"Do you experience meaning at work -- or just emptiness?

In the United States people spend on average 35-40 hours working every week. That's some 80,000 hours during a career -- more time than you will spend with your kids, probably.

Beyond the paycheck, what does work give you? Few questions could be more important. It is sad to walk through life and experience work as empty, dreadful, a chore -- sapping energy out of your body and soul. Yet many employees do, as evidenced by one large-scale study showing that only 31 percent of employees felt engaged with their work.

Of course, different people look for different types of meanings -- and, moreover, different workplaces provide different meanings. The phrase "meaning at work" refers to a person's experience of something meaningful -- something of value -- that work provides. That is not the same as "meaningful work," which refers to the task itself. Work is a social arena that provides a variety of meaningful experiences; even if an employee doesn't find her tasks to be especially fulfilling, she might derive meaning from other aspects of her job, such as friendships with colleagues.

So, what are the sources of meaningful experiences at work? We have compiled a list of ways that work can become more meaningful, based on our reading of literature in organization behavior and psychology."

Read more...

The Web Performance Working Group has published a First Public Last Call Working Draft of High Resolution Time Level 2. This specification defines a JavaScript interface that provides the current time in sub-millisecond resolution and such that it is not subject to system clock skew or adjustments. Comments are welcome by 8 January 2014. Learn more about the Rich Web Clients Activity.

The following is a guest post by Tyler Sticka. Tyler created a tool called Colorpeek. Yesterday we looked at the what and why of things. Today we'll look at how he built the Chrome Extension, which will serve as a great tutorial on how you can get started building your own Chrome Extensions.

In Part One I showed off Colorpeek, a web app I made for quickly sharing CSS colors, and its Chrome extension, which made receiving colors just as easy. So how’d a guy who describes himself as a designer first and a developer second manage to build a fancy-schmancy extension all by himself?

Pretty easily, it turns out. Chrome extensions are mostly JavaScript, and relatively simple JavaScript at that. Spelunking through all that documentation, may be harrowing at first, but once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll find that Chrome development is just web development with a few unique twists.

In this post we’ll build our own miniature version of the Colorpeek extension: background-colorpeek, a tool for finding and previewing all the background-color values that a webpage uses. You’ll be surprised how little rocket science is involved.

What You’ll Need

• Google Chrome.
• Your favorite text editor.
• A folder where the extension files will live.
• An icon for the browser action, which is Chrome-speak for a button in the browser toolbar. This should be a 19 square pixel PNG. You can use this one if you’d like:

You can create all the files we’ll need now or as we move along... it’s really up to you. By the time we finish, our folder will look something like this:

• event.js
• icon19.png
• inject.js
• manifest.json

Ready? Let’s get started!

The Manifest File

Create a new file at the root of your folder and name it manifest.json. The manifest is the heart of any Chrome extension. It tells Chrome “here’s what I am, and here’s what I need to work.”

Let’s add some details to the file using JSON:

{
      "manifest_version": 2,
    
      "name": "background-colorpeek",
      "version": "1.0",
      "description": "Get every background-color from the current tab.",
    
      "browser_action": {
        "default_icon": "icon19.png"
      },
    
      "background": {
        "scripts": ["event.js"],
        "persistent": false
      },
      
      "permissions": ["<all_urls>"]
    }

Most of these properties are self-explanatory, with a few exceptions:

• manifest_version: This lets Chrome know what version of the manifest file format we are using. Version 1 was deprecated as of Chrome 18, so you should always use 2.
• background: Information about the scripts our extension requires to respond to things like a click of the browser action. More on this later.
• permissions: Because we want our extension to grab the background-color values from any URL, we need permission to interact with <all_urls>. If we wanted our extension to only work on http://css-tricks.com/, we could specify that instead.

There’s a lot more you can do with the manifest file, but that’s all our extension will need.

Script Gets Real

You’ll notice our manifest references a JavaScript file we haven’t created yet, event.js. Create it now, and let’s add some code to it:

// This function will eventually contain some logic
    // for receiving background-color values from the
    // current tab.
    function getBgColors (tab) {
      // But for now, let's just make sure what we have so
      // far is working as expected.
      alert('The browser action was clicked! Yay!');
    }
    
    // When the browser action is clicked, call the
    // getBgColors function.
    chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(getBgColors);

This script is what’s known by Chrome (somewhat confusingly) as an event page. This means it will only run when an event the extension cares about occurs... in this case, the browser action being clicked.

Before we continue, we should load our extension in Chrome:

1. Open up chrome://extensions/ (or click the rightmost menu button, then “Tools,” then “Extensions”).
2. Make sure the “Developer mode” box in the upper-right is checked.
3. Click “Load unpacked extension...” and select the folder you created earlier.

If all goes well, the extension should install like any other. Give the browser action (our icon) a click to see a wondrous alert:

Neat, huh?

Tab Talkin’

Now that our browser action is prepared to do our bidding, we need to retrieve CSS information from the current tab. To do that, we should understand a little about how Chrome extensions work relative to webpages loaded in tabs, and how the two can communicate.

Chrome was the first browser to popularize something we take for granted in desktop browsers today: The multi-process architecture. In Chrome, every webpage, add-on and extension gets its own process. This makes it really difficult for a single webpage or extension to crash your entire browser. But it also makes our event page a bit of an island... how do we act on the contents of a tab when that tab’s process is completely separate from event.js?

Bad news: We can’t.

Good news: We don’t need to, because Chrome supports passing messages between scripts. We already have our event page, which we can use to send messages. All we need now is a script in the current tab that can receive them!

Here’s how our nifty message-passing will work:

1. When a user clicks the browser action, event.js will inject a new script into the current tab with instructions on what to do next.
2. The injected script will do whatever it needs to, responding with the data we requested.

This means our extension will need one more file, inject.js:

// This helps avoid conflicts in case we inject 
    // this script on the same page multiple times
    // without reloading.
    var injected = injected || (function(){
    
      // An object that will contain the "methods"
      // we can use from our event script.
      var methods = {};
    
      // This method will eventually return
      // background colors from the current page.
      methods.getBgColors = function(){
        var nodes = document.querySelectorAll('*');
        return nodes.length;
      };
    
      // This tells the script to listen for
      // messages from our extension.
      chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener(function (request, sender, sendResponse) {
        var data = {};
        // If the method the extension has requested
        // exists, call it and assign its response
        // to data.
        if (methods.hasOwnProperty(request.method))
          data = methods[request.method]();
        // Send the response back to our extension.
        sendResponse({ data: data });
        return true;
      });
    
      return true;
    })();

Now we have a script that’s ready to receive commands and return data. Let’s update event.js to take advantage of that:

// Execute the inject.js in a tab and call a method,
    // passing the result to a callback function.
    function injectedMethod (tab, method, callback) {
      chrome.tabs.executeScript(tab.id, { file: 'inject.js' }, function(){
        chrome.tabs.sendMessage(tab.id, { method: method }, callback);
      });
    }
    
    function getBgColors (tab) {
      // When we get a result back from the getBgColors
      // method, alert the data
      injectedMethod(tab, 'getBgColors', function (response) {
        alert('Elements in tab: ' + response.data);
        return true;
      });
    }
    
    // When the browser action is clicked, call the
    // getBgColors function.
    chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(getBgColors);

Reload the extension from chrome://extensions/ and try the browser action on any webpage. You should see a message with the number of HTML nodes therein, which means we’ve successfully interacted with the tab! Woo-hoo!

Finally Doing Something Cool

All the pieces are in place. It’s time to actually do what we set out to do:

1. When the browser action is clicked, determine all the background-color values of the current tab.
2. Build a Colorpeek URL based on those values.
3. Open that URL in a new tab.

There’s very little magic from this point forward... it’s really just JavaScript (and not even fancy jQuery). Here we go...

Open inject.js again and update the getBgColors method:

// Return all of the background-color values
    methods.getBgColors = function(){
      // Stores the colors and the number of occurrences
      var colors = {};
      // Get all the nodes on a page
      var nodes = document.querySelectorAll('*');
      // Instantiate variables we'll use later
      var node, nodeArea, bgColor, i;
    
      // Loop through all the nodes
      for (i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++) {
        // The current node
        node = nodes[i];
        // The area in pixels occupied by the element
        nodeArea = node.clientWidth * node.clientHeight;
        // The computed background-color value
        bgColor = window.getComputedStyle(node)['background-color'];
        // Strip spaces from the color for succinctness
        bgColor = bgColor.replace(/ /g, '');
        // If the color is not white or fully transparent...
        if (
          bgColor != 'rgb(255,255,255)' &&
          !(bgColor.indexOf('rgba') === 0 && bgColor.substr(-3) === ',0)')
        ) {
          // ...set or override it in the colors object,
          // adding the current element area to the
          // existing value.
          colors[bgColor] = (colors[bgColor] >> 0) + nodeArea;
        }
      }
    
      // Sort and return the colors by
      // total area descending
      return Object.getOwnPropertyNames(colors).sort(function (a, b) {
        return colors[b] - colors[a];
      });
    }

We’re almost done! Now update the getBgColors function in event.js:

// Get background-color values from the current tab
    // and open them in Colorpeek.
    function getBgColors (tab) {
      injectedMethod(tab, 'getBgColors', function (response) {
        var colors = response.data;
        if (colors && colors.length) {
          var url = 'http://colorpeek.com/#' + colors.join(',');
          chrome.tabs.create({ url: url });
        } else {
          alert('No background colors were found! :(');
        }
        return true;
      })
    }

Reload the extension and give it a try. If it works, go get yourself a beverage to celebrate your new-found ability to make Chrome extensions!

Extra Credit

This extension is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a ton of things you can do with Chrome’s Platform APIs. Here’s some stuff to try if your brain still thirsts for knowledge:

• Add more icons to represent the extension itself.
• Support using the extension from the context menu.
• Optimize the default_icon for high-density displays by providing a 38-pixel size as well.
• Change or animate the browser action icon when clicked.
• Store some options and design a page for customizing them.
• Support internationalization.

I hope this helped demystify some aspects of Chrome extension development. And if you like what we built together, please give Colorpeek for Chrome a try... I think you’ll dig it. Happy tinkering!

Colorpeek, Part 2: Building Your First Chrome Extension is a post from CSS-Tricks

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Jim Robbins

Published November 22, 2013

ON the first of November, when Mexicans celebrate a holiday called the Day of the Dead, some also celebrate the millions of monarch butterflies that, without fail, fly to the mountainous fir forests of central Mexico on that day. They are believed (by a few people of central america) to be souls of the dead, returned.

This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn’t come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual  (likely due to the abnormally cool spring in much of North America), in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts (that is, anonymous authorities) fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.

“It does not look good,” said Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College.

It is only the latest bad news about the dramatic decline of insect populations.

Another insect in serious trouble is the wild bee, which has thousands of species. Nicotine-based pesticides called neonicotinoids are implicated in their decline, but even if they were no longer used, experts say, bees, monarchs and many other species of insect would still be in serious trouble.

That’s because of another major factor that has not been widely recognized: the precipitous loss of native vegetation across the United States.

“There’s no question that the loss of habitat is huge,” said Douglas Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware, who has long warned of the perils of disappearing insects. “We notice the monarch and bees because they are iconic insects,” he said. “But what do you think is happening to everything else?”

A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels (specifically, ethanol), farmers have expanded their fields (This isn't entirely true. More often than not, they simply switch fields from crops like soybeans and hay to corn). That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes (Specifically, the program is called CREP. The primary reason for why CREP contracts haven't been renewed is that the payments farmers recieve for enrolling their land have not been adjusted for price inflation and as such are not really as desirable anymore).

Another major cause is farming with Roundup (Monsanto's Roundup is not the only herbicide detrimental to native vegetation, and shouldn't have been singled out in this article. A number of herbicides contain the active ingredient in Roundup, Glysophate, but don't carry the same label. Still many others use 2-4D, another herbicide which kills many native broadleaf plant species), a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.

As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar (one of dozens) for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.

The loss of bugs is no small matter. Insects help stitch together the web of life with essential services, breaking plants down into organic matter, for example, and dispersing seeds. They are a prime source of food for birds. Critically, some 80 percent of our food crops are pollinated by insects, primarily the 4,000 or so species of the flying dust mops called bees. “All of them are in trouble,” said Marla Spivak, a professor of apiculture at the University of Minnesota.

Farm fields are not the only problem. Around the world people have replaced diverse natural habitat with the biological deserts that are roads, parking lots and bluegrass lawns (This list neglects to mention the impact from invasive species, which also create "biological deserts." These species have been introduced to North America and now grow wild. Golden Bamboo, Norway Maple, and Kudzu are some of the better-known examples. These plants have very limited biological value and displace native species. Simply limiting development will not solve the invasive problem. Areas infested with invasives must literally be reclaimed, which may at times require the use of herbicides). Meanwhile, the plants people choose for their yards are appealing for showy colors or shapes, not for their ecological role. Studies show that native oak trees in the mid-Atlantic states host as many as 537 species of caterpillars, which are important food for birds and other insects. Willows come in second with 456 species. Ginkgo, on the other hand, which is not native, supports three species, and zelkova, an exotic plant used to replace elm trees that died from disease, supports none (The comparison between Oak/ Willow and Ginkgo/ Zelkova is not entirely appropriate. One cannot simply rip out ginko trees and plant oaks. Oaks and Willows have a very specific set of conditions under which they can grow, including the right soil pH, soil moisture, and a lack of pressure from browsing animals like whitetail deer. Ginkgo and Zelkova, however, are able to grow in a wide variety of conditions and thrive). So the shelves are nearly bare for bugs and birds.

Native trees are not only grocery stores, but insect pharmacies as well. Trees and other plants have beneficial chemicals essential to the health of bugs. Some monarchs, when afflicted with parasites, seek out more toxic types of milkweed because they kill the parasites. Bees use medicinal resins from aspen and willow trees that are antifungal, antimicrobial and antiviral, to line their nests and to fight infection and diseases. “Bees scrape off the resins from the leaves, which is kind of awesome, stick them on their back legs and take them home,” said Dr. Spivak.

Besides pesticides and lack of habitat, the other big problem bees face is disease. But these problems are not separate. “Say you have a bee with viruses,” and they are run-down, Dr. Spivak said. “And they are in a food desert and have to fly a long distance, and when you find food it has complicated neurotoxins and the immune system just goes ‘uh-uh.’ Or they become disoriented and can’t find their way home. It’s too many stressors all at once.”

There are numerous organizations and individuals dedicated to rebuilding native plant communities one sterile lawn and farm field at a time. Dr. Tallamy, a longtime evangelizer for native plants, and the author of one of the movement’s manuals, “Bringing Nature Home,” says it’s a cause everyone with a garden or yard can serve. And he says support for it needs to develop quickly to slow down the worsening crisis in biodiversity (The problem is what this requires: Most native wildflower species are kind of tall and weedy-looking, and most Homeowners and Homeowners Associations don't want them in their yards. Moreover, in order to prevent pollinator habitat from being overgrown with invasive weeds, regular maintenance is needed, which might include burning down the wildflower patch once every three years. This does not go over well with a lot of people).

When the Florida Department of Transportation last year mowed down roadside wildflowers where monarch butterflies fed on their epic migratory journey, “there was a huge outcry,” said Eleanor Dietrich, a wildflower activist in Florida. So much so, transportation officials created a new policy that left critical insect habitat un-mowed.

That means reversing the hegemony of chemically green lawns. “If you’ve got just lawn grass, you’ve got nothing,” said Mace Vaughan of the Xerces Society, a leading organization in insect conservation. “But as soon as you create a front yard wildflower meadow you go from an occasional honeybee to a lawn that might be full of 20 or 30 species of bees and butterflies and monarchs.”

First and foremost, said Dr. Tallamy, a home for bugs is a matter of food security. “If the bees were to truly disappear, we would lose 80 percent of the plants,” he said. “That is not an option. That’s a huge problem for mankind.”

