About WTCI:

The World Trade Center Institute (WTCI) is the largest international business network of its kind in the Mid-Atlantic – a who’s who of the top global business executives in the region. At WTCI we strive to drive the growth of Maryland’s flourishing global business community. Today more than 2,500 Maryland firms benefit from WTCI’s global connections, events, professional exchanges program and extensive global business services.  In addition, WTCI serves as the World Bank Group’s Private Sector Liaison Officer (PSLO) for the region, enabling local firms to access opportunities in developing counties.     

WTCI was established in 1989. Financed jointly by area businesses, the State of Maryland and the federal government, WTCI operates as a private, non-profit membership organization.

The United States Secret Service, Baltimore Field Office is currently accepting applications for Fall 2013 Student Volunteer Service Program (Internship) through April 15, 2013.

Our Student Volunteer Service Program (Internship) offers many advantages, including career exploration early in a student’s academic studies, exposure to new and emerging occupations/technologies,  and offers academic credit for the work performed, as well as  work experience that may be considered relevant if the student later applies for permanent employment.  The program, however, is not intended to provide the intern with investigative or protective experience.

To be considered, a student must:

- Be a U.S. Citizen, Be at least 16 years of age at the time of appointment

- Be enrolled or accepted for enrollment during the upcoming semester or quarter as a diploma/certificate/degree seeking student in high school,  or in an educational institution not above the baccalaureate level that is accredited by a recognized body

- Not be a son or daughter of a current Secret Service employee

- Be able to obtain a Top Secret clearance

To apply, student should complete the PDF Forms consisting of:

1.            Student Volunteer Service Program Application.  This form is available at www.secretservice.gov  under Pathways Program (Student Program)

2.            OF 306 – Declaration for Federal Employment.  This form is available at www.opm.gov under Forms

In addition, students should submit  the following with the above Forms:

3.            Resume

4.            Unofficial transcript (official transcript required at time of interview)

Completed application may be submitted to: BAL.Recruitment@usss.dhs.gov with attachments  or  faxed to:  443-263-1100, ATTN:  RECRUITMENT no later than April 15, 2013.  No application will be accepted for Fall 2013 Program after close of business (cob) on April 15, 2013.         

Turning the University Inside Out

Michael K. Young

President, University of Washington

After an election season in which the topic of the environment was all but ignored, President Obama's pledge to action in his inaugural and State of the Union addresses has kindled long-simmering debates on how our nation should move forward in addressing our sustainability challenges. What are the most viable options for clean energy? Should we focus resources on mitigation or adaptation? What are the economic and social equity impacts of taking action on the environment? While there clearly is no single direction in which all of the answers to these and other questions will be found, any path to sustainability must run through our colleges and universities.

Increasingly, the sustainability challenges we face today require connected, integrative solutions based on highly collaborative problem-solving research that spans disciplines and reaches across geographic boundaries. Long established as incubators for discovery, universities are particularly well-suited for this kind of research. From developing clean energy sources and technologies, to Smart Grid and other initiatives, America's research universities, often in collaboration with one another as well as partners in both the public and private sectors, are at the forefront of innovation in sustainability research.

There's no question that the advances we will see in the future -- alternative energy sources, new materials that will enable us to harvest energy from those sources, policies that will govern the use of new innovations and adaptations -- will emerge from work being done at universities today. Yet while we look forward to those breakthroughs, a great deal of non-research related activity happens on campuses that underscores the unique role colleges and universities play in advancing sustainability and from which we can take both inspiration and valuable lessons right now.

Over the last several years, the Ivory Tower has undergone significant greening. Pretty much everything connected to campus life has been put under the sustainability microscope. At the University of Washington (UW), for example, our buildings have gardens on their roofs and carry certifications such as LEED Silver, Gold, and Platinum. We are biking to school and work, and recycling and composting when we get there. Our students are using sensors to measure their energy use in their residence halls, and we are reclaiming water to use in landscaping. Our custodial teams use green cleaning products, and our gardeners brew special "teas" to use instead of pesticides.

Some of the reasoning behind the decision to go green is purely financial. As a case in point, we have saved $12.83 million in utility costs over the past year at the UW as a result of the myriad energy efficiency projects we have implemented. But it really goes much deeper than money alone.

For colleges and universities -- especially public ones -- engaging with our communities is fundamental to our mission. We all have a responsibility to turn our universities inside out -- that is, to take the wealth of ideas percolating on our campuses into our community, whether that community is across the street or across the globe. By making sustainability a priority in our daily operations and practices, we demonstrate in an authentic way our commitment to making a better world for us all. At the same time, it de-mystifies the work being done at universities, connecting discernible, concrete practices with an issue as complex as climate change.

