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The government shutdown is creating pain nationwide for small businesses that depend on federal agencies to operate or that were in the middle of securing government-backed loans.
Jeremy Shafer, owner of EnDepth Solutions LLC, a cybersecurity firm in Baltimore, said he might have to lay off some of his 12 full-time workers if the shutdown persists.
The company's customers are all federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. The government's fiscal year starts Oct. 1, and new projects meant to kick off this week are now on hold. "A lot of employees are just sitting around with nothing to do," Mr. Shafer said. "We're losing revenue."
Read more at http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303492504579111590750304108-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwMzEwNDMyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email
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All UMBC Students, Faculty, Staff, and RAC Members:
PLEASE PARDON OUR PROGRESS WHILE WE RENOVATE THE RAC WEIGHT ROOM!
The
UMBC NCAA Division-I Athletics Program is allowing
students/faculty/staff and patrons of the RAC to utilize the Michael S.
Knapp Training Center on the RAC Arena Track level for the following
hours while renovations are completed in the Recreation Weight Room in
October:
Monday 9/30
8am-10am
2pm-3pm
8pm-10pm
Tuesday 10/1
8am-10:30am
11am-12pm
1pm-2pm
3pm-4pm
8pm-10pm
Wednesday 10/2
9am-10am
2pm-3pm
8pm-10pm
Thursday 10/3
8am-10:30am
11am-12pm
1pm-3pm
8pm-10pm
Friday 10/4
9am-10am
1pm-9pm
Saturday 10/5
1pm-7pm
Sunday 10/6
12pm-7pm
Thank you for your patience,
RAC Staff
W3C published today the final report of the Workshop on the Publishing and the Open Web Platform that was held 16-17 September 2013 in Paris. W3C thanks IRI for hosting the event, Intel and Adobe for their sponsorship, and INRIA for their support.
The W3C Workshop in Paris was the third in a series of industry consultation events held by W3C. The goal of this Workshop was first to identify difficulties faced by existing professional publishing organizations in using tools based on the Open Web platform, including the production of printed books, and second to find ways to work on eliminating or ameliorating those difficulties. We received approximately fifty statements of interest and position papers for the two-day event, and approximately sixty people attended the Workshop. Part of the workshop were panels around a selected subset of the submissions, part was organized as open discussions.
Many of the issues raised during the discussions will provide additional input to the work started by the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group, collecting specific technical requirements of the publishing industry for the technologies of the Open Web Platform. Furthermore, it was felt that an additional activity on education and outreach may be necessary; indeed, one of the challenges of the Publishing Industry overall is to improve technical expertise in-house, also covering the new possibilities offered by the Open Web Platform (e.g., advanced CSS control for complex typography, or interactivity of electronic books provided by scripting), as well as the missing contacts the industry may have with Web Designers and Web Application Developers. It was also felt that W3C should continue to establish liaisons with various industry organizations in the area, and also to reach out to librarians and archivists to collaborate on, for example, the metadata issues of the publishing industry. We anticipate new actions in those areas in the months to come.
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This talk will be a brief introduction to the topic of quantum computing for the computer scientist interested in cybersecurity. It will begin with a light summary of the fundamental quantum algorithms and move to discuss the recent advances in quantum computing, including the D-Wave quantum optimizer, University of Bristol’s new quantum chip, quantum programming languages, and more. Finally, it will introduce some current research questions and projects residing in the intersection of quantum computing and cybersecurity.
John Seymour is a Ph.D. student in the UMBC computer science graduate program. As a UMBC undergraduate, he was a triple major — Computer Science, — Mathematics and Philosophy. He is currently working on three research projects: evaluation of a detection protocol for Man-in-the-Middle attacks, a web-based game for teaching students basic concepts of internet security, and integration of social media with internet voting to facilitate collaborative decision making.
Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.
]]>Cyber startup Light Point Security is feeling the warmth of being in the spotlight.
