UMBC Training Centers received a $5,000 grant financed by the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB) that will be used to defer tuition costs for students in the Cyber Operations Program. According to Tom Sadowski, President and CEO of EAGB:

“This contribution reflects EAGB’s commitment to growing the cybersecurity industry and talent base within the Greater Baltimore region. There are thousands of cybersecurity jobs available for highly motivated and trained individuals. The students that complete the Certificate in Cyber Operations program at UMBC Training Centers Cybersecurity Academy are ready to analyze complex network architectures, determine threat exposure and implement appropriate defenses.”

The Certificate in Cyber Operations, starting on January 21, 2014, is an intensive 9-month, part-time program. Cyber Operations features a rigorous curriculum that delivers a focused set of skills reinforced by multiple industry certifications, including CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and Certified Ethical Hacker. This program is closely aligned with the recent National Institute of Standards and Technology release of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education framework.

Meet Vani. She is a Biological Sciences and Psychology major currently doing an internship at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda. Her research investigates cocaine abuse. She is also a member of the Honors College.

Who did you work with on this project (PI, graduate students, other students) and how did you learn what you needed to know to be successful in this lab?
I would say that I have been extremely fortunate to have a position in this lab mainly because of the people that I work with. My most immediate team consists of my mentor, a post-bac, and a post-doc, with whom I am currently working on a series of projects. I have done my fair share of reading articles and practicing certain skills to gain a solid understanding of my project, but everyone in my lab has been extremely helpful and supportive of fostering my growth in the lab.

Do you get course credit for this work? Paid? How much time do you put into it?
This internship is unpaid, but I do receive credit through the Honors College and courses in my major. I put in approximately 16-18 hours each week.

What was the hardest part of your research experience?
The hardest part for me was finding the perfect balance between classes and research. Especially because I have a 20 minute commute to my lab, I had to be careful in scheduling classes while making sure I was still challenging myself academically. I have learned to get things done ahead of time in either lab or in studying for my classes depending on upcoming deadlines or exam dates.

What was the most unexpected thing?
We still laugh over it, but my current mentor and I entered the lab at the same time last year and went through training together- little did I know back then that I would be working under him!

How does this research experience relate to your work in other classes?
This research has given me a head start on the material covered in a few of my science and psychology classes, especially BIOL302 (Genetics) and PSYC335 (Physiological psychology).

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research?
My best advice would be to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself because you never know where it will take you! And don’t hesitate to ask your mentor or peers if you have any questions- they were in your shoes at some point in their lives so keep that in mind and make the very best of your experience!

Read her abstract here...

Program Description: Summer programs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide an opportunity to spend a summer working at the NIH side-by-side with some of the leading scientists in the world, in an environment devoted exclusively to biomedical research. The NIH consists of the 240-bed Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center and more than 1200 laboratories/research projects located on the main campus in Bethesda, MD and the surrounding area as well as in Baltimore and Frederick, MD; Research Triangle Park, NC; Hamilton, MT; Framingham, MA; and Detroit, MI.  NOTE: the number of positions in Hamilton, Framingham, and Detroit is limited.

Internships cover a minimum of eight weeks, with students generally arriving at the NIH in May or June. The NIH Institutes and the Office of Intramural Training & Education sponsor a wide range of summer activities including lectures featuring distinguished NIH investigators, career/professional development workshops, and Summer Poster Day.

Encouraging young people from diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in science is a national priority, and the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) is committed to meeting this goal in its recruitment and admissions practices.

Several enrichment programs are offered to help historically underrepresented local high school, resident and non-resident college level students jump-start their exposure and develop a broad perspective about the array of careers available within biomedical research, medicine and allied health. Our hope is that this early exposure will ultimately lead to an increase in the number of graduates having diverse perspectives in medical education.

Apple released their newest iteration of OS X, called Mavericks (finally straying from the “big cat” theme that’s been prevalent from the first OS X release), a few weeks ago, and there are some important new features of use to designers.

