This weekend, CSEE Professor Alan Sherman will watch as the UMBC chess team he directs plays in the Final Four of College Chess. The UMBC team will battle against teams from Webster University, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the four best of the 44 teams that competed in the 2012 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship. In fact, it was a four-way tie for first place.

Professor Sherman has served as the faculty advisor to the chess team since 1991 and helped build UMBC's reputation as the collegiate powerhouse of chess. UMBC has played in the President's Cup (the official name) every year since it was established in 2001 and has won six out of the twelve matches. Although Sherman's team is one of the best in the Americas, he acknowledged in an article in today's Washington Post that Webster is the odds on favorite to win this weekend.

"Anything can happen because it’s a competition," said Alan Sherman, UMBC’s chess director. "But I’m predicting Webster will be the clear winner."

The games start at 10:00am on Saturday at Booz Allen Hamilton in Rockville MD with the last match beginning at 9:00am on Sunday. Anyone can follow moves live on the Internet at Moroni.com.

The Baltimore Business Journal reports that Maryland is pushing back the launch of its small business health exchange by at least three months to allow more time for leaders to prepare the complex IT system involved and to train brokers who will bring businesses to the exchange.

The story cites analysis from The Hilltop Institute at UMBC that approximately 8,500 people are expected to get insurance through the small business exchange in its first year. This compares with the 138,764 people to buy health insurance through the individual exchange by 2014. By 2020, Hilltop expects the small business exchange to grow to around 10,157 people and the individual exchange to grow to 273,583.

Nicole Else-Quest, assistant professor of psychology, is in the news for a forthcoming paper in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.  The study shows that male and female students earn similar grades in math and science, while Asian American students of both genders outperform all other races.  The study also found that male students of all ethnicities reported a greater perception of their abilities in math, while female students associated greater value to science-related courses.

The findings have been covered in an April 4 story in “Voices of America” entitled “Asian-American Students Outpace Other Groups in Math, Science,” a March 29 story in “Medical Daily” with the headline “Asian Students Better at Math and Science; Girls Equal to Boys in STEM Career Potential,” a March 29 story in “Council and Heal” entitled “Despite Stereotypes, Girls and Boys Do Equally Well in Math and Science,” a March 31 story in “The Indian Express” titled “Asian-American students outperform other ethnic groups,” and a April 9 story in “Asian Scientist” with the headline “Asian Americans Outperform Peers In Science & Math Study.”

Else-Quest told “Voices of America” that she doesn’t want the data to further the “model minority” perception about Asian-Americans.

“I think that stereotype is harmful for everyone, whether benevolent or not,” she said. “They put us in boxes or restrict us in some way. When we talk about Asian-Americans, we have to recognize it’s a tremendously diverse population with a variety of cultures and varying levels of status and language proficiency.”

Reader Arun wrote in with a question on how to make a body border that was rounded where the edges met on the inside. Like this. We've covered body borders before, but this was slightly different.

It does look rather confusing at first. You can't do bizarro inside-y rounded-ness like with CSS, that's crazy talk. But then, if you just look at it as a normal rounded corner element sitting on top of a square element, it looks less weird. So that's attempt #1:

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But if that extra element just-for-design-reasons bothers us, we actually could pull this off using border-image on the <body> element. Remember border-image is just "nine slice" scaling essentially. Four fixed size corners, four repeating-on-one-axis edges, and a stretchy middle.

Pretty easy:

body {
      border-image: url(rounded-edge.png) 25% repeat;
      border-width: 25px;
    }

Note that IE (any version) doesn't do border-image.

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But but but scrolling

We'd need to ask how important it is that the "body border" always has visible bottom border. If it's OK that the bottom part can scroll away when the page is longer than the viewport, that's easy.

We just make sure the body is at least that big, but can get bigger:

* { box-sizing: border-box; }
    html { height: 100%; }
    body { min-height: 100%; }

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If it's not OK that the bottom border scrolls aways (it must be seen at all times) we're going to have to use that extra element again. Only we'll make sure that it can scroll vertically. That scrollbar might screw with the rounded-corner-ness though, unless we're in WebKit and then we can fiddle with the look of the scrollbars to make sure it's OK.

body {
      background: #5bb0ff;
    }
    
    .page-wrap {
      position: fixed;
      top: 10px;
      right: 10px;
      left: 10px;
      bottom: 10px;
      background: white;
      border-radius: 10px;
      padding: 20px;
      overflow-y: scroll;
    }
    
    ::-webkit-scrollbar-track {
      background: none;
    }
    ::-webkit-scrollbar {
      width: 10px;
      height: 10px;
    }
    ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
      background: #ccc;
      border-radius: 5px;
    }

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That's all I got.

Body Border, Rounded Inside is a post from CSS-Tricks

Google announced awards for the 2013 Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) program and UMBC was again among the sites selected. The program is an initiative sponsored by Google to promote Computer Science and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curricula. UMBC Professor Marie desJardins put together successful CS4HS workshops in 2011 and 2012 that were attended by 35 Maryland high school and middle school computer science teachers and administrators in each year.

The 2013 CS4HS Workshop will be held from 4-7 August 2013 on the UMBC campus. Dormatory accommodations and all meals will be provided, as well as a $50 stipend for each teacher who attends the entire workshop. The workshop will feature a mix of panels and presentations on a wide range of scheduled topics.  It will give both highly experienced and less experienced teachers an unparalleled opportunity to meet other Maryland CS teachers and to share ideas and innovations. Space is limited to 25 participants and registration is required by 4 July 2013.

The first workshop in 2011 led to the formation of the Maryland chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association and was the seed for the NSF-funded "CE21-Maryland" initiative that will culminate in a statewide Maryland Summit for Computing Education for educators and others interested in CS education on 17 May 2013.

Have you registered  for  CWIT's 3rd annual Spring into Leadership Event which will take place on Thursday, April 11th, 6:30-8:00 PM.?

This year's speaker is Tina Kuhn, the vice president of the Security and Information Operations (S&IO) business unit under the Cyber Solutions division at Northrop Grumman. The S&IO business unit provides intelligence-related systems and services to U.S. Government and international security customers. The organization’s focus is on full-spectrum cyber solutions that protect critical national systems and support the nation’s information dominance.