PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP is posting this position as part of an informal partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We have been asked to disseminate this job announcement. Please consider this position.

ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION

Opportunity: Program Officer (Energy and science programs)

Roles and Responsibilities:
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation seeks a bright, highly motivated, and well-organized individual with five to ten years of experience for the position of Program Officer in its energy and science program areas.
The Program Officer serves as the Foundation’s key manager of grantee relationships for the assigned program areas. The position works closely with the Program Directors and President to help manage the current grant portfolio, evaluate and respond appropriately to new grant opportunities, and develop new program strategies. The position monitors and evaluates grantee progress and new opportunities through site visits, reports, publications, conferences, and workshops. The Program Officer stays abreast of developments and emerging trends in relevant fields, and reviews and synthesizes research across multiple engineering, physical and social science disciplines to inform the Foundation’s grantmaking in these areas. The position reports directly to the President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

 
Organization:
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit founded in 1934, makes grants to support research and education in science, technology, economic performance, and the quality of American life. As of December 31, 2012 the Foundation’s endowment was ~$1.7 billion. The Foundation is an equal opportunity employer and seeks a broad and diverse pool of candidates for this position.

 
Qualifications:
The Program Officer position for the energy and science program areas requires a generalist with broad interest and expertise in energy technology, policy, economics, and regulation. The successful candidate will also have a strong interest in and familiarity with physical and social sciences generally. Breadth of knowledge and interests are important attributes for a successful Program Officer at the Foundation. The position requires 5-10 years of experience in the public, non-profit, and/or private sector, preferably in multiple, challenging assignments or in interdisciplinary scholarship; a Ph.D. or equivalent degree in engineering, science, economics, or or a multi-disciplinary degree covering two or more of these fields; and a strong record of achievement and relevant experience.
The Program Officer position requires a high level of intellectual, analytic, problem-solving, leadership, entrepreneurial, and management ability. The position requires sound judgment and integrity and the ability to analyze novel situations objectively based on available information, formulate and evaluate possible courses of action, and respond or offer recommendations in an appropriate manner.
The position requires superior organizational and quantitative skills as well as strong oral, written, and interpersonal communication skills. The position also requires good project, budget, and time management skills. The position requires proficiency in digital communications, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat Professional, and the ability and eagerness to learn additional information technology applications and systems.
The successful candidate must have the ability to work effectively in a small, collaborative, and semi-structured environment with Program Directors and others having a wide range of educational backgrounds and experience, including the Foundation’s managerial and support staff.

 
Compensation:
This is an exempt position. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation offers competitive compensation and benefits.
For consideration, please submit a cover letter and resume to Gail Pesyna (HR@sloan.org).

An Australian entrepreneur, usually known for his restaurants, has stunned the design world by creating a ligature to replace the word ‘the’.

It could be a prank until you hear that Paul Mathis estimates spending anywhere between $34,000 and $68,000 USD developing his symbol, leaving a shocked design world asking, ‘How on earth did he spend $34,000 on that?’

His inspiration it seems, was the ampersand which he mistakenly believes to be an ‘and’ symbol. The ampersand, which is a ligature of ‘e’ and ‘t’, is derived from Latin, popularized by French, and has been in use since at least the 2nd century AD.

There are numerous problems with Mr.Mathis’ proposed ligature, the first and foremost being that it isn’t a ligature of ‘the’ it’s a ligature of ‘th’.

Of secondary consideration is the fact that the characters don’t lend themselves to being a ligature. The purpose of ligatures is the increase readability where letter spacing is such that parts of characters, such as the arm on an ‘f’ and the dot over an ‘i’, collide.

Another spanner is thrown into the works when you consider the relative relationships of uppercase characters and the ascender height of lowercase letters: in roman typefaces, the cap height is frequently shorter than the ascenders, and almost exclusively so in serif faces. The ligature proposed by Mathis becomes counter-productive, by either creating a jarring inconsistency with the rest of a typeface, or by forcing the redesign of all typefaces using the symbol.