Catonsville-based Light Point has made it to the top five contestants in a Wall Street Journal startup competition that attracted 500 applications. The company still has to make it through two more challenges to win, but already Light Point is experiencing the benefits of being a winner. Investors, potential clients and media have been flocking to Light Point.
“It elevates our name, company brand,” said Zuly Gonzalez, chief operating officer for Light Point. “It’s brought us more recognition, made us a more familiar name with people.”
Light Point, which launched in 2010, has developed a software product to protect computers from Web-based malware attacks. The software allows users to browse the Web from a virtual cloud, meaning any attacks go there, instead of users’ own computers. The company is based at bwtech@UMBC Research and Development Park.
Gonzalez said the attention from investors is a change for the small startup. Entrepreneurs are often the ones seeking out investors, going from pitch meeting to pitch meeting to make their case. But now, Gonzalez said investors from all over are reaching out to her.“It’s nice,” she said. “It validates that we’re doing something right — we’ve got an interesting product, an interesting company.”
Light Point is not currently raising money, but will look to do an angel investing round next year. Getting to know investors now will be a leg up when it comes time to start raising next year, Gonzalez said.
The experience has also led Gonzalez and company CEO Beau Adkins to rethink their approach to building a customer base. The pair originally planned to reach out to potential customers directly. But through the startup contest, Light Point has realized that getting in with managed service providers — companies that handle IT operations for other businesses — could build their customer base more quickly. Those companies could provide Light Point’s software as a service to their entire network of clients.
The Wall Street Journal will narrow the remaining contenders to three in the next few weeks. A final winner will be announced Nov. 4. Light Point is one of 24 companies selected to participate.
The contest does not have a prize, other than bragging rights. But winning would be a huge vote of confidence from a publication the business community trusts — that would definitely be good for business, Gonzalez said.
“It would say a lot about the company,” Gonzalez said. “We could say, ‘We’re the most innovative and risk-taking company in the nation, according to the Wall Street Journal.’”
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As designers, we each develop distinct styles, and usually gravitate towards different kinds of projects when we have a choice in the matter. For me, it’s content-driven websites and nothing is more content-driven than the good old-fashioned blog.
There is something that simply feels right about putting a whole bunch of meaningful, interesting text, pictures, and/or video together in an aesthetically pleasing way. Blog content is all about ideas, and ideas are meant to be read, appreciated, and if everything goes well, discussed at length. Facilitating that process is personally fulfilling, and often challenging.
For people who own blogs, the advantages are clear:
No matter what blog you go to, you’ll see a variation on the following system:
This is not a bad set of defaults. By and large, this structure works and it’s familiar. This does not mean, however, that it’s right for you, or your content.
As UX designers, our job isn’t just to make sure that text is big enough to read, that navigation is easily recognizable as such, or that buttons are big enough to tap on. We solve problems. We make sure that it’s easy for users to find what they’re looking for, and quickly. We have mere seconds to engage readers and keep them on our site, so we have to get creative.
In this article, I’m going to look at features which are common to the majority of blogs, and see how we might make them easier to use, more engaging, and/or irrelevant. Let’s start with my absolute favorite pet peeve:
One problem that I have with the sidebar is that too often it distracts me from the content as I try to read. It might be a colorful animated ad, or worse, one that comes with sound and no mute button, or the sidebar itself just clashes too harshly with the rest of the site.
Sometimes, sidebars are rendered next to unusable by people who try to cram far too much information into them, making the text smaller and smaller all the time. Sometimes, sidebars are much much longer than an individual article.
Here’s a hint: putting five years of archives, sorted by month, in one sidebar is not a good idea. This might sound like it’s just a personal irritation to some people, but there is no reason why a sidebar should be twice the height of my 1600×900 screen.
Many blogs have solved this problem in one of a few ways, the most notable of which being that they often drop the sidebar altogether. Navigational lists such as categories and archives are moved to their own section, usually under the main content.
