Baltimore Entrepreneur, David Oros, Joins bwtech@UMBC

BALTIMORE, MD – Nov. 14, 2013 – Today the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Research Park Corporation - also known as bwtech@UMBC, announced that Baltimore entrepreneur, David Oros, is joining the park as a Senior Executive CEO in Residence.

Oros, a leader in the successful development of high-technology businesses for more than 30 years, graduated from UMBC in 1985 with a degree in mathematics.

Ellen Hemmerly, president and executive director of the park says that Oros will provide valuable advice, “enhancing bwtech’s incubator programs and helping our companies become successful.”

Unlike the current Entrepreneurs in Residence that work in specific incubators, Oros will use his experience in a variety of technology fields to work across all the incubators in the park.

“I went to UMBC and I’m very committed to UMBC,” says Oros. “I’ve started 15 companies in Baltimore and I really just want to focus on getting technology companies up and going that will stay in Baltimore and create more jobs.”

Oros has raised more than $2.5 billion in six public offerings and has been recognized as a leader and visionary in several technology fields. His many awards and honors include acknowledgement as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year; Mobile Computing Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2000, and the KPMG High Tech Entrepreneur of the Year.  

From 2007 to 2011, David was a founding partner of Global Domain Partners, LLC, a managed futures company that uses advanced optimization modeling as a predictive tool for worldwide markets, currencies and commodities. 

From 1996 to 2006, he was the Chairman and CEO of Aether Systems, Inc., a leading provider of wireless and mobile data solutions for the financial trading systems, transportation, and public safety industries.He built Aether Systems from a small consulting company with a handful of employees to an industry leader in high-end wireless applications.

From 1994 until 1996, David was president of NexGen Technologies, LLC, a wireless software development company. From 1992 until 1994, he was president of the Wireless Data Group at Westinghouse Electric.For a decade prior to that, he directed internal research at Westinghouse Electric, managing large programs in advanced airborne radar design and development.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors for Evolving Systems, Inc.  He is on the Board of Visitors for the University of Maryland Baltimore County and on the Board of Directors for Paul’s Place, a community outreach center in Washington Village.  He is Chairman of Drop Test International, Inc. (DTI), an international counter insurgency intelligence company and Chairman of Surroundart, Inc., a full service fine arts company specializing in shipping and storage.

Oros also holds a U.S. patent for a multi-function radar system.

About bwtech@UMBC:

bwtech@UMBC, www.bwtechumbc.com is a 71-acre research and technology community at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). It comprises the Life Science and Technology, Clean Energy, and Cyber Incubators, home to over 100 early-stage high-tech and life science companies, and the Research and Technology Park, with a capacity of 525,000 square feet of office and laboratory space. bwtech@UMBC offers collaboration with university faculty and students, and enjoys a strategic and convenient location, close to downtown Baltimore, BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, and Washington, D.C. bwtech@UMBC’s annual economic impact on the state is estimated to be over $300 million. 

Contact: Nicole Ruediger, nruedige@umbc.edu, 410-455-5791

Need People Fluent in Spanish to Serve as Interviewers or Translators

Drs.
Susan Sonnenschein and Claudia Galindo are conducting a study 
interviewing Latino parents about their children’s math development. We 
NEED people who can interview the parents and people who can translate 
the interviews into English (or backtranslate).

We are able to offer Psyc 397 credit or $$$

If you are interested please contact, Dr. Susan Sonnenschein at sonnensc@umbc.edu or 410.455.2361.

On the celebrated heels of its new logo and custom typeface, the Olympic brand team has just completed the most exhaustive collection of Olympic pictograms ever created in the history the event.

Taking their cue from the typeface designed for the Rio 2016 Olympics by London-based studio, Dalton Maag, the team worked for 16 months to produce a total of 64 pictograms, 41 for Olympic sports and 23 for Paralympic sports. A solid five months of that period was dedicated to validation of the pictograms by the 42 International Federations.

