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]]>The U.S. Census Bureau cordially invites you to the U.S. Federal Statistical Agencies Fall Outreach Symposium. The symposium will feature sessions on Statistics for Journalists and Statistics in the New Media Era. We believe it will be a great opportunity for your students to learn about the extensive statistics from the federal government. These statistics are widely used by communications professionals in journalism and public relations. Presenters will discuss the official statistics produced by their agencies:November 14, 10:00 to 12:00: Statistics for Journalists, Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference CenterJournalism students and reporters from broadcast, print and online media outlets will find this session helpful to their understanding of lesser-known federal statistical agencies, official statistics produced by these agencies, and how they can access and use official statistics, studies and analyses in their reporting. Presenters will include representatives of the Economic Research Service, National Center for Education Statistics, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, and National Center for Health Statistics.November 14, 1:00 to 3:00: Statistics in the New Media Era, Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference Center
This two-hour session focuses on digital and new media; in particular on some of the new media covered in the President’s Digital Strategy such as API’s, apps, infographics and other data visualizations. Agencies will share examples of how they are adapting new technology and how this helped them give the public easier access to data.There is no registration fee for the symposium. However, advance registration is required to ensure access to the BLS Conference Center. A detailed list of ALL presentations can be found in the attachment included on this news post.
To register, send an email to Wendy Martinez at martinez.wendy@bls.gov with “Symposium” in the subject line and include the attendees full name, a list of the session(s) attendee plans to attend, and any special needs, e.g., handicap access. For more information, see the press release.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Services has recently showed ongoing support to Dr. Bernard Lohr for the development of behavioral methodologies for saving the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow from extinction. The support comes in the form of a grant awarded to Lohr’s lab to facilitate the investigation of breeding a local close relative of the Florida sparrows in captivity in the hope that they will produce viable offspring that can eventually be re-introduced into the wild. Currently there are fewer than 200 Grasshopper Sparrows left in their Florida habitat, categorizing them as “critically endangered.” Graduate students, Sarah Luttrell and Archer Larned, are working alongside Lohr both in the lab and in the field to discover the optimal conditions under which the sparrows breed and rear their offspring. Results from the studies conducted in Lohr’s lab will be conveyed to scientists in Florida to assist with ongoing conservation efforts there. Lohr’s interest in auditory sensory ecology originally sparked his curiosity about the Florida Sparrow seeing as they are one of the few breeds of small song birds that can hear at high pitched frequencies. “It turns out it’s one of those things where the answers you get raise more questions, and more questions, that turn out to be fascinating in and off themselves,” said Lohr of his work with the birds. The dedication of over 20 years of his life to working with birds has not only led Lohr to being on the path to bringing back a vital species from near extinction, but has also granted him the honor of being made an elective member of the American Ornithologist’s Union.
By: Caitlin Kowalewski
]]>Bandura, a TechGuard Company, Partners with UNICOM Engineering to Develop New Product for Overseas Market
UNICOM Engineering’s Manufacturing, Regulatory Certification and Global Logistics Enable Security Company to Accelerate International Rollout of New Appliance
Canton, MA – October 29, 2013 — UNICOM Engineering (formerly NEI), a leading provider of application platforms, deployment solutions and lifecycle support services for software technology developers and OEMs worldwide, today announced that it is providing global expansion and manufacturing services to Bandura, a TechGuard company that provides technologies and services to protect critical networks from cyber attack. UNICOM Engineering is working with Bandura to manufacture and certify a new generation of the company’s award-winning PoliWall® appliance for the international market.
Bandura’s PoliWall is a network security device that sits between firewalls and edge routers to stop threats at the network perimeter by blocking malicious traffic. The PoliWall rapidly determines the country of origin and IP reputation for all incoming packets using HIPPIE® (High-speed Internet Protocol Packet Inspection Engine) and DCEL™ (Dynamically Compiled Exception Lists) technology. Packets are filtered according to customer-defined policies and unique exceptions that are bound to resource groups for specific network addresses and protocols.
