UMBC sports economist Dennis Coates appeared on NBC Nightly News on October 23, discussing the effects of a possible NBA season cancellation. Although a lost season would negatively impact related businesses, such as sports bars, some suggest keeping a sense of perspective. Compared to the possible negative economic impact of a lost NFL season—recently averted—Coates argues that a lost NBA season would be “a drop in the bucket. The industry is just too small.” NBC notes that both fans and local business continue to hope for a resolution.

Computer Science pioneer John McCarthy died at his home in his sleep on Monday. He was 84. He is noted for creating the Lisp programming language, making ground-breaking contributions to Artificial Intelligence (including naming the field), adding important results to the mathematical theory of computation, and helping to develop computer time sharing. He studied mathematics under John Nash at Princeton

McCarthy held the first “computer-chess” match in the mid-1960s between scientists in the US and the USSR, transmitting the moves by telegraph. The soviet team ran on inferior hardware and used Claude Shannon’s brute-force Type-A strategy while the MIT team had an IBM 7090 implemented Shannon’s more sophisticed Type-B approach that used a heuristic plausible move generator. The Soviets won.

McCarthy was born in 1927 in Boston and taught himself higher math using Caltech textbooks when his family moved to the area, allowing him to take advanced classes when he enrolled as a teenager. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1951.

He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. Over the years, he held faculty appointments at Princeton, M.I.T., Dartmouth, and Stanford University, where he spend his las 39 years.

****Also, CWIT's November 7th Family Meeting is open to ALL CWIT/SITE Scholars and CWIT Affiliates. It will be our semi-annual "Pick Your Classes" event, when members of the community can talk about about scheduling & course content, coordinate schedules and class sections, share advice about professors, etc. We will meet in UC 310 & Ballroom Lounge from 12-1pm on Monday, November 7th. Pizza and soda will be provided.****

Thanks to everyone who volunteered at MDC3 last Friday and/or Saturday! The UMBC Cyber Defense Team was in the finals, and from what I heard did a great job! Unfortunately, Towson and UMCP pulled ahead and got first & second place. Each member of the first place team received $5000 scholarships from the NSA, and each member of the second place team received $2000 scholarships from NSA. Woah!

Out of all the teams in the college and high school championships (I am estimating about 15 6-person teams), I only saw two women. That is only 2 out of about 90 students! I know there was some interest within CWIT in forming a team for this year's competition, but the teams were never fully formed. Lets start planning ahead to get some talented women some teams for next year! Joining the UMBC Cyber Defense Team (http://umbccd.umbc.edu/) would be a great start!