The Republican National Committee has announced it wants to hold its 2016 national convention as early as June. As Political Science Professor Thomas Schaller writes in an op-ed published January 28 in The Baltimore Sun, the decision to do so centers around finances.

“It’s a wise but also very sad decision because it confirms what most Americans already know applies to both parties: Money matters most,” Schaller writes.

In his column titled “In presidential primary schedule, money talks,” Schaller notes condensing the primary schedule and moving the convention earlier has two potential benefits: time and money. He writes moving the convention earlier gives parties more time to devote to the general election and also has campaign finance benefits.

“So at least in theory, a condensed primary calendar and earlier convention may prevent Republicans from wasting time and money on an end-of-summer convention that arrives too late to matter,” Schaller writes. “Once matching funds are no longer part of the equation, the financial penalty of an early convention disappears,” he adds.

You can read the full column in The Baltimore Sun here.

Theatre alumni David Brasington ’12, Jesse Poole ’13 and Anderson Wells ’13 were featured on the January 29 cover of b magazine — the highlighted article discusses the success of the web series, B.F.A., written and produced by Katie Kopajtic ’11, theatre.

Read the article “Baltimore-set comedic web series ‘BFA’ is not your average show about Millennials” at bTheSite or at the Baltimore Sun online. The series is described as “perfectly Baltimore, and it captures the humor, wackiness and mild desperation that make this show about young Bachelor of Fine Arts grads different from other shows about millennials.”

More about the series including an interview with Kopajtic also appeared in the January 19 issue of City Paper. Read, “Art Schooled: New web series pokes affectionate fun at Baltimore’s arts community” at City Paper’s website.

A screening of episodes 1-9 of B.F.A., followed by the release of Episode 10, will take place at The Metro Gallery, 1700 N. Charles St. in Station North this Friday, January 31 beginning at 8:00 p.m.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is pleased to announce our 2014 Summer Intern Program.  This is a 12-week internship program for current students with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher on a 4.0 scale.  The purpose of the Summer Intern Program is to enhance students' knowledge about CMS programs, mission, vision and goals.  Additionally, the program seeks to familiarize participants about Federal, State, and local health care programs serving under-served and uninsured populations.  

The available locations will be noted in each of the separate vacancy announcements and could include: Baltimore, MD; Bethesda, MD; Washington, DC; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Kansas City, MO; Denver, CO; San Francisco, CA; and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 Please ensure your students are aware of this opportunity and continue to monitor USAJobs or our CMS Careers website for the vacancy announcements.  Thank you!

John Resig released jQuery on August 26th, 2006 and changed the front-end development landscape forever. jQuery quickly arose to be the go to JavaScript framework.

A number of other libraries came out around the same time such as MooTools and Prototype but there’s a number of reasons why jQuery has surpassed them in popularity.

Reuse of CSS Selectors

jQuery came out around the time web designers and front-end web developers were getting used to creating table-less, semantically marked-up web pages. It was a lot of effort to switch from one way of coding to another. CSS was being learned by the web community en masse.

jQuery used the same CSS selectors that people were using for styling their pages to add behavior. There was no context switching when referring to the same elements.

jQuery also implemented many of the CSS3 selectors prior to browser implementations. This meant you could apply behaviors to elements you couldn’t necessarily select with CSS yet! You didn’t feel you were wasting your time learning new selectors as they’d be eventually supported by modern browsers. In most cases these selectors are widely supported today.

jQuery was forward thinking and kept CSS selectors in the forefront. Other libraries, initially, sought to extend JavaScript and ignore the fresh blood of the new CSS developers and missed out on the opportunity to welcome them into their fold. It was an afterthought to them, the horse had already bolted.

Unobtrusive by Design

Not only did jQuery emulate CSS with it’s selectors, it also employed the same separation from content.

While other JavaScript libraries were struggling with Unobtrusive JavaScript techniques, jQuery made it damn-near impossible to write hacky-in-the-markup-JavaScript.

By its very design, jQuery made it so that if you didn’t know what you were doing with JavaScript you’d write unobtrusive code without even realizing it. Fantastic.

It’s Simple

jQuery didn’t set out to extend JavaScript’s APIs in a JavaScripty way. It was built with the developer in mind. The user of the library. From a developer’s perspective, the user experience for jQuery is a delight.

If you want to hide all paragraph elements with the class of .spoiler call the hide() method.

$("p.spoiler").hide()
    

But what if you want to remove elements from the DOM? That’s right, you call the remove() method.

$("div.warning").remove()
    

It’s the principle of least surprise, both because you’re using pre-existing CSS knowledge and because of jQuery’s simple method names. You’ll find yourself guessing methods rather than looking them up in the documentation. When you do go to the documentation there’s plenty of example code to see each part of the jQuery API in action.

Conclusion

By its design, jQuery has allowed novices and pros to improve the experiences of countless numbers of users. It took the impossible job of thinking about both the end-user and the developer and made something that checked all the right boxes.

jQuery is a testament to John Resig and team’s ingenuity. I can’t imagine how much fun I’d have missed out on without jQuery in my toolbox.

Do you use jQuery? Why do you think it’s so popular? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments below.

The post Why jQuery is the Most Popular JavaScript Library appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

• Semester Academic Honors - earned at least a 3.5
• Dean's List - earned at least a 3.75
• President's List - 4.0!!!

These honors are only for students who took classes full-time and the credits were not taken as pass/fail.

http://inds.umbc.edu/about/academic-awards/

Will YOU be on the list next semester? We can work with you to make it happen!