While many of the features of the latest update are aimed at average users (as well as a ton of new accessibility improvements), some are much more useful to creatives in particular. Below is a rundown of the most useful of those new features, as well as how you might want to use them to make your more productive, efficient, and effective in your work.

New automation features

For anyone with even a basic knowledge of coding, Apple’s automation features have long been a useful tool. There are a few new additions you can now make use of:

• The AppleScript Editor and Automator can now support Documents in the cloud, so you can access your scripts, applets, and workflows from any of your Macs.
• Automator workflows can now be saved as Speakable items, making them available as voice commands.
• You can now sign your applets and droplets with your Developer ID.

New GUI features

There are a number of new improvements to the GUI on Mavericks that are likely to be welcome additions for designers. Check them out:

Finder tabs

One of my favorite new, albeit small, features in Mavericks is the addition of Finder tabs, much like those you find in web browsers. Forget about opening up fifteen different Finder windows and instead open the various folders and places you need in tabs, all neatly organized within the same window.

Sure, it’s a small improvement. But for web designers who are used to dealing with tabbed browser interfaces, this little change can greatly improve your productivity. This is particularly useful for those MacBook Pro and Air users with 11″ and 13″ displays, as it saves valuable screen real estate.

Already have a bunch of separate Finder windows open? Just go to the Window menu and choose “Merge All Windows” to consolidate them into a single window with multiple tabs.

Each tab can also have its own custom view (one in icon, with another in list view, for example).

Multiple screen improvements

If you use two or more monitors, one of the biggest gripes you may have had in the past is the uselessness of full screen mode. Your second monitor became an unusable, blank linen-textured screen whenever you went into full screen mode, which was incredibly annoying if say, you wanted to watch a movie tutorial, in one screen while working in the other. That’s been fixed in Mavericks. Now, the app that’s opened in full-screen mode will only take up its current screen, leaving any others as-is.

Menu bars and docks now also appear on each screen, allowing you to almost treat each one like its own computer. While it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, it’s bound to save time if you regularly use multiple screens, since you won’t have to constantly go back to the main screen to use the menu bar.

Application design improvements

While not directly impacting designers, the fact that a few native OS X apps have gotten UI design improvements is great news.

Most notable are the streamlined Calendar app and the newly redesigned Notes app, which has finally ditched the ugly yellow notepaper background. Both apps have gotten rid of the UI elements that were reminiscent of their physical, real-world counterparts — a welcome change.

Notification center improvements

The Notifications pane now lets you respond directly within alerts via Interactive Notifications. You no longer have to open the app itself in order to delete or respond to your alerts. In addition to working with Twitter and Facebook, it now also includes iMessage and LinkedIn.

Notifications has borrowed Do Not Disturb from iOS so that you can turn off notifications entirely for a specified length of time. Even cooler, though (and of use to many designers), is that Do Not Disturb is set to turn on automatically when you connect your Mac to a TV or projector (you can disable this setting if you choose). This is a huge improvement for anyone who makes presentations to clients or co-workers and doesn’t want their personal notifications appearing on screen.

Features for better battery life

Mavericks has a couple of added features for improving your battery life. Timer Coalescing groups together your low-level operations, allowing tiny (like, milliseconds tiny) periods of idle time that allow your CPU to enter low-power mode. It happens so fast and seamlessly that you won’t even notice it, and yet can reduce your CPU activity up to 72 percent at times.

App Nap is another power-saving feature that lets your hidden, unused apps save power even while they’re still running. If an app window is completely hidden and not actively doing something (like playing music or downloading a file), App Nap will slow the app down to conserve your battery. App Nap also works with Safari tabs, so only the active tab is working at full power.

HD video playback in iTunes has also been greatly improved, using up to 35 percent less energy while you’re watching video. This is a definite advantage to those designers who like to work from areas where plugging in isn’t always an option (or at least not a convenient one).

