John 1:1-5,14 (NIV) – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

1 Timothy 1:15 (NIV) – “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

“The prologue to John [John 1:1-14] is not about a message that offers hope, but about The Message that is the only hope. It is not about an idea, but a person. The Word became flesh tells us that God is intent on communicating with us not about mere concepts; he is intent on communicating about himself.

“There is only one hope, and it is God in Christ. In this incarnation God has exhibited the glory and grace that is native to his selfhood; and through this incarnation, humankind can regain the glory and grace it once had when it was created. The natural eye cannot see the glory of God since it is dimmed by sin. Instead, it is necessary for God to work, to self-disclose, to send his Son, who alone has exposed God’s heart (1:18).

“When God takes this initiative, new possibilities are born. Divine power is released into the broken world and its broken lives so that new life is possible. The theological key that the world finds so foreign lies here: Transformation and hope cannot be the fruit of some human endeavor. Only God can take the initiative, and men and women must see, receive, and believe the work he desires to do. And when they do, they are reborn to become God’s children.” [Burge, Gary M.. John (The NIV Application Commentary) (p. 14, 17). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.]

Worship: “A Christmas Alleluia” by Christ Tomlin – Link: “A Christmas Alleluia”

Prayer: Our Father in heaven, help us to honor Your name. May Your kingdom come and Your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. Reveal to me afresh your Son who came to save sinners like me. Renew in my heart the only hope for my life and may I express it fully today by magnifying Jesus in all that I say and do. Be glorified in my life. In Jesus name, Amen.

– TR

The Commons transformed into an art gallery last week, as Commonvision brought art to students with Art Week, a chance for the campus community to get creative.

Art Week in its current form began almost ten years ago, though Emma Hagen, Coordinator for Commonvision and Art Week, says it has existed in some form for as long as Commonvision has been at UMBC. Art Week is open to students from all departments, and features events like the Art Week Gallery, artist lecturers and a painting night inspired by Bob Ross.

Commonvision collaborates with the department of the Commons and with the office of Student Life for Art Week, but students and offices from all over campus are encouraged to get involved. Many of the events take place on Commons Mainstreet, so students can walk by and make a craft, design a cupcake and take a Polaroid in front of the woodland scene set up, while also perusing their classmates’ artwork in the Commons gallery.

Art Week began as a way for students across campus to express their creativity.

Hagen says, “We knew there was a need for art program in the Commons, and there were gallery spaces,” adding that “[Art Week] fed a need, especially in a school that is seen as STEM-heavy.”

Katie Chrzanowski, the Multimedia Coordinator for Commonvision, expounds upon some of the events this year. “The motion challenge allows [us] to see the hard work and talents, sometimes hidden, of students that we don’t always get to see on a day-to-day basis, and the artist lectures can give lots of great insight [that] students might not get in the classroom,” she explains.

Hagen thinks that Art Week is an important event for UMBC students. “Students want a creative outlet, even if art is just a hobby,” she says. Art Week seeks to provide such an outlet. It would seem the students agree: the gallery and zine received over 100 submissions from 50 or 60 students this year. The week’s collaboration with the Office of Health Promotions features the condom art competition which has 40 students working together on seven teams.

Students like Deborah Cagas, a junior studying global studies, came out to several of the events offered this week. Cagas really enjoyed what the event had to offer, particularly the cupcake decorating station. She found Art Week refreshing. “I like seeing, oh yeah, UMBC isn’t just STEM majors,” she said.

Fellow junior Katherine Magtanong, a health administration and policy program major, agrees, “It’s cool to see how diverse the school is.” She looks forward to attending more Art Week events in the future.

For more information on what Commonvision has in store, check out their website.

National Press Club Event: Rise to Dominance of Cybersecurity Challenges

Join UMBC and industry and government experts for a panel on how cybersecurity touches our everyday lives and how journalists can engage a wide range of readers in cybersecurity news. This panel will touch on topics ranging from online commerce to national conversations about security leaks. It will also explore how to best prepare the next generation of cybersecurity leaders to effectively tackle the challenges we are facing.

Thursday, 7 December 2017, 4:00-6:00pm
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Light refreshments will be served.

Registration by December 4 preferred.

Moderator: New York Times reporter Scott Shane

Featured panelists include:

• Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, UMBC President
• Nigel Faulkner, CIO, T. Rowe Price
• Anupam Joshi, Director, UMBC Center for Cybersecurity; Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
• Lauren Mazzoli ’15, M.S ’17, Systems Engineer, Future Technical Leaders Program, Northrop Grumman Corporation
• Tina Williams ’02, President, TCecure, LLC; Cybersecurity Academic Innovation Officer for University System of Maryland

Contact Candace Dodson-Reed at *protected email* with questions.