Having already achieved success in the U.S. market, Bandura decided to expand internationally with a next-generation version of the PoliWall product. This required a faster appliance with higher throughput, greater availability, and a smaller footprint. Given their past connection with UNICOM Engineering, Bandura knew that the company’s proven experience with appliance manufacturing and expertise in international regulation certification could help them achieve their goal. UNICOM Engineering delivered with a pre-integrated solution with global certifications, further accelerating time to market for the product.
“UNICOM Engineering had the platforms we needed to be able to support our new high-throughput product up to 20G per second,” said David Maestas, chief technology officer at Bandura.“The fact that the platforms were already pre-certified for export and for sale in the U.S. was a huge bonus for us.”
UNICOM Engineering provides a broad range of products backed by value-add services to deliver solutions to companies like Bandura. With a comprehensive approach to solution design and application deployment, UNICOM Engineering uses standard technologies to build appliances that meet specific application requirements,accelerate time to market, and reduce total cost of ownership. Throughout the design process, the company considers all aspects of the solution lifecycle, including component life, energy efficiency, and regulatory requirements, among other factors.
“We have partnered with very small companies and very large companies in the past, and feel like UNICOM Engineering offers the best of both worlds,” said Bandura CEO Suzanne Magee. “They are big enough that we know we are getting the support we need in the U.S. and global markets, and yet they’re small enough that we get personal attention. It feels like we really matter to UNICOM Engineering.”
About Bandura, LLC
Bandura® is a wholly owned subsidiary of TechGuard Security, founded in February 2000 in direct response to Presidential Decision Directive 63, provides trusted and innovative Critical Infrastructure Protection to the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, Federal agencies, and the US Critical Infrastructure. The TechGuardians® research, develop, and rapidly prototype, cutting-edge security technologies, including the patent and patent-pending PoliWall® with HIPPIE® and PCELs® technologies; and provide expert consulting services. PoliWall is marketed under Bandura, LLC.
About UNICOM Engineering, Inc.
UNICOM Engineering is a leading provider of server-based application platforms and lifecycle support services for software developers and OEMs worldwide. Through its expertise and comprehensive suite of solution design, system integration, application management, global logistics, support and maintenance services, UNICOM Engineering is redefining application deployment solutions to provide customers with a sustainable competitive advantage. More than a decade of appliance innovation with the ability to provide physical, virtual, and cloud-ready solutions makes UNICOM Engineering one of the most trusted software deployment partners in the industry. Founded in 1997, UNICOM Engineering has facilities in Canton, Massachusetts, Plano, Texas, and Galway, Ireland. For more information, visit www.unicomengineering.com.
For additional information, contact:
Jill Colna or Laura Nelson
SVM Public Relations
401-490-9700
jill.colna@svmpr.com
laura.nelson@svmpr.com
The online development tool Github has been around for a few years now. It provides online Git repository hosting for projects written in any common programming language. Over time their online API has gone through a few changes with the most current release at version 3. I have lots of fun toying around with different APIs, and Github is no exception.
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can build a remote Github webapp using jQuery and Ajax. You enter a username and using the API we pull out some information about the user and their profile stats. Since this requires a remote connection through Ajax you’ll need to host this on some type of web server, or a local server environment if you have one. I’ve also hosted a live demo that you can check out below.
Live Demo – Download Source Code
So far I’ve downloaded a local copy of jQuery and created another css directory for my stylesheet. The page design itself isn’t super important, but it does help to understand my whole process when building the webapp.
<div id="w">
<h1>Simple Github API Webapp</h1>
<p>Enter a single Github username below and click the button to display profile info via JSON.</p>
<input type="text" name="ghusername" id="ghusername" placeholder="Github username...">
<a href="#" id="ghsubmitbtn">Pull User Data</a>
<div id="ghapidata" class="clearfix"></div>
</div>
This is all you will find in the HTML body since most of the code is appended using jQuery. #ghusername is the input field to hold the username and #ghsubmitbtn is the element we use for triggering the API call. Once the user clicks on this link we can pull out all the info we need and create one long string variable holding all the HTML. This gets applied into #ghapidata using the jQuery .html() method.
Since the majority of the content here is written in jQuery I’d like to focus solely on the scripting. But if you want to learn about my CSS styles check out the styles.css file along with my source code. All of the classes we use in jQuery have already been styled beforehand. The easiest method is to construct your interface using HTML and CSS with dummy data, and then go back to replace it with jQuery.