Rio 2016 asserts that this is probably one of the world’s most complex design projects. It certainly could be the most well staffed: in addition to the designers brought in to create the games’ main graphic elements, a group of 28 other Rio 2016 staff were directly involved in the development of the pictograms.

Creating an individual pictogram for each of the Olympic and Paralympic sports is a first, says Rio 2016 President, Carlos Nuzman, and added, “This is one of our unique contributions to the history of the Games. I congratulate the creative team for their dedication and hard work together with diverse groups who contributed to this launch.”

What we see here are the designs that were considered the best of the team’s proposed ideas.

Rio 2016’s Brand Director, Beth Lula, talked about how flexible these icons will need to be. “From now until 2016, the pictograms will serve as a communication platform for the promotion of the sports, for partner activations, and will be present in all the games’ visual identity.” Expect to see them on everything from Olympics web pages and shop stands to signposts and t-shirts.

What do you think of Rio 2016′s new sports icons? How consistent are groups of designers compared to individuals? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Starting a position in an organization, especially if it is your first in the industry, can be as nerve-wracking as it is exciting. Practices that seem like common sense to those of us who have been in the Web industry for some time might not be as obvious to designers and developers without the benefit of our experience.

Part of our responsibility as veterans in this industry is to mentor new team members and share with them the knowledge that we know they will need to succeed.

As President Rutherford B. Hayes once said, “The expert in anything was once a beginner.” (Image source: opensourceway)

I recently published an article here on Smashing Magazine titled “Lessons Learned in Leading New Web Professionals.” As a follow-up to that piece, this one looks at the other side of the team leader-new employee dynamic. We’ll cover the practices that I have found are consistently followed by employees who excel in their new role and grow in this industry.

Embrace The Company’s Culture

Every company is different — with policies, procedures and a culture unique to it. While much attention is given to ensuring that new employees understand these policies and procedures, understanding and embracing the company’s culture is just as important to long-term success. One way to embrace a company’s culture is to get involved — both in and outside the office.

If your company is holding an event or activity for employees, make it a point to attend. It could be a full-blown company party or a small after-hours get-together of only a few employees. Either way, it provides an opportunity to socialize with your new colleagues and begin to build relationships with the people you work alongside.

In the office, look for projects that interest you and that you feel you can contribute positively to. These could be normal client engagements or even side projects driven by small teams in the organization. By asking to be included in these projects, you’ll get time to work hands on with your colleagues and show them the value you bring to the team.

Now, the challenge to participating in these activities is that new employees often feel like outsiders, and many are reluctant to join in on the company’s planned events. The irony, though, is that participating in these company events is one of the best ways to feel like part of the team and to break down that outsider status.

Respect The Client

Complaining about clients is a practice that has been around as long as clients themselves, but it has no place in the Web industry, whether you are a new professional or a seasoned veteran.

Clients can be challenging, but remember that when they stop calling you with questions or with work to be done, that is the day you no longer have a job. We are here because of our clients, not in spite of them.

Does this mean that the client is always right and that you should take whatever they dish out at you with a smile and a nod? Of course not. No one should ever suffer a client who disrespects them professionally or personally, but an abusive client who must be fired is very different from one who simply asks a lot of questions because they recognize that you are the expert. Yes, clients make poor decisions at times, and some of their questions will seem obvious or silly to you, but your answers and advice are why they hired you in the first place.

Respect clients — they keep you employed — and refrain from the bouts of unnecessary complaining that others in the organization might engage in. If others are complaining and trying to rope you in, politely excuse yourself. Nothing good will come of those negative conversations.

Ask Questions

As a new employee, you will undoubtedly have questions — a lot, in fact. That is OK. In fact, it is expected. You might feel like you are bothering others, but asking questions is how you learn and how “tribal knowledge” is passed from veterans in an organization to newcomers.

