It’s time for the 2013 SREB Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, Compact for Faculty Diversity!

PROMISE Maryland’s AGEP has been invited to nominate scholars for the upcoming SREB Conference. Read about our SREB trips to:

• Atlanta 2011: http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/25-promise-students-and-affiliates-plan-to-attend-the-sreb-conference-in-atlanta-october-2011/
• Tampa 2012: http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/2012-sreb-compact-for-faculty-diversity-conference-for-graduate-students-postdocs-and-jr-faculty/

YOU have a chance to attend in 2013 , but PROMISE has to nominate you. 

Here are some facts about the conference:

1. The 20^th Annual Compact For Faculty Diversity Institute on Teaching and Mentoring will be held at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Virginia from Thursday, October 31 – Sunday, November 3, 2013. We expect to exceed 1,100 in attendance. http://www.instituteonteachingandmentoring.org/Compact/sreb.html

1. Scholars nominated to attend the Institute should be individuals who have an expressed interest in teaching at the post-secondary level. All of the sessions at the Institute will focus on topics and issues related to teaching at the postsecondary level. Consequently, scholars who are not interested in teaching at the postsecondary level would not benefit from attending this Institute.

1. Nominated scholars must be minority or underserved STEM majors enrolled in a Ph.D. program. SREB will not accept nominations from students.

1. The conference will be in Arlington, VA. Hotel rooms will be available at no cost to you. Single rooms will not be available for scholars. Students will be placed in double rooms. 

TO APPLY: 

Write a comment to this post (below) with the following information, and in this order:

a) NAME

b) University & Department (no abbreviations)

c) Planned year of graduation for your PhD

d) One paragraph that describes the reason why you want to be a professor.

e) What PROMISE events have you attended, and what have you learned?

Our deadline is August 31, 2013. Please apply now. 

Note that the SREB website features some of our former scholars when they were students! Dr. Chris Whitt (PROMISE Peer Mentor, College Park) is now a faculty member at Augustana College, and Dr. Robert Alexander (PROMISE Peer Mentor from UMBC) is now at the CDC. Dr. Alexander conducts the research and evaluation for the CDC’s anti-smoking campaign and TV ads.

It’s time for the 2013 SREB Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, Compact for Faculty Diversity!

PROMISE Maryland’s AGEP has been invited to nominate scholars for the upcoming SREB Conference. Read about our SREB trips to:

• Atlanta 2011: http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/25-promise-students-and-affiliates-plan-to-attend-the-sreb-conference-in-atlanta-october-2011/
• Tampa 2012: http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/2012-sreb-compact-for-faculty-diversity-conference-for-graduate-students-postdocs-and-jr-faculty/

YOU have a chance to attend in 2013 , but PROMISE has to nominate you. 

Here are some facts about the conference:

1. The 20^th Annual Compact For Faculty Diversity Institute on Teaching and Mentoring will be held at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Virginia from Thursday, October 31 – Sunday, November 3, 2013. We expect to exceed 1,100 in attendance. http://www.instituteonteachingandmentoring.org/Compact/sreb.html

1. Scholars nominated to attend the Institute should be individuals who have an expressed interest in teaching at the post-secondary level. All of the sessions at the Institute will focus on topics and issues related to teaching at the postsecondary level. Consequently, scholars who are not interested in teaching at the postsecondary level would not benefit from attending this Institute.

1. Nominated scholars must be minority or underserved STEM majors enrolled in a Ph.D. program. SREB will not accept nominations from students.

1. The conference will be in Arlington, VA. Hotel rooms will be available at no cost to you. Single rooms will not be available for scholars. Students will be placed in double rooms. 

TO APPLY: 

Write a comment to this post (below) with the following information, and in this order:

a) NAME

b) University & Department (no abbreviations)

c) Planned year of graduation for your PhD

d) One paragraph that describes the reason why you want to be a professor.

e) What PROMISE events have you attended, and what have you learned?

Our deadline is August 31, 2013. Please apply now. 

Note that the SREB website features some of our former scholars when they were students! Dr. Chris Whitt (PROMISE Peer Mentor, College Park) is now a faculty member at Augustana College, and Dr. Robert Alexander (PROMISE Peer Mentor from UMBC) is now at the CDC. Dr. Alexander conducts the research and evaluation for the CDC’s anti-smoking campaign and TV ads.

In another move to attract more developers Nokia has just released their new Software Development Kit, Asha 501.

PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP and the Graduate Student Development Unit of The Graduate School at UMBC present the

2013 SPECIAL SEPTEMBER SATURDAY SESSION:

Success Seminar on Funding & Fellowships, with special emphasis on the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Application. 

“Funding Graduate Education”

Speakers: PROMISE Alumni, Dr. Frances D. Carter-Johnson and Dr. Patricia Ordóñez Rozo 

(Dr. Frances Carter-Johnson was one of the speakers for the AAAS “FC” panel on “Transitions” at the 2013 SSI, and Dr.  Patti Ordóñez led the 2013 SSI Alumni PROMISE Talks panel.)

