minified CSS file; this project takes care of that. It also acts as a static file generator because it supports HTML concatenation out of the box.

For more details on INIT’s workflow philosophy and set of features, see The Nitty Gritty’s “Reducing Boilerplate Code in Front-End Projects.”

INIT has a slightly different set of helpers than Yeoman’s Web app generator, including a workflow structure that is easy to extend and customize.

While Yeoman’s Web apps conduct simple testing, via Mocha and PhantomJS, INIT uses the more capable Jasmine test suite and Karma to run tests. INIT doesn’t expect you to need CoffeeScript, Compass or LiveReload, so it doesn’t install those by default. But should you need them, you can easily add them via plugins.

INIT does require a few dependencies to be installed on your machine:

• Node.js
  The technical foundation of Grunt
• Bower
  To manage front-end dependencies
• Grunt.js and Grunt CLI
  To run INIT tasks

Git is also recommended as a versioning system. To set up a new instance of INIT, grab the project’s code, extract the archive, and run the following in your command line:

git init
    npm install -g grunt-cli
    npm install
    git add .
    git commit -m 'Initial commit'
    

This will install everything you need to run the Grunt tasks automatically. It will also create a components folder that holds all vendor dependencies managed by Bower.

Installing INIT in the command line

Now that INIT is installed, we can take a closer look at what it brings to the table.

Folders, Files And Build Strategies

We can divide the file structure into four parts: configuration files, development files, tests, and the folder for the ready-to-use distribution files.

Configure Your Editor And Code Settings

INIT sets up some decent guidelines to ensure that your code is consistent. The principal settings for the code editor are configured in the .editorconfig file:

    [*]
    end_of_line = lf
    indent_style = tab
    charset = utf-8
    trim_trailing_whitespace = true
    insert_final_newline = true
    
    [.htaccess]
    indent_style = space
    indent_size = 2
    
    [*.json]
    indent_style = space
    indent_size = 2
    

Choose whether to use tabs or spaces for indentation, the character set, and the end of line style for the various file types. INIT has common defaults but can be easily adapted. If your editor recognizes EditorConfig files, then those configurations will be applied to your project automatically. The EditorConfig file is supported via a plugin in such apps as Sublime Text, WebStorm, Vim, Emacs, TextMate and more; a full list and links can be found on the official website.

INIT configures a few other things, too. For example, the .gitignore file contains all of the directories and files that should be excluded from Git versioning, and the .jshintrc file contains all of the rules that should be applied when JSHint tests your code.

Finally, the .htaccess file includes Apache Server Configs. If you use another server, please check the official repository maintained by H5BP. The server configuration file can reduce bandwidth by sending out Gzip’d files to the client and by setting cache headers so that files are cached in the browser. It also configures security settings to safeguard your website from common attack vectors.

Lastly, you can set up redirects for your domain, which is incredibly useful for preventing duplicate content from appearing in search engines and for when you change the website’s domain.

Configure the Automated Helper Tasks

When talking about automated tasks earlier, I mentioned Grunt. It automates tasks that you usually run manually during the development phase of a project. The following are some of the tasks built into INIT:

• JSHint and RequireJS
• Sass parsing
• Modernizr custom build
• Image optimization via ImageMin
• Concatenation, minification and versioning of files
• Karma unit tests

Plenty more may be added to a project; INIT just provides the most useful and frequently used tasks to save you time. The official documentation contains a demonstration of how to add LiveReload and SVG-Min as tasks. A couple of other official plugins will save you even more time.

The Build Process

To use all of these tasks and benefit from the tools, you can run a couple of predefined Grunt tasks in the command line. These Grunt commands run several subtasks that we can use to build the page or run unit tests:

• grunt dev
  This checks your JavaScript code through JSHint, compiles the Sass files and builds your static pages.
• grunt build
  This optimizes images, creates a custom Modernizr build and runs Karma tests, among other things. This is the task you use to generate the production files.
• grunt travis
  This runs unit tests via Karma in your continuous integration tool (in our case, Travis CI).
• grunt watch
  This runs the dev task every time you save a source file, so that you don’t have to constantly switch between browser, editor and command line.

The terminal will tell you whether something has gone wrong, like whether the JavaScript has a syntax error or Sass couldn’t find a mixin.

Automated Tests: Make Sure You’re Doing It Right

The sooner you find an error, the cheaper it will be to fix. All of us at some point have spent at least half an hour hunting down a missing comma or trying to figure out why that one CSS property doesn’t work. These manual tasks could be done much more quickly by little programs.

JSHint, for instance, complains when we screw up JavaScript syntax by checking against common rules. Jasmine enables us to write unit tests to verify code. Karma runs those tests in the browser.

These automated unit tests ensure that the code works fine. While they don’t replace manual testing by you, they do add a layer of quality assurance and save you time by reporting problems as soon as they are introduced. There are almost no limits to writing unit tests. To learn about writing advanced unit tests, read Guido Kessels’ article “Advanced Unit Testing Techniques in JavaScript”.

By default, INIT uses Jasmine as a test engine and uses Karma to run tests, which are both easier to handle than Mocha. But if you don’t like Jasmine or Karma, you can use any other tool that has a Grunt task.

Static Website Generator

A small static website generator is built into INIT by default that you can use right away.

In pages.json, you can set up the HTML files to generate. The pieces used to construct those files are usually stored in the templates directory. To tell INIT how to assemble things, you would declare a target, name its source pieces and specify a file to save the result to:

{
      "index": {
        "src": [
          "templates/header.html",
          "templates/index.html",
          "templates/footer.html"
        ],
        "dest": "temp/index.html"
      }
    }

So that you don’t have to start from scratch, INIT comes with a preconfigured index.html file that you can customize.

This system enables you to work with multiple distinct files, which in the end will make up the HTML that you view in the browser. This is handy if you’re creating multiple files that all use the same header, footer and navigation. You can share content between the “static” pages without having to maintain duplicate files.

Customize!

INIT gives you a solid tool set to start projects more efficiently. It optimizes images and minifies code so that you don’t have to worry about those tasks.

But while it is a solid starting point for new projects, I encourage you to adapt it to your habits and coding workflow. If it’s missing some tools you like, add them; if you don’t need some tools that it does have, remove them. Adapt it to be your ideal framework.

I’ve used INIT for some large projects and use it now for most of my projects, configuring it to what I (and the development team) actually need, which varies from project to project. The static file generator makes it easy for me to work independently of the back-end team, while still being able to show clients my progress right in the browser.

An Outlook

We are working on a number of plugins to extend INIT’s feature set. You can find the plugins on GitHub.

INIT is not meant to replace Yeoman. In fact, you can use INIT via Yeoman. A Yeoman generator is available — generator-init — so you can simply build your own INIT instance using npm install -g yo and npm install -g generator-init.

I’d love to hear feedback, feature requests, ideas and insights on how you use INIT. Please let me know here in the comments, or file a bug in GitHub.

(al, ea, il)

© Anselm Hannemann for Smashing Magazine, 2014.