I wrote two separate ways of pulling JSON data from the server, but I want to clarify that either one can work fine. A newer solution $.getJSON() is a shorthand Ajax function where you know the response will be in JSON format. I also put together a different function which allows for a callback method using $.ajax().
function requestJSON(url, callback) {
$.ajax({
url: url,
complete: function(xhr) {
callback.call(null, xhr.responseJSON);
}
});
}
This block is found at the very bottom of the script, defined as a reusable function. It helps if you want to call different Ajax requests based on which button is pressed – that way you can pass in different variables for the request URL and callback method. There are reasons to use both of these methods but for newcomers I’d recommend using getJSON() to make problem solving a bit quicker.
I’ve setup a click event listener tied onto the button which calls a new function whenever it gets clicked. My first line uses event.preventDefault() so the HREF value doesn’t get loaded into the address bar. I also put together a small loading GIF which appears while we are waiting on the Ajax request.
$(function(){
$('#ghsubmitbtn').on('click', function(e){
e.preventDefault();
$('#ghapidata').html('<div id="loader"><img src="css/loader.gif" alt="loading..."></div>');
var username = $('#ghusername').val();
var requri = 'https://api.github.com/users/'+username;
var repouri = 'https://api.github.com/users/'+username+'/repos';
requestJSON(requri, function(json) {
Each variable is used to obtain information about the API request. Each URI is based on the username provided in the text field. It’s important that you recognize we are calling the function I wrote earlier requestJSON() and using the sample user URI to get profile info from Github.
Notice the second parameter writes in a callback function. We aren’t defining this callback elsewhere in the document, it gets initialized right away. So inside this new function we have access to the JSON data so that we can start organizing a return value. Keep this in mind as we go over the rest of the code.
Our simple JSON object is returned to a variable with the name json. First we need to check out the response and see how we are configuring the page output.
if(json.message == "Not Found" || username == '') {
$('#ghapidata').html("<h2>No User Info Found</h2>");
}
else {
// else we have a user and we display their info
var fullname = json.name;
var username = json.login;
var aviurl = json.avatar_url;
var profileurl = json.html_url;
var location = json.location;
var followersnum = json.followers;
var followingnum = json.following;
var reposnum = json.public_repos;
if(fullname == undefined) { fullname = username; }
If the user does not exist we don’t get any JSON response, just a string “Not Found”. If that’s the case we end the script immediately by appending some basic HTML onto the page. Otherwise we do have a real user and we can start creating variables to hold their profile information. At the end I put together an if{} statement checking if the user has no set Full Name, then we just replace it with their account username instead.
var outhtml = '<h2>'+fullname+' <span class="smallname">(@<a href="'+profileurl+'" target="_blank">'+username+'</a>)</span></h2>';
outhtml = outhtml + '<div class="ghcontent"><div class="avi"><a href="'+profileurl+'" target="_blank"><img src="'+aviurl+'" width="80" height="80" alt="'+username+'"></a></div>';
outhtml = outhtml + '<p>Followers: '+followersnum+' - Following: '+followingnum+'<br>Repos: '+reposnum+'</p></div>';
outhtml = outhtml + '<div class="repolist clearfix">';
Now we follow-up by creating a single variable outhtml to hold all the HTML output. This is why you may find it easier to have already written the HTML so you know what will look good on the page. Once all the static information is written into HTML my last feature is to pull out a list of the user’s Github repos(including forks).
To do this we need another Ajax request. I’m going to use $.getJSON() and write another function to handle the HTML output onto the page.
var repositories;
$.getJSON(repouri, function(json){
repositories = json;
outputPageContent();
});
function outputPageContent() {
if(repositories.length == 0) { outhtml = outhtml + '<p>No repos!</p></div>'; }
else {
outhtml = outhtml + '<p><strong>Repos List:</strong></p> <ul>';
$.each(repositories, function(index) {
outhtml = outhtml + '<li><a href="'+repositories[index].html_url+'" target="_blank">'+repositories[index].name + '</a></li>';
});
outhtml = outhtml + '</ul></div>';
}
$('#ghapidata').html(outhtml);
} // end outputPageContent()
} // end else statement
}); // end requestJSON Ajax call
}); // end click event handler
The repositories variable now contains a full JSON response of the user’s entire repo collection. The new function I wrote outputPageContent() will have access to this variable because it is defined at the same scope. First I check if the JSON response is empty because the user has no repositories, otherwise we output some HTML using a jQuery loop.