They’re coming back! They’re bringing their award winning seminar back to us! See the description from last year:

http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/how-to-fund-your-graduate-education-dr-ordonez-rozo-and-dr-carter-johnson-promise-alumni-present-their-award-winning-seminar-on-saturday-sept-15-2012/

10:00 AM

Saturday, September 7, 2013

UMBC University Center Room 312

RSVP: 

• UMBC’s students: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/18755
• If you are not a student at UMBC, RSVP by posting in the comment section at the bottom of this message with your name, school, and discipline (academic department)/major.

Graduate students and undergraduates from all schools in the region are invited to attend this seminar. All current LSAMP Bridge to the Doctorate Fellows are required to attend the workshop, and are required to apply for the NSF GRFP.

We have received many announcements for job and fellowship openings. Please page down to the comments section to see some of the latest listings.

Related articles

• Congratulations to PROMISE GA Miguel Nino! (promiseagep.wordpress.com)
• UMBC Again Named a “Great College to Work For” (umbcinsights.wordpress.com)

PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP and the Graduate Student Development Unit of The Graduate School at UMBC present the

2013 SPECIAL SEPTEMBER SATURDAY SESSION:

Success Seminar on Funding & Fellowships, with special emphasis on the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Application. 

“Funding Graduate Education”

Speakers: PROMISE Alumni, Dr. Frances D. Carter-Johnson and Dr. Patricia Ordóñez Rozo 

(Dr. Frances Carter-Johnson was one of the speakers for the AAAS “FC” panel on “Transitions” at the 2013 SSI, and Dr.  Patti Ordóñez led the 2013 SSI Alumni PROMISE Talks panel.)

They’re coming back! They’re bringing their award winning seminar back to us! See the description from last year:

http://promiseagep.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/how-to-fund-your-graduate-education-dr-ordonez-rozo-and-dr-carter-johnson-promise-alumni-present-their-award-winning-seminar-on-saturday-sept-15-2012/

10:00 AM

Saturday, September 7, 2013

UMBC University Center Room 312

RSVP: 

• UMBC’s students: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/18755
• If you are not a student at UMBC, RSVP by posting in the comment section at the bottom of this message with your name, school, and discipline (academic department)/major.

Graduate students and undergraduates from all schools in the region are invited to attend this seminar. All current LSAMP Bridge to the Doctorate Fellows are required to attend the workshop, and are required to apply for the NSF GRFP.

We have received many announcements for job and fellowship openings. Please page down to the comments section to see some of the latest listings.

Related articles

• Congratulations to PROMISE GA Miguel Nino! (promiseagep.wordpress.com)
• UMBC Again Named a “Great College to Work For” (umbcinsights.wordpress.com)

This article walks web developers through the basics of the “aside” markup element, which is used to reference ancillary content in HTML5 web pages.

Bruce Lawson:

Once again, I propose that the definition of <cite> be reverted to include the real-world use for marking up names of those cited, and that the spec note that cite-inside-blockquote is one way (although not the only way) to link a quotation with the work or the person being quoted.

+1

The cowpath was already paved, so we just need to stomp it down again.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Let’s <cite> People is a post from CSS-Tricks

WebKit has made some serious news by finally implementing the srcset attribute. As Chair of the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group, I’ve been alternately hoping for and dreading this moment for some time now. It turns out to be good news for all involved parties—the users browsing the Web, most of all.

As with all matters pertaining to “responsive images”: it’s complicated, and it can be hard keeping up with the signal in all the noise. Here’s what you need to know.

What Does It Do?

As originally proposed, the srcset attribute allowed developers to specify a list of sources for an image attribute, to be delivered based on the pixel density of the user’s display:

<img src="low-res.jpg" srcset="high-res.jpg 2x">

Not too scary, this markup. In plain English:

“Use low-res.jpg as the source for this img on low-resolution displays, and for any browser that doesn’t understand the srcset attribute. Use high-res.jpg as the source for this img on high-resolution displays in browsers that understand the srcset attribute.”

Things were starting to look scary, for a little while there. Due in part to high resolution devices, the average website is now nearly an entire megabyte of images. Now developers can target users on high-resolution displays with a high-resolution image source. Meanwhile, users on lower pixel density displays won’t be saddled with the bandwidth cost of downloading a massive high-resolution image, without seeing any benefit.

Can’t We Do That With JavaScript?

On the surface, srcset isn’t doing anything special—it chooses an appropriate source from an attribute and swaps the contents of an img tag’s src. Swapping the contents of an attribute is something we’ve been doing with JavaScript since time immemorial. Well, since the 90s, anyway. So, what does this gain us?

We actually attempted this approach on BostonGlobe.com, one of the earlier sites to make use of any sort of “responsive images” solution. Thanks to increasingly aggressive prefetching in several of the major browsers, an image’s src is requested long before we have a chance to apply any custom scripting: we would end up making two requests for every one image we displayed, defeating the entire purpose. I’ve documented some of those efforts elsewhere, so I’ll spare you the gory details here.

