CIC conference for URM postdocs in STEM
May 31-June 2, 2012
Hyatt Place Columbus/OSU
795 Yard Street, Columbus, OH 43212

CIC member campuses are committed to recruiting and retaining diverse
faculty. The goal of this conference is to provide Postdoctoral
Scholars from groups historically underrepresented in Engineering and
Natural Sciences the opportunity to network and access information and
materials necessary for a successful transition to a faculty position
at CIC universities or similar research intensive institutions.

The conference is also designed to provide recruitment opportunities
for CIC departments and programs anticipating faculty hires in STEM
disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The
intent is to match potential faculty recruits with open searches at
CIC universities. For more information, see
http://www.cic.net/Home/Projects/Leadership/PostDocConference/Home.aspx

——————————————

This message has been sent to all AGEPs nationwide.  We hope that postdoctoral scholars from our PROMISE AGEP campuses and beyond will take advantage of this opportunity. Registration is free of charge.  Interested PROMISE postdocs should check with representatives from their respective campus’ office or unit of postdoctoral affairs  (representatives listed below) to see if there are funds available for travel and lodging.

• UMBC: Dr. Renetta Tull (rtull@umbc.edu)
• UMB: Dr. Erin Golembewski (egole001@umaryland.edu)
• UMCP: Dr. Arthur Popper (apopper@umd.edu)

CIC conference for URM postdocs in STEM
May 31-June 2, 2012
Hyatt Place Columbus/OSU
795 Yard Street, Columbus, OH 43212

CIC member campuses are committed to recruiting and retaining diverse
faculty. The goal of this conference is to provide Postdoctoral
Scholars from groups historically underrepresented in Engineering and
Natural Sciences the opportunity to network and access information and
materials necessary for a successful transition to a faculty position
at CIC universities or similar research intensive institutions.

The conference is also designed to provide recruitment opportunities
for CIC departments and programs anticipating faculty hires in STEM
disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The
intent is to match potential faculty recruits with open searches at
CIC universities. For more information, see
http://www.cic.net/Home/Projects/Leadership/PostDocConference/Home.aspx

——————————————

This message has been sent to all AGEPs nationwide.  We hope that postdoctoral scholars from our PROMISE AGEP campuses and beyond will take advantage of this opportunity. Registration is free of charge.  Interested PROMISE postdocs should check with representatives from their respective campus’ office or unit of postdoctoral affairs  (representatives listed below) to see if there are funds available for travel and lodging.

• UMBC: Dr. Renetta Tull (rtull@umbc.edu)
• UMB: Dr. Erin Golembewski (egole001@umaryland.edu)
• UMCP: Dr. Arthur Popper (apopper@umd.edu)

Our JAWS Bus Trip last night was cancelled. If you feel like you wasted $3; come to our office in Commons 2b10, and we’ll trade your ticket in for two regular movie tickets. (That saves you a dollar!)

EE Graduate Seminar

Spectrum Wars: LightSquared vs. GPS

Professor Chuck LaBerge
Professor of the Practice, CSEE Dept/UMBC

11:30am-12:45pm Friday, 2 March 2012, ITE 231

The radio-frequency spectrum is a limited resource. Within the US, commercial use of the spectrum is administered by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), while government use of the spectrum is administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Currently, the regulatory community is locked in a battle about spectrum utilization in the vicinity of 1.5 GHz. This struggle pits millions of users of GPS technology for position and time information against technical innovators desiring to bring 4G wireless communications to millions of users in underserved populations. So who wins the spectrum wars?

The talk will outline the technologies involved, and provide a time-line of the regulatory actions to date. There are some innovative things going on here, and some simple analysis will show why there are points of contention. A final resolution cannot be provided at this time, because the issue is currently an open discussion in FCC. And, as might expected, there are financial and political ramifications as well.

This talk will provide an interesting insight into how the 'real world' works.

Dr. LaBerge is Professor of the Practice of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the CSEE at UMBC, where he teaches a wide variety of courses ranging from Introductory Circuits to Error Correcting Codes. From 1975-2008, he was employed by Bendix, which became AlliedSignal, which became Honeywell through a series of corporate mergers. He retired in July 2008 as the Senior Fellow for Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance in Honeywell's Aerospace Research and Technology Center.