When you join, a company will likely give you some kind of orientation and show you the ropes, but only so much information can be conveyed in an orientation or in training. So much of what you will need to know is picked up on the job, by actually doing the work itself. When you hit a roadblock, look to others on the team for help. They will often have encountered the issue before and have set a precedent for dealing with it — the aforementioned tribal knowledge. Gaining that knowledge through experience and by asking questions is how you will grow in the organization.

Asking questions enables you to learn and acquire team knowledge, but try to solve problems for yourself first. (Image source: Tim O’Brien)

Now, there is a balance to be struck. Throwing your hands in the air and yelling “Mayday!” every time you hit a bump in the road is too much. Try to solve a problem for yourself first, so that when you ask for help, you can show the person what you’ve tried so far. Over time, you will find the balance between exploring solutions on your own and asking for a hand.

Teach Me Something

I am constantly reading articles with new tips, techniques and best practices in our industry, and I spend many nights and weekends outside of normal office hours working to master these new techniques. When I discover an article or idea that I think is valuable, I always share it with the rest of my team. And I love it when others on the team return the favor.

When a new employee shares a worthwhile article or an approach that I had not considered, they demonstrate their passion and their dedication to growing in the industry. It also shows that they are willing not only to learn, but also to teach others.

Check Your Work

I appreciate when a team member completes a task quickly, but speed doesn’t trump accuracy. Too often, in an attempt to impress their manager, new team members will race through a task to show how efficient they are. They submit work before really going over it to make sure that all of the tasks have been completed correctly.

Checking your work before submitting it to a manager for review probably sounds like common sense, but it’s one of the biggest problems I hear about from other team leaders and managers. Work that is missing key elements or that has little errors (spelling mistakes are common) or whose functionality hasn’t been fully tested (broken links, forms that do not submit properly, etc.) are major headaches for many team leaders. A manager would rather the person finish the task a bit more slowly if the bulk of the errors could have been caught by a more thorough review.

Before you submit work as being complete, give it a once over to make sure that everything works as intended.

Mind The Clock

Web design is not a 9:00 to 5:00 job. Sometimes, inspiration or a breakthrough strikes at the end of the day. If you punch the clock exactly at 5:00, you could lose any momentum or spark of creativity you may have had, when instead you should nurture the moment. Other times, a deadline is looming that requires extra hours in the office. You need to accept that the day doesn’t always end at 5:00.

It goes both ways, though. An employee who is willing to stay late and put in extra effort when needed will be recognized and appreciated, but don’t stay at your desk 12 hours a day, only to go home and do more work there.

Minding the clock means not working late every night. (Image source: abdallahh)

Minding the clock means balancing your professional and personal time. Don’t burn yourself out by trying to be a superhero who does nothing but work. The most successful colleagues I have worked with over the years have found and maintained a work-life balance.

Work On Your Communication Skills

Responding to questions and requests from clients can be a full-time job. In fact, on some days I feel like all I’ve done is answer emails. Managers want to be able to offload some communication responsibilities to others on the team — but they need to know that the communication will not suffer from a lack of skill.

Whether you are answering questions from clients, presenting design concepts in a meeting or brainstorming with colleagues, communicating your ideas in a way that meets your company’s expectations is important. This skill will increase your value to the team and set you up to take on more responsibility.

Join The Community

The Web community is amazing, and you can participate in it in a number of ways. Depending on where you live, you might have access to meetups, networking events, conferences and other gatherings. We all have opportunities to share our experience, knowledge and passion for this industry.

Participating in these events will make you feel like a part of the Web community, help you make connections with peers and reflect well on your company. With limited time to attend such events, leaders appreciate when other team members take the initiative to get out in the community and represent the company.

Stay Positive

This tip might sound easy to follow, but keeping a positive attitude and demeanor is more challenging than it seems.

As a new team member, you will undoubtedly have times when you are unsure of what to work on next or of how you are performing. This uncertainly can be stressful, and stress can eventually lead to a negative attitude. Fight the urge to give into that negativity — stay positive.

Saying that everything is easier with a positive attitude might sound like an oversimplification, but it’s not. A positive attitude makes challenges easier to face, and it encourages others to come to your aid. After all, no one is excited to work with someone with a negative attitude.