Can’t We Do That With CSS?

“Yes” and “No.” We can do this with background images easily enough, using a combination of media queries concerned with pixel density. srcset as implemented by WebKit is very similar to the recent image-set feature they introduced to CSS. image-set allows you to specify a list of background image sources and resolutions and allow the browser to make the decision as to which one is most appropriate—pretty familiar stuff. We didn’t have anything along these lines for non-presentational content images, however, until now.

Using CSS to manage content images is broken by default, in terms of keeping our concerns separate. It’s an approach that may make perfect sense within the scope of a quick demo page, but stands to quickly spiral out of control in a production website. Having our CMS generate scores of stylesheets full of background images would be no picnic, from a developer standpoint. Worse, however, is that it would lead to requests for stylesheets and images that users may not need unless done very, very carefully. Beyond that, it renders our images—no pun intended—inaccessible to users browsing by way of assistive technologies.

The closest thing we’ve found to a CSS-based approach would swap an image’s sources based on values set in HTMLs data attributes, using some proposed CSS trickery, much of which is only theoretical and may never happen. However, it still didn’t account for the the double download of high and low resolution image assets—the same issue we encountered with JavaScript. Even if a technique like Nicolas’ should become available to us, we’ll still face the same problems as many script-based solutions: attempting to work around a wasteful, redundant request.

What Does It Do About Bandwidth?

Regardless of screen density, there are a number of situations where lower resolution images sources may be preferable: a Retina MacBook Pro tethered to a 3G, for example, or an unstable conference WiFi network—both situations we’ve all been in plenty of times.

Beyond simply providing us with a sort of inline shorthand for resolution media queries, srcset accounts for bandwidth as well, in a sense. It’s buried in arcane spec-speak, but one of the really exciting facets of srcset is that it’s defined as a set of suggestions to the browser. The browser can then use environmental heuristics or a user preference to decide that it wants to fetch a lower resolution image despite a high-resolution display: envision a preference in your mobile browser allowing high-res images to only be requested while connected to WiFi, or a manual browser preference allowing you to only request low-resolution images when your connection is shaky.

Ideally, we’d love to send only those images to devices which are specifically resized for each screen resolution. The intention is to save bandwidth and allow the images to download faster on the targeted screen. A common use case for responsive images.

This isn’t a part of WebKit’s early srcset implementation, but it does pave the way for their addition without requiring any changes to our markup. We, developers, can safely use srcset today, and these optimizations may come “for free” in the future.

What Does This Mean For The picture Element?

Here’s where things get interesting.

The version of srcset implemented by WebKit matches the original proposed use of srcset, and the version that the Responsive Images Community Group has been working towards. We can think of this incarnation of srcset as shorthand for the whole slew of media queries concerned with resolution, with one key difference where the browser can choose to override the applicable source based on user preference.

While this implementation matches the original srcset proposal, the current srcset spec attempts to expand the syntax to cover some of the use cases that the picture element fulfills, using a microsyntax that performs some—but nowhere near all—of the functions of media queries.

<img src="fallback.jpg" srcset="small.jpg 640w 1x, small-hd.jpg 640w 2x, large.jpg 1x, large-hd.jpg 2x" alt="…">

In our opinion not ideal, this markup pattern. We’re restricted to the equivalent of max-width media queries, pixels, and an inscrutable microsyntax, all for the sake of duplicating the function of media queries. Fortunately for us, neither Web developers nor browser reps are particularly fond of this overextended syntax—hopefully, it will never see the light of day.

The picture element exists to address these use cases using a more flexible—and familiar—syntax. picture uses media attributes on source elements, similar to the video element. This allows us to target image sources to a combination of factors: viewport height and/or width, in pixels or ems, using either min or max values—just like media queries in our CSS.

<picture>
        <source src="med.jpg" media="(min-width: 40em)" />
        <source src="sm.jpg" />
        <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="" />
    </picture>
    

The picture specification was written with this reduced srcset syntax in mind, so it could be used on picture’s source elements as well as img elements.

<picture>
        <source srcset="med.jpg 1x, med-hd.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 40em)" /> 
        <source src="sm.jpg 1x, sm-hd.jpg 2x.jpg" />
        <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="" />
    </picture>

In concert, the two markup patterns give us an incredible amount of flexibility over what image sources we serve to users, depending on their context.

So This Is Good News.

Absolutely, it is. While srcset as implemented by WebKit doesn’t address to all the responsive images use cases, it does represent a major step toward a long overdue solution—hopefully the first of many.

Let’s hope that other browsers follow WebKit’s lead in implementing this feature as it was originally proposed, and stay tuned to the Responsive Images Community Group’s homepage and Twitter account to keep tabs on the subject.

I also wrote about the issues with responsive images and the solutions we’ve come up with when working on the BostonGlobe website in the chapter “The Struggles and Solutions In Responsive Web Design” of the upcoming Smashing Book 4. Grab it, you won’t be disappointed.

(vf)

© Mat Marquis for Smashing Magazine, 2013.