The final nail in the coffin is that nobody knows what the ligature is supposed to be. It doesn’t increase readability if it isn’t familiar and so, other than giving you two extra characters to play with on Twitter, serves no purpose.

Whilst you can purchase extended keyboards from the Android store that include the new symbol, the Apple store have so far resisted Mathis’ attempts to release his app.

This vanity project fails because you can’t steer culture. Typography has developed over many hundreds, if not thousands of years. If there was a compelling case for a ‘Th’ ligature, its genesis would be evident in prior work. Language is an evolutionary, not revolutionary process. Mr Mathis would have been better spending his $34,000 lobbying Twitter to raise the character limit on his account.

It’s a great moral lesson for entrepreneurs everywhere: good design solves problems, it doesn’t invent them.

Would you consider using Mathis’ Th ligature? Does any good come from vanity projects? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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An Australian entrepreneur, usually known for his restaurants, has stunned the design world by creating a ligature to replace the word ‘the’.

It could be a prank until you hear that Paul Mathis estimates spending anywhere between $34,000 and $68,000 USD developing his symbol, leaving a shocked design world asking, ‘How on earth did he spend $34,000 on that?’

His inspiration it seems, was the ampersand which he mistakenly believes to be an ‘and’ symbol. The ampersand, which is a ligature of ‘e’ and ‘t’, is derived from Latin, popularized by French, and has been in use since at least the 2nd century AD.

There are numerous problems with Mr.Mathis’ proposed ligature, the first and foremost being that it isn’t a ligature of ‘the’ it’s a ligature of ‘th’.

Of secondary consideration is the fact that the characters don’t lend themselves to being a ligature. The purpose of ligatures is the increase readability where letter spacing is such that parts of characters, such as the arm on an ‘f’ and the dot over an ‘i’, collide.

Another spanner is thrown into the works when you consider the relative relationships of uppercase characters and the ascender height of lowercase letters: in roman typefaces, the cap height is frequently shorter than the ascenders, and almost exclusively so in serif faces. The ligature proposed by Mathis becomes counter-productive, by either creating a jarring inconsistency with the rest of a typeface, or by forcing the redesign of all typefaces using the symbol.

The final nail in the coffin is that nobody knows what the ligature is supposed to be. It doesn’t increase readability if it isn’t familiar and so, other than giving you two extra characters to play with on Twitter, serves no purpose.

Whilst you can purchase extended keyboards from the Android store that include the new symbol, the Apple store have so far resisted Mathis’ attempts to release his app.

This vanity project fails because you can’t steer culture. Typography has developed over many hundreds, if not thousands of years. If there was a compelling case for a ‘Th’ ligature, its genesis would be evident in prior work. Language is an evolutionary, not revolutionary process. Mr Mathis would have been better spending his $34,000 lobbying Twitter to raise the character limit on his account.

It’s a great moral lesson for entrepreneurs everywhere: good design solves problems, it doesn’t invent them.

Would you consider using Mathis’ Th ligature? Does any good come from vanity projects? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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A Brief History of Time

Back in the 90′s and early 2000′s when the web was so shiny and new, designers experimented with animation quite a lot. I remember watching hundreds of Flash cartoons during that period, but I was always most impressed when animation was used for more functional purposes. The problem, of course, is that these made use of Adobe Flash. Sometimes there are good uses for Flash, but typically it’s bad for accessibility, mobile devices, and many other reasons.

As CSS3 support continues to pick up across all the major browsers, animation is starting to appear much more frequently. However, if you avoided Flash and any other form of animation in the past, some of the concepts may be foreign to you. When I first learned about CSS3 timing functions for animations, it was more confusing than quantum mechanics (OK, maybe that’s hyperbole, but it definitely felt like I was learning how to warp time). In this post, I’ll attempt to demystify some of the more confusing parts of CSS3 animation. Get ready to free your mind and learn how to think about time as a flexible dimension.