Have Fun

Many years ago, I had an employer who, whenever my job got stressful or challenging, would say, “Well, that’s why we pay you to be here. If it was fun, it wouldn’t be work!”

I don’t agree with this sentiment. Yes, most of us wouldn’t show up for work every day if a pay check wasn’t waiting for us at the end of the week. However, just because we have to work doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy where we work.

The most successful employees I have had the pleasure of working alongside over the years have enjoyed their job and where they work. Life is too short for anything else. So, have fun at your job — and if you can’t, consider getting another.

Staying positive and having fun at your job are two overlooked yet incredibly important elements of success. (Image source: opensourceway)

In Summary

Joining an organization can be stressful. Hopefully, the tips presented here will help you make the most of the opportunity and relieve a bit of the stress. Here are the do’s and don’ts we’ve covered:

• Do embrace the culture, and participate in company events.
• Do not let the feeling of being a newbie keep you from participating in events.
• Do not engage in pointless complaining about clients.
• Do respect your clients and recognize that they are the reason you have a job.
• Do not be afraid to ask questions; that’s how you learn.
• Do try to solve problems on your own before asking for help.
• Do share helpful or interesting articles that you come across.
• Do not submit work before having checked it for accuracy.
• Do strike a balance between your professional and personal time.
• Do work on your communication skills, and understand what the company expects from your communication with clients.
• Do look for opportunities to participate in your local Web community.
• Do stay positive, even when you feel uncertain or stressed out.
• Do have fun at your job and enjoy where you work.

What About You?

What habits of successful new team members would you add to the list? Feel free to share in the comments below.

(al, ea, il)

© Jeremy Girard for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

A lot of designers use some sort of CSS pre-processor, whether that be Sass, LESS or Stylus. If you’ve used any of these, you’re probably also aware that Compass is a framework built on Sass, and although its installation may be off-putting, once you use it you’ll quickly discover it’s one of the best skills any web designer can learn.

If you’ve never used Sass before, I’d recommend that you take a look at WDD’s introduction to Sass.

Compass works like a framework for your CSS. When you’re working on a large project it’s easy for things to get out of hand and often finding things in your own CSS is a challenge. Compass attempts to address these problems, with the added benefit of working with vendor prefixes.

What is Compass?

As I said above, Compass is a framework for your CSS that resolves some of the problems with the language. It also includes a few tools to make development faster and easier:

• like Sass, Compass supports variables, mixins and nesting;
• it provides a whole range of helper functions for images, colors, typography and more;
• it supports mathematical calculations;
• it helps ensure cross-browser compatibility.

Like Sass and LESS, Compass is just a tool to make website design simpler.

How to install Compass

Compass is a Ruby gem, so in order to install it you first need to have Ruby installed on your machine. Fortunately Ruby installation is simple, on Windows you just need to download this Ruby Installer For Windows, on Mac/Linux follow the instructions on the Ruby site.

Once you have Ruby installed, installing compass is as easy as this:

gem install compass

This will install both Compass and Sass.

If you want to create a Compass project, you’d then type:

compass create /path/to/project
cd /path/to/project
compass watch

These three lines of code mean that anytime you change a Sass file they’ll be automatically compiled into CSS.

Alternately, you could use Codekit (Mac) or Prepros (Windows) to compile the Sass when it’s saved.

Getting started with Compass

Compass is divided into modules and in order to start using its utilities we first need to import the module we want into our main .scss file. For example, to import the CSS3 module we’d use:

@import "compass/css3";

Now we can start using the utilities and mixins that Compass offers for the new properties that came with CSS3. The very best thing about this is that we don’t have to type vendor prefixes over and over again, which has always been a problem when it came to CSS3.