The simplest way is using .each() on the repositories JSON object. The callback function allows 2 parameters but we only need the index value. In basic English, this loop will append one more <li> element into the output HTML for each repo in the JSON object. I can open+close the unordered list by writing this code outside of the loop.
Finally the output function ends with $(‘#ghapidata’).html(outhtml) to render this whole HTML string right into the empty div element. This will automatically replace the small GIF loader I added before, and it’ll do the same thing if you enter a different username into the text field.
Live Demo – Download Source Code
Once you start learning the basics of API development the whole process becomes very educational. Pulling data from 3rd party services can offer many new ideas for widgets or content areas in your layout. I do hope that my example can provide a way for developers to understand the process of using an online API. Also feel free to download a sample copy of my source codes and see what else you can learn.
The post Code a Simple Github API Webapp using jQuery & Ajax appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>The online development tool Github has been around for a few years now. It provides online Git repository hosting for projects written in any common programming language. Over time their online API has gone through a few changes with the most current release at version 3. I have lots of fun toying around with different APIs, and Github is no exception.
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can build a remote Github webapp using jQuery and Ajax. You enter a username and using the API we pull out some information about the user and their profile stats. Since this requires a remote connection through Ajax you’ll need to host this on some type of web server, or a local server environment if you have one. I’ve also hosted a live demo that you can check out below.
Live Demo – Download Source Code
So far I’ve downloaded a local copy of jQuery and created another css directory for my stylesheet. The page design itself isn’t super important, but it does help to understand my whole process when building the webapp.
<div id="w">
<h1>Simple Github API Webapp</h1>
<p>Enter a single Github username below and click the button to display profile info via JSON.</p>
<input type="text" name="ghusername" id="ghusername" placeholder="Github username...">
<a href="#" id="ghsubmitbtn">Pull User Data</a>
<div id="ghapidata" class="clearfix"></div>
</div>
This is all you will find in the HTML body since most of the code is appended using jQuery. #ghusername is the input field to hold the username and #ghsubmitbtn is the element we use for triggering the API call. Once the user clicks on this link we can pull out all the info we need and create one long string variable holding all the HTML. This gets applied into #ghapidata using the jQuery .html() method.
Since the majority of the content here is written in jQuery I’d like to focus solely on the scripting. But if you want to learn about my CSS styles check out the styles.css file along with my source code. All of the classes we use in jQuery have already been styled beforehand. The easiest method is to construct your interface using HTML and CSS with dummy data, and then go back to replace it with jQuery.
I wrote two separate ways of pulling JSON data from the server, but I want to clarify that either one can work fine. A newer solution $.getJSON() is a shorthand Ajax function where you know the response will be in JSON format. I also put together a different function which allows for a callback method using $.ajax().
function requestJSON(url, callback) {
$.ajax({
url: url,
complete: function(xhr) {
callback.call(null, xhr.responseJSON);
}
});
}
This block is found at the very bottom of the script, defined as a reusable function. It helps if you want to call different Ajax requests based on which button is pressed – that way you can pass in different variables for the request URL and callback method. There are reasons to use both of these methods but for newcomers I’d recommend using getJSON() to make problem solving a bit quicker.
I’ve setup a click event listener tied onto the button which calls a new function whenever it gets clicked. My first line uses event.preventDefault() so the HREF value doesn’t get loaded into the address bar. I also put together a small loading GIF which appears while we are waiting on the Ajax request.
$(function(){
$('#ghsubmitbtn').on('click', function(e){
e.preventDefault();
$('#ghapidata').html('<div id="loader"><img src="css/loader.gif" alt="loading..."></div>');
var username = $('#ghusername').val();
var requri = 'https://api.github.com/users/'+username;
var repouri = 'https://api.github.com/users/'+username+'/repos';
requestJSON(requri, function(json) {
Each variable is used to obtain information about the API request. Each URI is based on the username provided in the text field. It’s important that you recognize we are calling the function I wrote earlier requestJSON() and using the sample user URI to get profile info from Github.
