Navajo Hipsters.

Leave it to Urban Outfitters to get sued by the Navajo Nation for products such as these.

As the Navajo have retained a trademark on their name since 1943, it appears Urban Outfitters may have some hefty damages to pay .

Not only are they treading on trademark toes, they may even be breaking the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which makes it illegal to suggest that a product is an authentic Native American good.

So how do members of the Navajo tribe feel about this?

In an open letter she wrote to the CEO of Urban Outfitters, Navajo woman Sasha Houston Brown states:

“…as a Native American woman, I am deeply distressed by your company’s mass marketed collection of distasteful and racially demeaning apparel and décor. I take personal offense to the blatant racism and perverted cultural appropriation your store features this season as “fashion.”

Is Urban Outfitters stepping over the line ? Or is litigating little undies a little over the top?

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow (AKA Dan Perkins) has crafted a humorous take on Rick Santorum’s most recent challenge:

Is this what you’re hearing from Sen. Rick Santorum? How will this affect average voters’ opinions of him and his campaign? As GOP strategist Alex Castellanos reminds us, “Republicans being against sex is not good; sex is popular.”

Furthermore, we’ve already reported on the prevalence of contraception use among men and women––even Catholics. Will this intense focus on contraception help or hurt the GOP in the long run?

Using Static Analysis to Diagnose
Misconfigured Open Source Systems Software

Ariel Rabkin, UC Berkeley

1:00pm Monday 5 March 2012, ITE 325b UMBC

Ten years ago, few software developers worked on distributed systems. Today, developers often run code on clusters, relying on large open-source software stacks to manage resources. These systems are challenging to configure and debug. Fortunately, developments in program analysis have given us new tools for managing the complexity of modern software. This talk will show how static analysis can help users configure their systems. I present a technique that builds an explicit table mapping a program's possible error messages to the options that might cause them. As a result, users can get immediate feedback on how to resolve configuration errors.

Ari Rabkin is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley working in the AMP lab. His current research interest is the software engineering and administration challenges of big-data systems. He is particularly interested in applying program analysis techniques to tasks like log analysis and configuration debugging. His broader interests focus on systems and security, including improving system usability by making systems easier to understand, the connections between computer science research and technology policy, developing program analysis techniques that work acceptably well on large, complex, messy software systems.

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