Dr. LaBerge has worked on precision landing systems and a wide variety of aeronautical radios and applications. He's recognized as an expert in issues involving interference to aeronautical systems. His technical, writing, and editorial contributions have received numerous citations from regulatory bodies, and he was the winner of the Best Paper of Conference at the 2000 IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference.

Dr. LaBerge is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of Tau Beta Pi, and an inductee in the Order of the Engineer. He received his BES-EE and MSE-EE, degrees, both with Honors, from The Johns Hopkins University and the PhD. in Electrical Engineering from UMBC. His three kids are older than his students. He's been married to his patient wife for almost 38 years.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

The Register has an article, Cray gets graphic with big data, on Cray’s uRiKA computer that is designed for analyzing large graphs. The specialized machine uses Crays’s Threadstorm processors and is designed to support up to 8,192 processors and 512TB of shared main memory. If you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can’t afford it — starter rack costs “several hundreds of thousands of dollars”.

Cray is positioning uRiKA as a graph appliance that “complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing enterprise analytics workflow.” Most interesting to me is that it ships ships with a software suite based on open source Semantic Web technology.

“The hardware, while impressive, is not particularly useful without some software. The Urika stack is based on the Apache Jena project, which is a Java framework for building semantic web applications. SPARQL is the pattern-matching query language for graph applications, and Apache Fuseki is the SPARQL server that runs in conjunction with the Jena framework and that allows data stored in the RDF format, the special format for graph data, to be served up over the HTTP protocol.”

Courtesy of Tikkun

Is a”‘gay Catholic” a contradiction of terms?

Rev. Marcel Guarnizo certainly thinks so.

He recently made that clear to Barbara Johnson, a lesbian woman from D.C.

Johnson was attending her mother’s funeral in Gaithersburg, MD this past Saturday with Rev. Guarnizo presiding. When Johnson went up to receive the Catholic sacrament of communion, Guarnizo covered the chalice with his hand and said:

“I can’t give you Communion because you live with a woman, and in the eyes of the church, that is a sin.”

But Rev. Guarnizo was not finished.

When Johnson was delivering the closing eulogy for her mother, Rev Guarnizo decided to bolt. He then claimed he was too sick to preside over her mother’s burial.

Johnson received an apology letter from the Archdiocese expressing concern regarding the way she was treated and stating that an individual’s right to receive communion should not be addressed in a public setting.

While Johnson has stated that she doesn’t want to make the incident into a gay-rights issue, some gay-rights activists feel that there is a larger conflict within the isolated event.

On the other side of the issue, some Catholics are voicing support of Guarnizo. They say that the blame lies with Johnson, who should have known that her sexual orientation would not be warmly accepted by the Catholic Church.

Johnson seems to believe that this is simply a matter of common courtesy and respect. But is there more to it than that? Is this another example of the growing controversy regarding the rights of religious institutions vs. those of the individual?

Some of the reactions this incident has incited suggest that this Communion conflict might only be the appetizer of a much larger meal.

The movie is now looking to for general release in major cinemas.

The film took a hard stand against the current  epidemic of bullying facing youth today. It featured real adolescents and its purpose is to reach out to that age group.

But there’s a big problem… most of these adolescents won’t be able to see the movie.

The MPAA has assessed the documentary with an R rating keeping it out of reach of its intended audience.

The reason for the R? Cussing–mostly used by the kids featured in the film.

The MPAA has a long history of maintaining their status quo as the dominant assessors of a movie’s content, rating films at their own discretion.

The Weinstein Company (backers of the movie) also has a history of fighting against MPAA ratings and has even threatened to leave the system as a whole after this latest defeat.

But should the Weinsteins withdraw from the rating system, it would leave the “unrated” Bully with a challenge.

Theaters aren’t too keen on showing unrated movies because it gives an impression the film’s content is worse than your standard “R” movie.

Do you think dropping a few too many F-bombs in a film is really essential? Or do you think it’s a lame reason to give films such a harsh rating? What do you think of the MPAA’s monopoly on movie ratings?