By the way we live on our campus, we also teach our students every day what it takes to live sustainably. And it's a lesson they really take to heart. Our students voted themselves on a set of fees that goes into a Campus Sustainability Fund from which they finance their own sustainability projects, including, do-it-yourself bike fix-it stations, green walls, and a bioswale to filter pollutants from storm-water runoff in a parking lot. Every year we send out about 15,000 graduates who have lived and breathed this lifestyle; it is not unrealistic to expect that they will carry this way of living with them into the real world.

In a similar vein, another unique strength of universities is our graduates who understand the innovations of today so well that they will continue developing the innovations of tomorrow. We see this process taking root every day on our UW campus where our students have undertaken such ambitious projects as building a 3D printer that can transform waste plastic into composting toilets and rain-catchment systems and developing an electric vehicle drive train that converts any car from gas to electric power. Speaking personally, I cannot wait to see what they come up with next.

The energy and commitment of our students are powerful testaments to the exceptional efficacy of colleges and universities to lead the way to sustainability. We provide laboratories for future advances, as well as for what works now. By leveraging this experience, we can change the world -- ensuring a healthier, greener, more sustainable planet for ourselves and for generations to come.

This is the first post in a seven-part series titled, "Students of Sustainability: How Higher Education Can Teach the World To Be More Planet-Minded." It is presented in partnership with the University of Washington.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-k-young/green-colleges-_b_2830622.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003&ir=Green

Jordan Moore experiments with talking to the browser to adjust how things look. For instance, "Make the text larger." Like in, you know, the future.

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The CSS-Tricks feed is sponsored by Wufoo, the best online form builder there is. I use it on every project I've done as long as I've been a web worker. Quickly build any type of form you need, from the humble contact form to the epic multi-page, logic-riddled, mobile-friendly, custom-designed, spam-protected, payment-taking super form. Try Wufoo for free today!

Responding to Voice is a post from CSS-Tricks

Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")
Assistant Professor
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

10:30-12:00 Monday, March 11, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. This talk will give you a preview of what we do at PreCog in the area of PSOSM. I will describe briefly some of the cool ongoing projects that we have: ChaMAILeon, PhishAri, Twit-Digest, U2P2, and OCEAN. Much of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Data Mining, Text Mining, Statistics, Network Science, Public Policy, Complex networks, Human Computer Interaction, and Psychology.

In this talk, I will focus on the following: (1) Twit-Digest is a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. Pro-cursor to this work is published at PSOSM 2012, this work also obtained second best award at IBM ICARE 2012. (2) OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks. Here, we show how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013. (3) Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0 U2P2, this is one of the largest ever done privacy study in India. This has been in media recently; if you are interested search for #privacyindia12 on Twitter. This work obtained the third Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") Assistant Professor, is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research interests include developing technological and inter-disciplinary solutions to detect and prevent computer crime, in particular, these days be has been dabbling with complex networked systems (e.g. social web systems like Twitter, Facebook, and telephone logs). He is also very passionate about issues related to human computer interaction. As Principal Investigator, PK is currently managing research projects value of about 2 Crores INR. PK is a Co-Principal Investigator in a project that is approved at the Europe Union FP7 which is about 5.3 million Euros. PK has received research funds Government of India, National Science Foundation, industry bodies in India, and International Development Research Centre. He is serving as a PC member in WWW 2013, AsiaCCS 2013 and he is also serving as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM's Transactions on Internet Technology. PK’s Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at Carnegie Mellon University has contributed in creating a successful start-up company, Wombat Security Technologies. PK founded and manages PreCog, a research group at IIIT-Delhi. PK can be reached at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Another weekend, and yet another freebie. Today, we are happy to feature a useful icon set, the Simple Icons by Dan Leech. Dan’s set contains 100 PNG icons for popular websites, apps and organisations, all in eleven sizes (16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 pixels squared).

The white icons have transparent backgrounds, which makes them ridiculously simple to style with CSS. As a bonus, simpleicons.org maintains a list of official background colour values that can be used in conjunction with the icons, thoroughly researched and derived from official branding guidelines of each brand.

Larger view.

Download the set for free!

Large preview (1000×2467), Full-size preview (1628×4016).

• Download the complete set (.zip)
• Download individual files from the GitHub repository
• Preview the icons and get colour info at simpleicons.org

Behind the design

Here are some insights from the designer himself:

“Even though the future of Web iconography will clearly be dominated by resolution-independent formats like SVG and icon fonts, there will still be many uses for a set of simple, flexible, high-quality raster icons. That’s what I set out to achieve with Simple Icons. The set is still very much a work in progress. I plan to refine and grow the set as time goes on.”

Thanks for your fantastic work and your contribution, Dan!

© The Smashing Team for Smashing Magazine, 2013.