According the Washington Post, the federal government is preparing to spend at least $890,000 on service fees for over 13,000 of its empty bank accounts – that is, bank accounts that have a zero balance.  Here’s a quick quiz question for you… What’s the best way for the government to save $890,000?

The legacies of U.S Presidents are as diverse as the country that elected them.

George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower seen as brilliant commanders of the armed forces. Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon known as the two presidents whose names have the words “impeachment” or “resignation” in accompaniment.

            This past week, the legacy of our 43^rd President will now have its own building and artifacts with the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

            The event was attended by all five living presidents, as all would take turns saying nice things about the man whose name is placed on the enormous, Leed certified, $250 million dollar complex.

            There was mention of his strong leadership skills after the 9/11 attacks and his commitments to education and tax relief. However, there was no acknowledgement of the policies that put the economy into a freefall. Nor acknowledgement  of how he and those around him were wrong (as in not close to being right) about Iraq or the mismanagement of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina.

            Four years out office, the former President has seen his rating rise to its highest since the beginning of his second term.

            It has been a quiet retirement for the former president. He has rare appearances and interviews with his name never being mentioned except for one of his Bushisms or poor policies.

Who would have thought that the man who was President during 9/11 and had started (and did not win) two wars would be less popular than his flagrantly womanizing and impeachment battling predecessor.

Last summer during the nominating conventions, the Democrats featured two former presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. At the Republican Convention, there was no evidence of a Republican president other than Ronald Reagan, despite the fact there have been two presidents named Bush since.

            It is safe to say that the legacy of George W. Bush is evolving, but what it evolves to is still a mystery. Will he go down as the president who made us safe? Will he make us think twice when offered a Presidential candidate we would want to “have a beer with”? Or will he just be the president before the black guy?

 t’s been two years since the start of the bloody civil war in Syria.

Despite regular reports of destruction and human loss, Barack Obama and western allies have been tentative to act.

Could chemical warfare, then, be the final tipping point for the U.S.?

Possible evidence of a chemical weapons attack by Syrian army forces north of Aleppo. Courtesy of Reuters. 

Obama hinted as much when discussing intelligence suggesting that the Assad regime has been using chemical agents against Syrian civilians and rebel fighters. Obama was quoted as saying that there remained uncertainty as to whether or not the “red line” had been crossed.

 So… the US is still tentative to act.

 Secretary of State Chuck Hagel alluded to “varying degrees of confidence” within the Pentagon, at best, that Assad had deployed chemical weapons against his own people.

Weapons experts from the U.N., meanwhile, won’t be much use. They would need to access alleged sites to test soil, blood, and tissue samples—a daunting prospect to say the least, seeing as Assad has all but shut his country off to the U.N.             

 And while the wait for concrete evidence continues, more people in Syria will continue to die or be displaced with each passing day.

While we wait for actionable evidence to be confirmed and new decisions made, the human cost mounts.

Which brings us to another question: with all that has transpired already, why should chemical weapons be the red line?

Shouldn’t the tens of thousands already dead be sufficient  for western intervention? And if not, why?

Facebook engineers Xiao Li and Maxime Boucher describe the language processing techniques used to implement Facebook’s graph search in a recent post on the Facebook Engineering page (alternative for non-facebook-users via VentureBeat).

Users can enter a question like Which of my friends who went to school at the University of Illinois live in California? which is translated into a query over Facebook’s Open Graph. That data structure is an RDF like graph of millions of entities and objects of various types that are connected thousands of types of relations. This is a very interesting and application of current human language technology to a highly visible and useful task!

Facebook announces acquisition of Parse, a provider of a cloud-based app development platform that makes it easier for developers to build mobile apps

The IBM-UrbanCode deal and what it means for the future trajectory of the DevOps movement.

When you consider making multiplayer games, there are many methods available for creating a game that friends can play online. The article will present a playable demo with parameters to play with, showcasing the concepts discussed.

Alumna Kimberly Haines ’12, visual arts, will display a collection of paintings centered around the theme “New Skies” at the David Mikow Art Gallery in Catonsville starting later this week. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Friday, May 3, from 5 to 7 p.m.

“New Skies, is full of new planets and surreal landscape paintings created with a variety of different mediums including watercolor, spray paint and acrylics,” said Haines, who was part of the gallery’s inaugural show with four other UMBC alumnae last fall. This is her first solo show.

“I am ecstatic to see so much of my own work line the walls of an art gallery,” she said.

The David Mikow Art Gallery is run by UMBC political science professor Carolyn Forestiere and her husband, Asher. For more information, including directions to the gallery, visit the gallery’s website here.

Read more about the gallery in this story featured in UMBC Magazine.

On Saturday, April 27, UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller spoke at the 9th annual Western Maryland Democratic Summit, alongside Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen and others.

According to coverage in the Herald-Mail, Schaller commented that the Republican Party has become a “Housified party” in recent years. Since 1994, Republican majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives have been driving the policies, philosophy and message of the party, which Schaller argued is to the GOP’s detriment in Senate and presidential politics. On the 2014 midterm election, Schaller predicted the Democrats are unlikely to regain a majority in the House because that would require 18 more seats and there are fewer swing districts across the nation than in the past.