Notice the second parameter writes in a callback function. We aren’t defining this callback elsewhere in the document, it gets initialized right away. So inside this new function we have access to the JSON data so that we can start organizing a return value. Keep this in mind as we go over the rest of the code.
Our simple JSON object is returned to a variable with the name json. First we need to check out the response and see how we are configuring the page output.
if(json.message == "Not Found" || username == '') {
$('#ghapidata').html("<h2>No User Info Found</h2>");
}
else {
// else we have a user and we display their info
var fullname = json.name;
var username = json.login;
var aviurl = json.avatar_url;
var profileurl = json.html_url;
var location = json.location;
var followersnum = json.followers;
var followingnum = json.following;
var reposnum = json.public_repos;
if(fullname == undefined) { fullname = username; }
If the user does not exist we don’t get any JSON response, just a string “Not Found”. If that’s the case we end the script immediately by appending some basic HTML onto the page. Otherwise we do have a real user and we can start creating variables to hold their profile information. At the end I put together an if{} statement checking if the user has no set Full Name, then we just replace it with their account username instead.
var outhtml = '<h2>'+fullname+' <span class="smallname">(@<a href="'+profileurl+'" target="_blank">'+username+'</a>)</span></h2>';
outhtml = outhtml + '<div class="ghcontent"><div class="avi"><a href="'+profileurl+'" target="_blank"><img src="'+aviurl+'" width="80" height="80" alt="'+username+'"></a></div>';
outhtml = outhtml + '<p>Followers: '+followersnum+' - Following: '+followingnum+'<br>Repos: '+reposnum+'</p></div>';
outhtml = outhtml + '<div class="repolist clearfix">';
Now we follow-up by creating a single variable outhtml to hold all the HTML output. This is why you may find it easier to have already written the HTML so you know what will look good on the page. Once all the static information is written into HTML my last feature is to pull out a list of the user’s Github repos(including forks).
To do this we need another Ajax request. I’m going to use $.getJSON() and write another function to handle the HTML output onto the page.
var repositories;
$.getJSON(repouri, function(json){
repositories = json;
outputPageContent();
});
function outputPageContent() {
if(repositories.length == 0) { outhtml = outhtml + '<p>No repos!</p></div>'; }
else {
outhtml = outhtml + '<p><strong>Repos List:</strong></p> <ul>';
$.each(repositories, function(index) {
outhtml = outhtml + '<li><a href="'+repositories[index].html_url+'" target="_blank">'+repositories[index].name + '</a></li>';
});
outhtml = outhtml + '</ul></div>';
}
$('#ghapidata').html(outhtml);
} // end outputPageContent()
} // end else statement
}); // end requestJSON Ajax call
}); // end click event handler
The repositories variable now contains a full JSON response of the user’s entire repo collection. The new function I wrote outputPageContent() will have access to this variable because it is defined at the same scope. First I check if the JSON response is empty because the user has no repositories, otherwise we output some HTML using a jQuery loop.
The simplest way is using .each() on the repositories JSON object. The callback function allows 2 parameters but we only need the index value. In basic English, this loop will append one more <li> element into the output HTML for each repo in the JSON object. I can open+close the unordered list by writing this code outside of the loop.
Finally the output function ends with $(‘#ghapidata’).html(outhtml) to render this whole HTML string right into the empty div element. This will automatically replace the small GIF loader I added before, and it’ll do the same thing if you enter a different username into the text field.
Live Demo – Download Source Code
Once you start learning the basics of API development the whole process becomes very educational. Pulling data from 3rd party services can offer many new ideas for widgets or content areas in your layout. I do hope that my example can provide a way for developers to understand the process of using an online API. Also feel free to download a sample copy of my source codes and see what else you can learn.
