Sophomore forward Chase Plummer was selected to the America East Conference Second Team, it was announced today at the University of Harford, site of the 2012 championships.

At the end of the regular season, the 6’6″ Plummer was the only player in the conference to be ranked in the top five in both scoring (fourth) and rebounding (fifth).

He produced one of the most prolific sophomore seasons in UMBC’s 26-year NCAA Division I history, scoring 446 points, one shy of the all-time record for a sophomore, set by Peter Mulligan in the 2001-02 campaign.Plummer, who finished the campaign at 15.4 points per game and 7.4 rebounds per contest, also become just the fifth player in school history to record 400 points and 200 rebounds in a single season. He also etched his name in the single season free throw shooting lists, converting the sixth-most (119) in a single season in school history and attempting the third-most (180).

A co-captain as a sophomore, Plummer scored in double figures in 11 consecutive games, from Jan. 17-Feb. 22, averaging 18.4 points per game in that stretch. He had five double-doubles, including a 24-point, 14-rebound effort at Canisius on Feb. 18. His top scoring game was a 28-point effort vs. Hartford on Feb. 7, when he converted 11 of 14 field goal attempts.

Plummer is the seventh Retriever in nine years of UMBC’s play in America East to earn second team honors. Only Jay Greene (2008) and Darryl Proctor (2008, 2009) have been selected to the first team.

OBAMACARE!!!!!

That word seems to scare lots of Republicans around the country.

Ever since President Obama’s Health care law (officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) was passed in March 2010 by a (then) Democratic congress, Republicans have been sick.

Now is their chance for payback.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to “Obamacare” on Monday, March 26 to Wednesday, March 28, 2012.

The law, set to go into effect in 2014,  contains a mandate requiring all Americans purchase health insurance.

Opponents think this is unconstitutional, have challenged the law, and now their argument is going to The Supremes at the Supreme Court.

But there are other provisions in the law that concern college students and college grads.

Adults between the ages of 18 to 26 under this federal law can stay on their parents’ health insurance plan until their 27th birthday. The young adult of said parent (s) can be married or file their taxes as an independent and still qualify. They don’t have to live with their parents or even live in the same state as their parents.

Presently, many students do not have insurance and do not seek medical treatment when they are sick.

Groups for the law such as National Action Network, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Organization for Women, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and other leaders in the labor and civil rights community will rally in support of the law in front of the Supreme Court during the hearings.

Opponents of this law say:

“It is high time for the high court to strike down this unconstitutional, unworkable and unpopular law,” said Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown.

How do you think the Supreme Court will rule on these issues? How do you think they should rule?

For Myths and Quick Stats regarding this mandate check out the links below:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/healthreform/myths-and-facts

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/health-care-law-supreme-court-justice-hold-future/story?id=15040434

http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/health/state-laws-and-actions-challenging-aca.aspx

http://www.healthcare.gov/?gclid=CLCk4o2ny64CFYwbQgodRztUYw

Correlation Aware Optimizations for Analytic Databases

Hideaki Kimura, Brown University

1:00pm Friday 9 March 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Recent years have seen that the analysis of large data-sets is crucially important in a wide range of business, governmental, and scientific applications. For example, research projects in astronomy need to analyze petabytes of image data taken from telescopes. Providing a fast and scalable analytical data management system for such users has become increasingly important.

The major bottlenecks for analytics on such big data are disk- and network-I/O. Because the data is too large to fit in RAM, each query causes substantial disk I/O. Traditional database systems provide indexes to speed up disk reads, but many analytic queries do not benefit from indexes because data is scattered over a large number of disk blocks and disk seeks are prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, such huge data sets need to be partitioned and distributed over hundreds or many thousands of nodes. When a query requires more than one data at once, such as a query involving a JOIN operation, the data management system must transmit a large amount of data over the network. For example, the Shuffle phase in Map-Reduce systems copies file blocks over the network and causes a significant bottleneck in many cases.

Our approach to tackling these challenges in big data analytics is to exploit correlations. I will describe our correlation-aware indexing, replication, and data placement which make big data analytics faster and more scalable.

Finally, if time allows, I will also introduce another on-going project to develop a scalable transactional processing system on modern hardware in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

Hideaki Kimura is a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. His main research interests are in data management systems. His dissertation research with Prof. Stan Zdonik is on correlation-based optimizations for large analytic databases. He also worked on transaction processing systems exploiting modern hardware at HP Labs.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information