The Department of English is pleased to announce that Deborah Rudacille, will join the department as a visiting professor of the practice this fall.

A 1998 science writing graduate of Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program, Rudacille has been published in various local and national magazines, as well as authoring three books: The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism and Transgender Rights (Pantheon, 2005), and most recently Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town  (Pantheon, 2010), a work of history whose subject matter remains prescient given the recent events concerning RG Steel’s declining fortunes in Sparrows Point.

According to Christopher Corbett, actong chair of English, Rudacille will teach four courses at UMBC next year. Her fall courses will be “Reporting the Local” (ENGL384), which will cover forms of community journalism in the digital age, and “Diagnosing Gender” (ENGL317/GWST390), a combined section course with gender and women’s studies which will “weave together the history of scientific and medical attempts to define gender with the lived experience of transgendered and intersexed individuals.” In the spring, she will teach an introductory science writing course and a reading course called “The Physician as Writer.”

Rudacille expressed her pleasure with joining the university, saying, “I’m very excited about my courses and eager to get started teaching this fall. I’ve heard great things about UMBC students from instructors who have taught at the school–that they are smart, motivated and hard-working. Engaging with such a high caliber of students is what I am most looking forward to at UMBC.”

More of Rudacille’s previous work can be found at her website.

NIST will hold a Big Data Workshop 13-14 June 2012 in Gaithersburg to explore key national priority topics in support of the White House Big Data Initiative. The workshop is being held in collaboration with the NSF sponsored Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, a collaboration between UMBC, Georgia Tech and UCSD.

This first workshop will discuss examples from science, health, disaster management, security, and finance as well as topics in emerging technology areas, including analytics and architectures. Two issues of special interest are identifying the core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share big data that could be standardized and developing measurements to ensure the accuracy and robustness of big data methods.

The workshop format will be a mixture of sessions, panels, and posters. Session speakers and panel members are by invitation only but all interested parties are encouraged to submit extended abstracts and/or posters.

The workshop is being held at NIST’s Gaithersburg facility and is free, although online pre-registration is required. A preliminary agenda is available which is subject to change as the workshop date approaches.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, is seen using SQL in the Hollywood remake. See The Girl With The ANSI Tattoo for an analysis of which DBMS this is and a critique of the queries (Everybody’s a critic!).

Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, has been named the next Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Boehling was appointed unanimously by the eleven-member state International Commission, which supervises the work of the ITS, at its annual meeting in Paris last week. She will take a leave of absence from UMBC and begin her directorship on January 1, 2013. "Strong academic and administrative leadership is required to ensure the continuing institutional transformation of the ITS into a centre for documentation, information and research of world importance. The ITS’s expanded mission is both challenging and fulfilling, and the International Commission is delighted to have secured the appointment of such an outstanding candidate," said Frédéric Baleine du Laurens, director of archives at the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and chairman of the International Commission. Boehling is an expert in the history of the Holocaust, World War II and the early postwar period in Germany. She served for several years on the Historical Advisory Panel to the U.S. Government’s Interagency Working Group for the Implementation of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Federal Disclosure Act, tasked to declassify material related to WWII war crimes. “The treasure trove of documents in the ITS archives reveals new insights into the experience and the perspectives of the victims of Nazi persecution. It is very compelling material that we want to make more accessible for research and educational purposes by means of digitization and archival description,” she said. Boehling said that she hopes to develop internships and research opportunities for UMBC students, especially with the displaced persons files, which are mostly in English. Boehling has studied and researched in Germany for several years on various research projects, including in Kiel, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich, and had a research fellowship at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. In 1980 Boehling received her M.A. and in 1990 her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Central European History. Last year, she co-authored with Uta Larkey Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story based on the family letters of Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg, professor of biology at UMBC. The present ITS Director and ICRC delegate, Jean-Luc Blondel, will return to Switzerland and continue to work for the ICRC. The ITS press release can be found here. About the International Tracing Service The International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen serves victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate through the archives it manages. The ITS preserves these historical records and makes them available for research. The archive contains about 30 million documents relating to the persecution, forced labour and emigration that took place in the wake of the Second World War. The ITS is governed by the eleven member states (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, USA) of the International Commission. On behalf of the commission, the ITS is managed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) until the end of 2012. The German Federal Archives will become the new institutional partner for the ITS as of January 2013. For more information visit www.its-arolsen.org. Picture Download http://www.its-arolsen.org/index.php?id=80&L=0 http://www.its-arolsen.org/de/presse/fotodownload/index.html

NIST will hold a Big Data Workshop 13-14 June 2012 in Gaithersburg to explore key national priority topics in support of the White House Big Data Initiative. The workshop is being held in collaboration with the NSF sponsored Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, a collaboration between UMBC, Georgia Tech and UCSD.

This first workshop will discuss examples from science, health, disaster management, security, and finance as well as topics in emerging technology areas, including analytics and architectures. Two issues of special interest are identifying the core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share big data that could be standardized and developing measurements to ensure the accuracy and robustness of big data methods.

The workshop format will be a mixture of sessions, panels, and posters. Session speakers and panel members are by invitation only but all interested parties are encouraged to submit extended abstracts and/or posters.

The workshop is being held at NIST’s Gaithersburg facility and is free, although online pre-registration is required. A preliminary agenda is available which is subject to change as the workshop date approaches.

1 Peter 2:9-10

9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Reflection:
Because of God’s mercy, we have been rescued and called God’s royal priesthood. It was because God in His mercy saw us and had compassion on us that we were saved. And the mercy we have received, we are to share and declare. God has called us to go and minister, and share His mercy and love with this generation.

Response:
Let’s ask God for His heart for our generation, that we would pray, love and share His mercy to those around us, and that we will be His royal priesthood to our generation.