The post National Press Club Event: Rise to Dominance of Cybersecurity Challenges appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Humans have been observing the circadian rhythms of plants for millennia, even if they couldn’t fully explain what they saw. In a new piece for The Conversation, Hua Lu, associate professor of biological sciences at UMBC, and Linda Wiratan ’19, biochemistry and molecular biology, survey current knowledge of plants’ daily rhythms and how recent findings could influence human medical care.

“The internal time-sensing mechanism,” known as the circadian clock, “allows many living organisms to keep track of time and coordinate their behaviors along 24-hour cycles,” write Lu and Wiratan. Important advances in circadian clock research led to the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine being awarded for work that explained the molecular basis of circadian rhythms.

Lu and Wiratan, among others, are studying plants’ circadian clocks “for insights into how they affect the health and well-being of all life on Earth,” they write. They point out that bacteria, fungi, insects, plants, and mammals are all affected by circadian rhythms, which are regulated by the circadian clock’s central oscillator, “an elaborate network of genes that turn each other’s activity on and off,” forming “complex feedback loops that accurately calibrate time.”

While the exact genes involved differ across organisms, the basic feedback-loop mechanism is the same. “Such amazing balancing acts reflect organisms’ abilities to anticipate changing environment throughout the day,” Lu and Wiratan write, which includes everything from herbivore activity to light availability.

Researchers have found evidence that improper circadian clock function plays a role in human diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and depression, so a fuller understanding of the clock is important for human health. Plants’ circadian clocks also regulate the function of their immune systems. First-line defenses include ever-present physical features like protective hairs and waxy coatings, but plants also have more sophisticated ways of fending off their foes. Some plant cells can detect the presence of pathogens, triggering a cascade of defense responses such as production of antimicrobial compounds.

“Even in the absence of pathogens, many of these responses show low but rhythmic changes that are influenced by the circadian clock,” Lu and Wiratan say. “When a real attack arrives, the plants’ daily rehearsal of their defense systems ensures a strong and concerted timely defense. Plants with misaligned clocks succumb to the attack.” Their clock allows the plants “to time their defense, which allows them to anticipate likely attacks before they occur and modulate defense responses to real attackers.”

For example, Arabidopsis (a small flowering plant ubiquitous in plant science laboratories) peaks its production of jasmonic acid, a hormone associated with the defense response, at noon, to prepare for the predictable onslaught of cabbage looper caterpillar feeding a few hours later. It’s unknown how in-sync pathogen and plant clocks are, but evidence suggests that some pathogens can manipulate the Arabidopsis clock.

These relationships aren’t limited to plants and their pests. “In humans and mice, some populations of gut microbiota oscillate daily, depending on the host circadian clock,” Lu and Wiratan write, adding that “interestingly, gut microbiota are capable of re-programming the host clock […] Research in this area represents a fascinating and unexplored level of host-invader dynamics.”

All of this research on plants has provided a great deal of knowledge about circadian rhythms “and their role in modulating everything from development to defense,” Lu and Wiratan write. “As researchers continue to untangle more about how these clocks work—including how they influence interactions between hosts and their invading pathogens and pests—new forms of specially-timed precision medicine could be on the horizon.”

The original article, Studying circadian rhythms in plants and their pathogens might lead to precision medicine for people, has been viewed more than 4,750 times and republished in outlets such as Smithsonian Magazine, World Economic Forum, and at Phys.org.

Image: Floral clock in Edinburgh, Ireland. Photo by Patrick Down, used under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Public Policy Assistant Professor Dr. Pamela Bennett co-authored (with Amy Lutz and Rebecca Wang) an article on affirmative action and higher education which was published online Nov. 13, 2017, in Ethnic and Racial Studies entitled " Mismatch and academic performance at America's selective colleges and Universities"

to link to this article go to:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2017.1392030

“What are you an expert at?” Corinne Janet and Andrea Davis posed this question to the attendees of the “Women & Leadership: Rising Above Barriers and Bias” seminar.

Answers ranged from cooking and painting to speaking multiple languages. At the heart of this leadership workshop was the push for women to begin owning their successes and speaking about them unabashedly.

The “Women & Leadership: Rising Above Barriers and Bias” program is part of the Women + Leadership experience, an ongoing initiative for women-identified leaders to “identify opportunities to engage, connect, and network with other campus leaders” as well as creating a personally meaningful campus leadership experience, according to the program website. The program was put on by Student Life’s Leadership Programs, Women Involved in Learning and Leadership and the Women’s Center.