Improved responsiveness

Mavericks has made some big improvements to memory usage over Mountain Lion. Memory compression lets your Mac free up space by compressing data from inactive apps when you approach maximum memory capacity. Compressing and decompressing is almost instantaneous, so you won’t even notice it. But you’ll find that your Mac is 1.4x more responsive under load, and wakes from standby 1.5x faster.

Better organization

Pretty much by default, designers create a LOT of files. And keeping those organized can get a little bit overwhelming at times. New tagging options in Mavericks let you tag files in the Finder, and then easily find all of them via search or through the Finder sidebar.

Just select the tags you want to include in a document when you save it, or add it later. They’ll even work with files you keep in iCloud.

An improved Safari

The newest version of Safari has seen some noticeable performance improvements. Each web page now runs as its own process (like in Chrome), which will save your browsing session if a single page becomes unresponsive.

Safari also has some new social features. Connect your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and you can now access a list of links your friends are sharing. It’s a useful feature, and the fact that you can just keep scrolling when you reach the end of one link and Safari will automatically load the next one makes it even cooler.

Other small improvements

There are a number of other small improvements that have been made to Mavericks that you’re sure to appreciate.

Have a big meeting with a client in an area you’ve never been to? Calendar can now use Apple Maps to calculate your travel time for you, saving you the trouble of opening additional apps and looking it up yourself.

You can also access Maps directly from within your Contacts to view an address. It’s a small time-saver, but a useful one nonetheless.

If you use Reminders to keeping track of your todo list, you’ll be glad to find that now when you reorder things in Reminders on your Mac, those changes are pushed to the cloud so that your Reminders will appear in the same order on all of your devices. Small change, big productivity improvement.

The iCloud Keychain has a bunch of useful new features, too. You can now generate passwords that mix alphanumeric characters in hard-to-guess combinations, and then save them directly into your iCloud Keychain for access from any of your devices. It can also save your credit card information for faster checkout (particularly helpful if you make regular purchases from your iOS devices, or hate to have to pull out your wallet every time you want to buy something). And all of your iCloud Keychain info is protected with 256-bit AES encryption to keep is safe on your device, in transit, and in the cloud.

The Mac App Store lets you schedule updates that require a restart at night by simply clicking “Try Tonight” when you receive an alert. It will then try to update between 2am and 5am, and your Mac will be just as you left it when you return in the morning. It’s a great feature for designers who don’t want to take a break to run updates mid-day, but tend to forget to set them to run before quitting for the day.

Videos can now be shared directly from the Finder or Quick Look to Facebook. While it’s not necessarily a huge new feature for designers, you might find it useful and time-saving on occasion.

Conclusion

Considering that Mavericks is free, there’s really no reason not to take the plunge and make the upgrade. While there are no real groundbreaking, game-changing new features, there are a ton of small additions and improvements that can add up to big results and better efficiency and productivity.

Have you upgraded to Mavericks? What are your favorite new features? Let us know in the comments.

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The company says it wants to wire the world. But will it do more than make its own app work better?

Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg invested in an impressive domain name: internet.org. Then, in August, he posted a video featuring snippets of John F. Kennedy’s “Strategy of Peace” speech and blogged that he would “share a rough proposal for how we can connect the next 5 billion people and a rough plan to work together as an industry to get there.” With that, Facebook and six corporate partners—including Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Ericsson—became part of a swelling movement of tech companies declaiming a commitment to connectivity, seemingly moved by the fact that only 2.7 billion of the world’s seven billion people have Internet access. In October, Google helped launch the Alliance for Affordable Internet (whose members include Facebook and Ericsson). It is pushing for cheaper Internet access through policy and regulatory reforms.

Genetically modified crops will allow farming practices closer to the ideals of the organic movement.

I grew up on a farm on the North Coast of California in the 1970s. It had been a sort of commune, and after my parents bought the property, the hippies stayed on as farm workers and the place retained the style of the counterculture. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, with its tools and ideas for the back-to-the-land movement, was the farm’s almanac.