On July 20th, the Virginia radio program BackStory With the American History Guys tackled the history of postal delivery in America in an episode entitled “You’ve Got Mail: A History of the Post Office.” Among the guests who appeared was Christopher Corbett, professor and interim chair of English.  Corbett is the author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legacy of the Pony Express, a history of the mid-19th Century mail carrier.

Associate producer Eric Mennel began the segment by quizzing his own mother on the history of the Pony Express. When he asked how long the Pony Express was in operation, Corbett responded, “Well, with no disrespect to your mother, no one ever gets that right. People guess ten years, twenty years, [or] twenty-five years. It more ore less operated for seventy-eight weeks.”

Corbett then discussed the truth of the Pony Express as opposed to the legend. “They were carrying government documents. They were carrying bank transfers. They were carrying important business matters. They were not carrying love letters, Chistmas cards, [or] junk mail, and they were not carrying packages… but other than that, Mom was right.”

Eugene Schaffer, professor and chair of education, spoke with the Catonsville Times for a story on the performance of the county’s middle school students on the Maryland School Assessment (MSA) tests.

With test scores on math showing a slight improvement and reading scores a slight decline, the results show an overall mixed record regarding students’ progress.

Schaffer said that subjects that used to be taught in high school are now taught in middle school, which might account for some of the decline. He also spoke of the difficulties facing many students during the middle school years. “It’s tough being in middle school because it’s a time of enormous growth, intellectually, physically,” he said. “Just growing up is an enormous challenge. You’re going through a lot of changes.”

The story, “Arbutus middle school students’ progress mixed on MSA test,” appeared on July 17.

Robert Deluty, associate dean of the graduate school, has published a new book of poetry, titled “Through Others’ Eyes.” In his review of the book, Dr. Ronald Pies states:

“If, as Marcel Proust wrote, the only true voyage of discovery is ‘to possess other eyes,’ then Robert Deluty envisions the world through the eyes of a multitude. This is best exemplified in his uncanny ability to enter into the world-view of the very young and the very old, as with ‘a fourth grader/ dreaming of statues sculpted/ in his honor’ and the ‘elderly chemist/ struggling to spell the word/ laboratory.’ As always, Deluty’s poetry does not judge–it appraises; his perceptions do not moralize–they empathize.”

Copies of “Through Others’ Eyes,” as well as of Deluty’s other books, are on sale at the UMBC Bookstore.

MS Thesis defense

Dynamically Reconfigurable Layered Filesystem

Sunil Venkatesh

10:00am Thursday, 26 July 2012, ITE 325b

Traditionally, all files and directories in Linux and UNIX-like systems have been organized in a hierarchical fashion under the root directory “/” adhering to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Although there is sufficient flexibility in how the filesystem hierarchy is structured given it satisfies the FHS, there is little straightforward means to customize the filesystem structure to suit an individual user’s or a set of users’ needs without affecting rest of the users on a shared system. Our approach aims to eliminate such a restriction by providing isolated environments to individual users with the help of data being organized in the form of layers. Such an environment also provides an important advantage from security perspective by reducing the risk involved in unwarranted access to files by carefully choosing the layers a user has access. Maintainability at the layer level is another key advantage of our approach over the fine-grained approach of dealing with individual files.

Committee: Drs. John Dorband (Chair), Yelena Yesha, Mohamed Younis

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