Now let me be perfectly clear. I am not saying that sidebars should go altogether. In fact, when I move my personal blog from my main domain to its own, I actually intend to use a sidebar for some rather important things.
What I am saying is that sidebars should not be stuffed with more information and widgets than is reasonable, and they should not dominate the page. They are meant to be navigational aids only. Let’s treat them that way.
If you want to display more information than can comfortably fit in a sidebar, display it elsewhere.
I’d like to talk about individual articles before the home page because if you’re doing well as a writer, the home page will rarely be the first thing that people see. People will be sent directly to individual articles by search results, links provided by friends, and services such as Stumbleupon.
For this reason, make sure that navigation options like categories and search are available on every page of your blog. The article that your users find may not be the one they’re looking for, so you’ve got to make it easy for them to find your other content.
A lot of self-styled blog “gurus” will talk about the importance of having “related articles” listed for each individual post. As much as I hate to agree with anyone who calls himself a “guru”, they have a point. Reading through a blog is all about discovery, and that discovery process should happen quickly. Users are more likely to click on an eye-catching related headline than look for the category link to see similar articles on your site.
Make sure that there’s a bit of descriptive “About” text on every page. If it’s a really short paragraph, it could go in the sidebar. If it’s longer, you could put it in the page footer, where users are likely to see it after they’ve finished reading/skimming the article.
Finally, if there’s one thing you learn from this part of the article, remember this: on a blog, you should spend more time designing your post content than your home page. Your content is what people will see first, in all likelihood.
Many people design the home page of their website as though it will be the first thing that every user sees. This is a mistake. The users most likely to view a home page are regular readers who don’t use RSS feeds (which should always be available), and those first-time visitors who’ve just read an article, then clicked “Home” because they felt like it.
So yes, the home page of most blogs is essentially a glorified RSS feed. This is where users come for updates.
Unless you’re running a tumblelog – a blog made up of very short posts, images, and videos – I would recommend displaying no more than a headline, an excerpt, and an optional image thumbnail. Blogs that display entire posts on the home page force readers to scroll down and down to make sure they haven’t missed anything.
Some people get around this by displaying a list of the most recent headlines in their sidebar, but I see this as redundant. Such a list can be useful on every page of the blog except the home page.
This is not the only way to make a home page for a blog, of course. There are other ways to present your content, but I believe that this approach makes the most sense from the perspective of a reader.
Need more proof? Look up a newspaper or magazine site. All they do is display the links to the most recent articles in every major category.
It’s typical to put a date on every post published, and to allow users to navigate the site’s content by month or year. For some writers, this makes sense. If you’re writing about design trends, reviewing technology, addressing political issues, or doing anything else that’s time-sensitive in any way, use it.
However, is chronological navigation always necessary? Probably not. Examine your content. If you’re writing about things that aren’t going to change in a hurry, like history, human nature, or less-than-contemporary art, you may want to leave date-based navigation options out altogether.
Look for other ways to organize your content based on your subject matter. Categories will never go out of style, but let’s take art, for example. You could design the site in such a way that people can browse your posts by which artists are mentioned, or by the art styles and mediums you discuss.
You know your audience. How would you like to be able to find the things that interest you?
Ah, comments. The place where everyone can virtually gather round and discuss the post at hand without getting off-topic, starting pointless debates, or insulting each other. And just as we’re all about to indulge in a quick drink before we peacefully disperse to go about our lives, I wake up.
All jokes aside, having a comments section can provide invaluable feedback, and the interaction and user engagement can help bring your readers back for more.
One thing I’ve seen many blog designs and themes do is make their comment areas too small. This is especially a problem when you consider two things:
My solution? A comment section should be as wide as the article above it. At least.
What do you like least about blogs? What features are essential for you? Let us know in the comments.
Featured image/thumbnail, blogging image via Paolo Valdemarin.
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