The seminar was held in the Women’s Center as attendees sat in a circle on overstuffed couches and fluffy poufs. It was led by Janet, the Coordinator of Student Life for Leadership, and Davis, a senior majoring in sociology and africana studies, a Civic Engagement and Leadership intern and president of the Student Events Board. They asked each attendee to introduce themselves and invited everyone to participate in the discussion. This was as much a conversation about the unique challenges faced by women in leadership roles as it was an informational seminar.

“We[‘re] talk[ing] about the particular challenges that college women face in leadership as well as address[ing] some possible solutions we can work toward as a community to support one another,” said Janet.

Attendees broke off into small groups to discuss the benefits of holding leadership roles on campus, such as having a better understanding of the community and being able to affect change on campus. However, the conversation quickly turned to the struggles of being female in a position of leadership.

Davis succinctly questioned: “How do I [lead and] not seem like a bitch or too commanding?”

Other struggles included dealing with co-workers who assume that women will do the behind-the-scenes labor like planning events and sending emails, without receiving credit for their work. Imposter syndrome, in which individuals cannot internalize their own achievements, was also common. Women reported feeling like a fraud in their job and attributing successes to good luck instead of hard work.

Women also mentioned the struggle of the burden of effortless perfection. Janet and Davis led a popcorn reading of an article titled “Never Let Them See You Sweat: The Myth of Effortless Perfection” by Amy Yao.

“I feel like I need to have it all together all the time,” says Janet. “Hair, lipstick … I need to make it look seamless.”

Participants discussed that women not only need to consistently perform at a high level, they have to make it look easy for fear of judgement by peers and other women. Organizers also emphasized that women are judged more harshly for mistakes and expected to be constantly ‘on’ to not only excel in the workplace, but fulfill the societal expectations of women.

“Relearning [these] ingrained lessons [about gender and expectations] are really hard,” says Janet.

“Women feel like they’re representing the whole gender,” says Jess Myers, the Director of the Women’s Center.

Being a female leader is also a complex issue that not only deals with gender but intersects with sexuality, race and class as well.

Zhihong Pang, a freshman biology major, admitted that he was attending the workshop as part of an assignment for his first year seminar class, but that he realized that it’s really valuable information to be aware of.

At the end of the discussion, Janet and Davis provided some insight into ways that women-identified leaders can grow and challenge the obstacles.

Finding a mentor and a sponsor can be especially helpful. A mentor is a person who supports and encourages, while a sponsor is someone who connects leaders with opportunities. Mentors and sponsors can help women reach their goals by emboldening them to embrace and expound upon their achievements.

“Women aren’t delivering the message of their greatness,” says Davis.

Purpose

The purpose of this Notice is to alert the NIH extramural community that NIH is strengthening enforcement of longstanding closeout requirements, outlined in the NIH Grants Policy Statement Section 8.6, Closeout. NIH has consistently reminded recipients of their responsibility to submit timely, accurate final grant expenditure reports, and has communicated the critical need for recipients to reconcile cash transaction reports submitted to the HHS Payment Management System (PMS) with expenditure reports submitted to NIH.  In order to fulfill agency requirements under the Grants Oversight and New Efficiency (GONE) Act and HHS grants policy, NIH will no longer delay the closeout of awards unless the recipient submits a prior approval request to the IC providing an acceptable written justification..  Without prior approval from the awarding IC, NIH will initiate unilateral closeout for all awards that fail to meet closeout requirements within 120 days as required by the NIH Grants Policy Statement (NIH GPS) Section 8.6. See below for details.

Background

Recipient Responsibilities

The requirement for timely closeout is generally a recipient responsibility. However, NIH may initiate unilateral closeout if a recipient does not provide timely, accurate closeout reports or does not respond timely to NIH requests to reconcile discrepancies in grant records.

NIH recipients must submit a Final Federal Financial Report (FFR), Final Research Performance Progress Report (F-RPPR), and Final Invention Statement and Certification (FIS) within 120 calendar days of the end of the period of performance (project period), as required in section 8.6 of the NIH GPS. The reports become overdue the day after the 120 calendar day period ends. Cash transaction data continues to be submitted directly to and processed by PMS. It is the recipient's responsibility to reconcile reports submitted to PMS and to the NIH awarding Institute or Center.

NIH Actions

NIH is committed to addressing and reducing grant closeout delays and to enhance compliance with HHS regulations and policies, and the GONE Act.  Therefore, NIH will strictly enforce its closeout policies. When recipients fail to submit timely reports, NIH will initiate unilateral closeout. It is important to note that for financial closeout, if a recipient fails to submit a final expenditure FFR, HHS policy directs NIH to close the grant using the last accepted Federal Cash Transaction Report’s cash drawdown amount. This could be considered a debt or result in disallowed costs.  In addition, failure to correct recurring reporting problems may cause NIH to take one or more actions that may include, but are not limited to, corrective actions, withholding of further awards, suspension or termination.