The post Code a Simple Github API Webapp using jQuery & Ajax appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>
After a brief overview of research in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, we will focus on one particular research problem, the use of hearing and touch for conveying graphical and pictorial information to visually impaired (VI) people. This problem combines visual, acoustic, and tactile signal analysis with and understanding of human perception and interface design. The main idea is that the user actively explores a two-dimensional layout consisting of one or more objects with the finger on a touch screen. The objects are displayed via sounds and raised-dot tactile patterns. The finger acts as a pointing device and provides kinesthetic feedback. The touch screen is partitioned into regions, each representing an element of a visual scene or graphical display. A key element of our research is the use of spatial sound to facilitate active exploration of the layout. We use the head-related transfer function (HRTF) for rendering sound directionality and variations of sound intensity and tempo for rendering proximity. Our research has addressed object shape and size perception, as well as the of a 2-D layout of simple objects with identical size and shape. We have also considered the rendering of a simple scene layout consisting of objects in a linear arrangement, each with a distinct tapping sound, which we compare to a “virtual cane.” Subjective experiments with visually-blocked subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Our research findings are also expected to have an impact in other applications where vision cannot be used, e.g., for GPS navigation while driving, fire-fighter operations in thick smoke, and military missions conducted under the cover of darkness.
Thrasos Pappas received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1987. From 1987 until 1999, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. He joined the EECS Department at Northwestern in 1999. His research interests are in human perception and electronic media, and in particular, image and video quality and compression, image and video analysis, content-based retrieval, model-based halftoning, and tactile and multimodal interfaces. Prof. Pappas is a Fellow of the IEEE and SPIE. He has served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2010-12), elected member of the Board of Governors of the Signal Processing Society of IEEE (2004-07), chair of the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (2002-03), and technical program co-chair of ICIP-01 and ICIP-09. Since 1997 he has been co-chair of the SPIE/IS&T Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging.
Host: Janet C. Rutledge, Ph.D.
]]>
Student retention and success are important topics in all academic fields and institutions. Faculty seek to understand which topics, theories, or skills defeat students or require strengthening to promote success. Programs seek to understand how to better sequence courses to ensure students are prepared for requisite future courses. Institutions seek to understand how to intervene to promote retention and improve graduation rates. Unfortunately, most statistics gathered by Institutional Research efforts are limited to failure rates, enrollment rates, and graduation rates and do not often explore individual student performance. While these are often further analyzed by various student demographic attributes such as race and gender, these statistical methods alone are insufficient to understand student performance over time and sequential patterns of enrollment or success and failure. This research presents a method using multiple levels of abstraction to visualize performance patterns over time.
To visualize student enrollment and performance patterns, several issues must be addressed including sequential versus concurrent enrollment, spatial layout of course events, and performance over time. Another challenge addressed by this work is that of presenting sequences within the context of the entire program. To address these issues, multiple abstractions are combined in a multi-layered visualization that presents a high-level overview of students enrollment and performance patterns while retaining detailed information regarding individual student progress and performance as they advance through their courses.
The aggregated view represents the lowest level of abstraction, student enrollment and performance are aggregated into a graph structure, presenting patterns of movement throughout the program at the individual course level. The clustered view represents mined sequential patterns of enrollment and performance, illustrating common sequences. The directed view represents the highest level of abstraction and uses two visual elements, heat maps and a vector field, to illustrate overall performance in individual events and movement through the program. Results from multiple cohorts can then be superimposed on the same visualization to enable easy comparisons between patterns. Together, these abstractions provide a focus+context view of student performance, retaining outliers and emphasizing common patterns to illuminate dominant and unique patterns between cohorts of students.
This approach can help educators better understand student progress through the program, performance in individual courses, or student-selected course sequencing and this information can be used to address deficiencies in preparation, skills, or prerequisites. To demonstrate the appropriateness of this approach, performance and enrollment patterns are explored in the Computer Science program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Specifically, this work examines the Gateway policy that requires students to earn a B or higher in the first two required programming courses before progressing with the hopes of validating the existing Gateway but also exploring other possible Gateway courses. Other issues explored within the Computer Science program include race, gender, math placement, and high school scores with the goal of attracting and retaining a more diverse group of students.
Committee: Penny Rheingans (chair), Marie desJardins, Marc Olano, Tim Finin and Diane Lee
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