Keep’s paper-like qualities might just beat its computery ones.

In January, I did something heretical for a productivity-app-obsessed tech writer: I threw away the “list” apps on my phone and went back to paper. As a queryable, bottomless, always-accessible database of my every passing thought, a Post-It stuck to my iPhone certainly falls short compared to Evernote or Clear. But here’s what I realized: for me, most of the time, I don’t need a database, nor do I want to spend time querying and managing one. I’m with Bret Victor: interacting with software mostly sucks on principle. For the job of “jotting” random stuff, paper’s form (physical, flexible, direct) just plain beat software’s function. 

Ryan Bloom ’03, visual and performing arts, an English lecturer at UMBC, was recently awarded a fellowship at Yaddo, an artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo’s mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.

Bloom is an internationally-recognized translator of Albert Camus. He received his MFA from The American University in Washington, D.C., where he undertook a multidisciplinary study of Literary Translation, Fiction, and Composition Education. His work-translation, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction-has appeared in places such as  The New Yorker, The Arabesques Review, The Baltimore Sun, The Current, Horizon Magazine, The Orlando Sentinel, and other publications.

This post originally appeared in UMBC Insights.

Don't miss: Online Exhibit: "From Ideas to Independence: A
Century of Entrepreneurial Women"

Women’s entrepreneurship is everywhere in the news these days. In September 2009, Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, declared that women’s businesses offer the “highest return on investment.” As of 2013, reporters and women’s business groups were hailing record growth: the number of women’s ventures has increased by 54 percent in the past fifteen years with revenues jumping 58 percent. Women’s achievements are more impressive given that they historically had little access to traditional forms of business capital, often having no other choice but to use credit cards and savings to launch their ventures.

There were other challenges, too. Operating both within the larger world of commerce yet without the insider status that men’s businesses have typically enjoyed, women entrepreneurs throughout history often had to go it alone, create parallel networks to traditionally male organizations, or forge alliances to gain access to vital means of producing, distributing and growing their businesses.

Women have always owned businesses; what changed over the last century is their increasing acceptance, prominence and movement into a vast assortment of enterprises and the role of technology in making entrepreneurship more accessible and affordable. This exhibit explores the forces in the last century that led to this moment.

Ryan Bloom ’03, visual and performing arts, and English lecturer, was recently awarded a fellowship at Yaddo, an artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo’s mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.

Bloom is an internationally-recognized translator of Albert Camus. He has written for The New Yorker, The Arabesques Review, The Baltimore Sun, The Current, Horizon Magazine, The Orlando Sentinel, and other publications