Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Bills, the great motivator

Up the financial stairs

An unusual slogan

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

3 Months Access to All Learnable eBooks & Courses – save 46%!

MS Thesis Defense

Extracting cybersecurity related entities,
terms and concepts from text

Ravendar Lal

10:30am Tuesday, 28 May 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

Securing computers, data, cyber-physical systems and networks is a growing problem as society's dependence on them increases while they remain vulnerable to attacks by both criminals and rival nation states. Creating 'situationally aware' computer systems that defend against new "zero day" software vulnerabilities requires them to automatically integrate and use new security-related data from a wide variety of sources. One important source is information found in text from security bulletins, vulnerability databases, news reports, cybersecurity blogs and Internet chat rooms.

We describe an information extraction framework to extract cybersecurity-relevant entities, terms and concepts from text. We use a Conditional Random Field based model trained on manually annotated data to identify and extract the relevant terms. These are then mapped to a previously developed OWL ontology and represented as RDF linked data. We evaluated the system's performance by comparing its results on test data from the National Vulnerability Database and security bulletins from Microsoft and Adobe.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (Advisor), Anupam Joshi, Tim Oates

On May 23, Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, was a guest on the Marc Steiner Show for a segment entitled “Is President Obama’s Message To Black America Different From The Rest Of America?,” in which Moffitt and her fellow guests analyzed President Obama’s messages to Black America, looking at his recent commencement speeches.  Moffitt was joined by Kai Wright, editorial director of Colorlines.com and Keith Snipes, an actor and writer.

“I think as a politician, he’s fairly consistent with providing us middle-class rhetoric,” said Moffitt. “But I think the difference with what we see happening at HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities] in terms of the speeches there, is that in some ways, the Obamas feel like they’re with family and that they can have certain familial conversations that they probably would have in smaller settings, but they’re forgetting that they’re in a very public space.”

The full segment can be heard here.

Psychology professor Robert Provine’s latest book, “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond,” was recently reviewed in the American Journal of Human Biology.

“Provine brings together ethology, neurophysiology as well as psychology to describe the secrets of our daily behaviors in detail,” writes the reviewer. “Aimed at a wide readership, Provine’s book consists of 13 chapters written with humor… using only minimal resources, available to anyone, he is studying behaviors that raise serious questions.”

The full review can be read here.

This week the OpenGov Foundation and MarylandReporter.com led a focus group to examine transparency in Maryland politics and government. Conversation centered on the Maryland General Assembly website, redesigned in December 2012. The groups also asked for feedback on the website from external experts, including UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers.

Meyers told MarylandReporter.com that he was glad the new site moves away from the previous subscription model, which charged a fee to access the most current legislative information. However, he critiqued “delays in [posting] voting records on second and especially third reading.” The article suggests this problem is in part due to a policy that gives senators and delegates until the end of the business day to record or change their electronic votes in the case of a mistake or malfunction, delaying final tallies.

If you Tweet about a TV show or its ads, don’t be surprised if the advertisers ‘Sponsored Tweet’ you back

People love to Tweet about television shows they are watching; this much, we know. But now the analytics technologies are producing the payback: televsion advertisers will find out and Tweet them back.