Here’s an example, if we wanted to create a simple 3 column layout with a 20px gutter, in CSS we’d need to type:

div
{
        -webkit-column-count:3;
        -moz-column-count:3;
        column-count:3;
        -webkit-column-gap:20px;
        -moz-column-gap:20px;
        column-gap:20px;
}

You can see how unmanageable that quickly makes our code. With the help of Compass and Sass all we need is this:

div
{
        @include column-count(3);
        @include column-gap(20px);
}

As you can see, we’ve removed the vendor prefixes, and what took 6 lines of CSS we accomplished in just 2.

Another example of CSS that requires a lot of typing, is gradients. Here’s how we’d write a simple white to black gradient in CSS:

.gradient
{
        background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 50% 0%, 50% 100%, color-stop(0%, #ffffff), color-stop(100%, #000000));
        background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(#ffffff, #000000);
        background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(#ffffff, #000000);
        background-image: -o-linear-gradient(#ffffff, #000000);
        background-image: linear-gradient(#ffffff, #000000);
}

Creating the same effect with Compass is as simple as:

.gradient
{
        @include background-image(linear-gradient(#fff, #000));
}

Not only does this significantly reduce the amount of code, but if you want to change the colors, in the Compass version you only have to change them once.

There’s a full list of the shortened CSS3 properties here.

Compass also includes some helpers for links, one of which is a real time-saver. First, we need to include the typography model as the start of our main Sass file:

@import "compass/typography"

The typography module has great shorthand for styling colors, like so:

a
{
        // link colors (normal, hover, active, visited, focus)
        @include link-colors(red, blue, grey, red, blue);
}

This is the best thing about Compass; it takes the code we use on a daily basis and gives us shorthand versions.

Conclusion

This article was just a quick introduction to Compass, but if you found the subject as exciting as I do, then I’d strongly advise you to check out their website and explore more of the utilities that are available.

I hope you’ll now consider using Compass and Sass in your projects, because they really are incredible additions to the web designer’s toolbox.

Do you use Compass or Sass? Do you prefer a different pre-processor? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, compass image via Shutterstock.

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Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

Human Computing Capacity and Future Human Development

Professor Bezalel Gavish
Information Technology and Operations Management
Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX

2:30pm Monday, 18 November 2013, ITE 325B, UMBC

This talk introduces bounds on future computers’ processing capacity and analyzes the possibilities for their realization in the long run. The analysis shows the existence of hard limits on the progress in processing capacity, which in turn generates bounds on future computing capacity. The results show that it is unlikely that some of the predictions on future computing capabilities will ever be achieved. The capacity bounds stem from fundamental physical limitations, which generate the relatively tight bounds. Different bounds have been developed that will be reached much faster than expected when compared to using simple traditional forecasting methods. This will be discussed in the lecture.

Assuming that computational activities like decision making, processing, vision, control, auditory and sensing activities of human beings require energy, the above energy based results generate upper bounds on the computational capacity (in the broadest sense) of human beings. The results are architecture independent and have direct impact on research on models of the brain and provide bounds on the cognitive abilities of human beings. A byproduct of this line of research is providing some new conjectures on the past and future physical development of the human species.

Professor Bezalel Gavish holds the Eugene J. and Ruth F. Constantin Distinguished Chair at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He was the Chairman of the Information Technology and Operations Management department at the Cox business School. Professor Gavish is the founding Chairman of the International Conference on Telecommunications Systems Management and the International Conference on Networking and Electronic Commerce. He is the Editor-in-Chief of two top ranked research oriented journals, the Telecommunication Systems Journal, and of the Electronic Commerce Research Journal; serves as an Editorial board member of the Wireless Networks journal, Networks, Annals of Information Systems; was Telecommunications Departmental Editor for the Operations Research journal and Department Editor of Distributed Systems in ORSA Journal on Computing; and serves on the editorial boards of Computers and Operations Research, Annals of Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence, INFOR, Mathematics of Industrial Systems, Combinatorial Optimization: Theory and Practice, and Pesquisa Operacional. Prof. Gavish has published over 100 papers in his areas of expertise. He received the Ph.D. (1975) in operations research from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.