Keyframes and the Animation Property

There are two broad concepts to understand first: animation keyframes and the animation property. When I was first learning, it helped me to understand keyframes first. Consider the following CSS:

  @-webkit-keyframes fade {
        0% { opacity: 1; }
        100% { opacity: 0; }
      }

In this example, we’re using the @keyframes rule. For the sake of simplicity, we’re only using the -webkit- vendor prefix; in a production environment, you would need to duplicate these keyframes for cross-browser compatibility. Then, we’re creating a new animation called fade. Inside of our keyframe rule, we’re adding keyframes using the percentage values 0% and 100%. You can, of course, add any number of keyframes with any percentage values.

In this simple animation, we’re starting at 0% completion with the opacity property set to 1 (or, completely opaque). Then, we end the animation at 100% and set the same opacity property to 0 (completely transparent). This example simply uses the opacity property, but you can animate almost anything, particularly properties that use numeric values (think position, color, transforms, margin, padding, and so on).

Now that we’ve created a new animation, we’re ready to apply it to an element using the animation property. Consider the following CSS:

  .myElement {
        -webkit-animation: fade 3s linear infinite;
      }

In this code block, we’ve selected an element and used the animation property (again, with the vendor prefix for webkit browsers). We’ve added the name of our keyframes, fade, to indicate which set of keyframes we’d like to use. This is useful on pages where there are lots of different sets of animations and keyframes. Next, we’ve set a duration of 3s (3 seconds) over a linear animation curve (more on this later). The animation will loop an infinite number of times. Here’s what it looks like:

Check out this Pen!

Timing Functions

There are many other values that you can apply to the animation property. If you want to delve into the full details, I strongly recommend you read the W3C documentation for CSS animation. However, the most confusing value by far is the timing function and its relationship to the duration value and the applied keyframes. In the example above, we used a the built-in keyword linear, but we could have used keywords like ease-in, ease-out, or ease-in-out. Here’s what these timing functions look like as animation curves over time:

So for example, if we applied the ease-in-out timing function, the animation would start out slowly, speed up towards the middle, and then slow down at the end. In a sense, we’re altering the speed of animation playback. It’s important to note, however, that the timing function is completely separated from the duration. The duration adjusts how long the animation should run overall; it can speed up or slow down anywhere in between with timing functions and keyframes, but overall, the animation will still adhere to the duration regardless of timing functions. Put another way, the graphs above represent the relationship between the percentage completion in the animation, and time (which is a flexible scale that can be adjusted with the duration value). Here’s a graph with the axises labeled:

Even with all that explanation, I understand that this still might not make sense. If that’s the case for you, I suggest you check out the following example. For each box, I’ve applied a set of keyframes that will move the boxes from left to right. I’ve also added the alternate keyword to the animation property so that, after the animation completes, it will play in reverse. The only difference between each box is that they have a different timing function applied.

Check out this Pen!

If you look at the box labeled linear, you’ll notice that it moves at the same speed for the entire (4 second) duration. The other boxes change their speeds, based on the timing function applied. However, all four boxes always start in the same time and place, and end in the same time and place. If they start out slow, they end fast to make up for it.

This post is meant to be a simple introduction to animation, so I don’t want to overcomplicate things with the cubic-bezier timing function or a more detailed of the bezier handle coordinates. However, if you would like to create your own timing functions, there’s this really great tool called the CSS3 Bezier Curve Tester. I suggest you take a peek and play with the settings on your own; experimentation is always the best explanation.

The post CSS3 Animation Demystified appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Are you away from UMBC this summer? Do you want to share how you are spending your experience with the greater UMBC community? 

Using the hashtag #UMBCIntern, share your best photos with us about your Summer internship, co-op, or research experience. 

Eligibility:

Rules:

Prizes and Selection of Winners:

Disclaimers:

Questions: