“I think it would be great to get folks [to understand] the importance of how diversity and cultural identity affects everything,” said Carlos Turcios, program associate for diversity and inclusion at the Mosaic. “I think people only think that, you know, race only matters here and class only matters here. But it’s actually like we bring this everywhere.”

The Mosaic launched this semester’s “What’s the (T)ea?” discussion series by exploring voting in our social identities. Participants shared their personal experiences and learned about the history of voting rights. The discussion focused on how one’s social identity can affect their ability to vote in elections. Students explored this idea by taking a literacy test that people had to pass in the 1960s to be able to vote.

“The whole point is to frustrate you. Because I wanted you to learn that, crap, this is the BS that people had to go through to fill [a voting ballot] out,“ said Turcios.

The discussion also focused on the role of voting in today’s society and how some groups have faced hardships when going out to vote. Students also watched YouTube videos that highlighted the social movements that have led to changes in voting laws. The videos reflected on today’s voting conditions and how some groups have trouble, or are unable, to vote in elections. The difficulty the disabled and ex-convicts face in being able to vote was especially emphasized.

“Today was mostly getting people to think about how important it is to vote, or what’s the significance behind voting,” said Carlos Turcios.

“What’s the (T)ea?” is a monthly discussion event hosted by the Mosaic focusing on topics relating to current social issues. The title is a play on the phrase used in gay ball culture, “What’s the T,” where the T stands for talk of the town. The discussions are set in the Commons room 329 with tea and snacks provided.

Each “What’s the (T)ea?” discussion focuses on different social issues that face American communities today. Each discussion is packed with activities and different topics to touch on every aspect of the issue. Next month, on April 5, “What’s the (T)ea?” looks at taxes and how it affects many groups, especially those who cannot vote for the tax policy they want.

“I don’t think there’s another environment or most people around our age group that have this type of access. Like I can’t think of many communities that have the ability to create all types of programming to intentionally teach people about different diversity topics,” said Turcios.

The Mosaic’s “What’s the (T)ea?” discussions are an opportunity for UMBC students to share their experiences and hear other students opinions on current social issues. The discussions are an opportunity to learn how students can make a difference and what problems need to be solved.

Who doesn’t love a delicious piece of pie? Well, at UMBC we also love our pi, the infinite decimal 3.14 essential for so many computations (and puns). Our love is completely rational, we swear, even if pi is not!

So, what does Pi Day look like at #RetrieverNation? Here’s a quick peek at the day’s fun…

INFINITE SLICES?? — UMBC Dining Services served up delicious plates of pie all day. Looks yummy, no?

ON THE NUMBERS — Grad student Cameron Rhode outdid himself by reciting pi to the 250th digit!

MASCOTS <3 PIE, TOO -- Enough said.

Happy 3.14, #Retrievers! #PiDay #mascot #baltimore #maryland #truegrit #dog #dogsofinstagram

A post shared by UMBC (@umbclife) on Mar 14, 2018 at 7:22am PDT

Dear Advisor,

If any of your students are interested in pursuing a career in Art Therapy, please forward this email to them.

Please consider reviewing our program and consider applying!! The Graduate Art Therapy and Counseling Program at Eastern Virginia Medical School has 40 years of recognition for excellence, integrity, and innovation in art therapy education to develop world class art therapists. Please refer to our website for additional information.

http://www.evms.edu/education/masters_programs/art_therapy_counseling_program/

In addition, we have partial tuition waivers for highly qualified applicants and research assistantships. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have questions.

We have rolling admissions and we still have openings for our next cohort for Fall 2018. In addition, we will likely be offering part-time options for the program. Students are encouraged to apply even if they have prerequisites to complete.

I look forward to your students’ applications!

Mary Roberts

Mary Roberts, EdS, LPC-ACS, ATR-BC, ATCS

Program Director and Associate Professor

Graduate Art Therapy & Counseling Program

School of Health Professions

Eastern Virginia Medical School | Lester Hall | Room 304 |

(: 757.446.5895 | 7: 757.446.6179 | *: robertmr@evms.edu

Enter Campus Life's annual CelebratingOrgs photo contest! Three winners get their photo printed and put on display in the Student Organization Space for the next year, AND these winners will receive $100 in their Student Organization carry-over account.

You are eligible for this contest if, you are a part of an officially recognized UMBC student organization. 

Selection Process: The selection committee, comprised of students and staff, will be looking for awesome photos that show your student organization in action! Winners will be announced at CelebratingOrgs on May 2, 2018. 

Submission Instructions: By Monday, April 23, 2018 at 11:59pm, high resolution photos should emailed to Kaitlin Winchester (kaitlin5@umbc.edu) with typed details about the student organization, the person submitting the photo, and the student organization's main web domain or email address.

Please be sure to avoid the following scenarios:

• Photos of your group just standing together and smiling. 
• Low quality, low res photos. The better the quality, the better it will look large scale.
• Being vulgar or disrespectful towards any person, group, etc. 
• Any kind of nudity. 

For ideas, check out last year’s photos in the Student Organization Space!

Please be sure to follow UMBC's Terms and Permissions.

CHMPR Distinguished Lecture

Challenges and pitfalls in big data analysis

Yoav Benjamini, Tel Aviv University

3:30-5:00 Thursday, 12 April 2018, ITE 325b, UMBC

I shall warn about the pitfalls resulting from the false assurance that “we have all data at hand”, and discuss the challenges that are not commonly recognised such as the validity and replicability of the analysis results. Examples will be given from our work on the Health Informatics part of the European Human Brain Project, as well as from our studies in neuroscience and genomics.

Yoav Benjamini is the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of statistics and operations research at Tel Aviv University. He holds B.Sc in physics and mathematics and M.Sc in mathematics from the Hebrew University (1976), and Ph.D in Statistics from Princeton University (1981). He is a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and of the Edmond Safra Bioinformatics Center both at Tel Aviv University. He taught as a visiting professor at Wharton, UC Berkeley and Stanford and is currently visiting Columbia University. Prof. Benjamini is a co-developer of the widely used and cited False Discovery Rate concept and methodology. His current research topics are selective and simultaneous inference, replicability and reproducibility in science, model selection, and data mining. His applied research fields are Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, Animal Behavior and Brain Imaging, and as a member of the European Human Brain Project he is involved in health informatics research. Prof. Benjamini served as the president of the Israel Statistical Association, He received the Israel Prize for research in Statistics and Economics at 2012, and is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The post 🗣️ talk: Challenges and pitfalls in big data analysis appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

In compliance with state and federal requirements, UMBC is administering an annual campus climate survey on sexual assault and misconduct that is open to all students between Feb. 28 and March 16.

During the three week period, the survey will collect data from the approximately 13,000 undergraduates, graduates, and professionals aged 18 or older that make up the UMBC student body. The Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC), its leading state sponsor, has expressed that the information received from the survey can be critical to “tailoring sexual violence prevention education programming and expanding the scope of institutional responsibility for reporting incidents of sexual violence on campus.”

The survey was first introduced by the White House Task Force in 2014 as part of a large-scale initiative to address the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. Under House Bill 571 and Chapter 436 of the Acts of 2015, all Maryland colleges and universities are required to “develop an appropriate sexual assault campus climate survey, using nationally recognized best practices for research and climate surveys” in the hopes of understanding the scope and nature of sexual violence on campuses for future sexual violence prevention education and improvement.

As of today, sexual assault remains one of the most widely under-reported crimes in the U.S. According to the National Violence Resource Center, nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted during college, and 90 percent of victims do not report the assault. With the recent media attention that has been brought to sexual assault investigations, including the 2015 Stanford rape case and recent accusations against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, some newspapers have even taken to describing sexual assault as an “epidemic” in America. This has forced a national discourse on the attitudes about, behaviors towards, and preventative measures against sexual violence.

Since the inception of the survey in 2015, the responses to UMBC’s sexual assault climate in previous years has generally been positive. According to the 2016 Climate Survey results, 76 percent of respondents believed that UMBC would “take the report or sexual assault seriously,” 79 percent believed that UMBC would forward a report of sexual violence to police (given permission from the accuser), and 62 percent believed that UMBC would handle the report of sexual violence or sexual assault “fairly.” While the responses were not a completely accurate representation of the whole student population (with white females being the majority of respondents in the study), they indicated that a decent majority of students were likely to have faith in the legal process of UMBC.

The comparison to other Maryland institutions tells a more detailed story. While a findings summary on the MHEC site declared that “the vast majority of students attending Maryland’s colleges and universities feel valued, respected, and safe,” aggregated incident data of all Maryland public colleges and universities showed that of the approximately 803 reported incidents, just 32 percent of incidents were reported in the first 24 hours, while 68 percent of incidents were reported within the span of the semester or longer.

In response to these results, the MHEC said that while a student’s chances of being a victim of sexual assault are “very low,” “institutions are tailoring their responses to the findings of the survey to meet the unique needs of their campus communities.”

The MHEC’s website also says that “plans are underway and practices are already in place at Maryland’s institutions to continue improvements to the incident reporting process,” and that “improving the campus climate around sexual assault is a more complex task requiring a longer time horizon.”

It adds, “Moving forward, campus climate surveys will be central to an improved understanding of the campus community and its needs… [this goal] also relies on student trust and confidence that the systems in place will support them through a difficult and traumatic process.”

For more information about the survey and the free resources available to UMBC students, you can go to https://humanrelations.umbc.edu/campus-climate-survey-on-sexual-misconduct/.