BIAS DETECTOR:

Overall, NewzGuyz gives this article a B. While bias was visible, it was not so pronounced as to distract from the main point or reach the point of activism. We feel that most omissions were done for the sake of brevity, though some do contribute to common misconceptions about agriculture and ecology.

The article is clearly advocating for people to plant more wildflowers, and as such neglects to mention some of the issues with doing so. However, it avoids the taint of mainstream political activism and as such earns our approval.

Hello!

Final exams are quickly approaching.  Enjoy some brain food to fuel a study session ON ME!!  

All iCubed Team Study Group participants in a study group are eligible to enter. Please fill out the study group registration form (attached) and return to me by FRIDAY, December 6th, to be entered into a raffle to win 2 PIZZAS for you and your study group on UMBC Study Day (Dec 12th).   

For those of you not in a study group yet, it is not too late!  If you need assistance, I can help you find one.  For more information or if you have questions, please feel free to contact me,  stop by during my office hours (on Wednesdays in the dorms), or stop in my office in University Center 116.

Thanks!

-- 

Tashauna Felix, M.S., Ph.D.

iCubed Study Group Coordinator

University Center 116

tfelix1@umbc.edu

410.455.3173

Meet Celia. She is a Mathematics/Statistics and Information Systems major. Last summer, she was a participant in the SURF program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg. Her current research interests include the emerging field of "Big Data" and cyber-security.

How did you find out that you could do research in your field in the summer?
I learned about it as a Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) Scholar. Janet McGlynn of the Office of Undergraduate Research came to one of our seminar classes to tell us about the NIST fellowships.

How did you know that research at NIST was what you wanted to do?
I really wanted to see what it was like to work in a federal lab.

Did you apply to other places?
I also applied to several Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Math or Statistics at universities around the country. I was accepted to one of those at Michigan State in Probability and Discrete Math.

Was the application difficult to do? Did you have help with this?
It was easier than I expected. The Office of Undergraduate Education holds workshops to help you prepare a personal statement about which of the NIST labs and projects might be a good fit for you.

What was your summer research project?
I ran computer simulations looking at how cell phone networks could keep up better when people are on the go and the base stations to which they are connected keep changing. My work helped to measure the performance of mobile devices as the connections pass among different size towers, like from the giant ones that serve part of a city to the little base station at somebody's home. We were looking for the best mix of coverage areas to minimize outages and keep the devices from inefficiently “ping-ponging” from one station to the next.

Who was your mentor for this project?
Dr. David W. Griffith, an electrical engineer in NIST’s Information Technology Lab. He was so nice and helpful, and his daughter, Indira, is now a freshman at UMBC!

How much time do you put into this work?
I worked on the project full-time for 11 weeks.

Were you paid? Where did you live?
The NIST fellows were paid $500 a week, and 140 of us stayed for free at the Hyatt House in Gaithersburg. It was so much fun hanging out with students from all over the country. We’d have lunch together at NIST, and we’d all head into D.C. or to the beach on the weekend.

What academic background did you have before you started?
I had taken Calculus II and III as a freshman along with Discrete Structures and a computer programming class.

How did you learn what you needed to know for this project?
I had never worked with MATLAB, a computing language that helps you run simulations and visualize lots of data, so I watched videos and looked at textbooks to get started.

What was the hardest part about your research?
There were times when it was hard to figure out the coding I needed. But Dr. Griffith was always willing to make suggestions if I hit a snag.

How does this research relate to your course work at UMBC?
Matlab is one of the main programs used for mathematical calculations, so it’s something I needed to learn. I’m already using it this fall in my Linear Algebra class!

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research? 
Recommendations from professors are crucial. I was lucky enough to get recommendations from two terrific teachers, Dr. Brian Dean and Dr. E.F. Charles LaBerge. Be sure you get to know some of your professors right from the start.

What are your career goals?
I am interested in the new field of “Big Data,” which combines math, statistics, and computer knowledge to analyze huge amounts of data. Google and Facebook created this kind of work, and now government agencies and companies like General Electric are looking for breakthroughs of their own in this area. I’m also interested in cyber-security, which is another rapidly growing field.

Do you now live on campus or commute to UMBC?
I’m from Montclair, N.J., just outside New York, and I live on campus.