The Down and Dirty Dawg Band – UMBC’s pep band – is not only known around campus, but nationally, as well. Making appearances on Good Morning America and The Today Show, their mission is to spread school spirit and celebrate the power of music. On December 3, a national day of giving, you can help them reach their dream.

We talked with three members of the band (Matt Basch ’08, information systems and ’10 M.S., information systems, Director of the UMBC Down and Dirty Dawg Band; Paul Swenson ’06, computer science, Producer; and Drew Ballantine, a UMBC senior, member) to see why they love being a part of it and how you can help.

Q: What is the purpose of the pep band and why is it important?

Paul: The pep band is a musical and marching ensemble sponsored by Athletics that provides its members with a chance to perform fun tunes, become engaged with school spirit at UMBC sporting events and even earn some money through part-time employment opportunities.

Matt: The mission is to support the Athletic Department and the university through music and spirit. Whether it’s 20 degrees and snowing during one of the winter basketball games, or 100 degrees with the sun blazing during the Catonsville and Arbutus 4th of July parades, you’ll experience unbridled enthusiasm and exceptional playing from this band.

Q: Why is music important?

Matt: I can’t imagine life without music. The emotional and inspirational impact is incredible and something I witness in the band every day. Throughout a sporting event, the music we play gets the sports teams and fans pumped up. When the game is over, the band plays our Alma Mater and everyone stands with pride and respect for the university.

Q: Why did you become involved?

Drew: The drumline is actually one of the reasons I chose to come to UMBC. As Senior Captain of UMBC’s drumline, it’s been amazing to see how it has grown and improved.

Q: What does the support of the alumni, community, and donors mean to you?

Matt: It means the world to the band. If you’re an alumni of the band and had a great experience, your donation will help ensure that the next generation of students have the same positive experience. If you’re a parent of a student in the band and have seen the positive impact its had on your child, your donation will help pass those positive experiences on to the next students. If you’re a community member and have heard the band perform, your donation will help continue making that experience available to the [rest of the] community.

Drew: The pep band is a huge part of UMBC’s culture. Without the help and support of the community, we wouldn’t be able to receive stipends, buy new equipment, pay for instrument repairs, or put out CDs. These donations allow us to continuously grow by doing more things each year, like adding more performances or playing new music. I think it’s awesome that people want to donate and help our cause. It feels really good to give something back to the audience. And now they don’t have to wait for basketball season to listen to us play!

Yes, I want to support UMBC’s Down and Dirty Dawg Band and help make music!

Perhaps you've been keeping up on the responsive images #hotdrama? If you have no idea what "responsive images" means, it means serving different images under different circumstances. How to do that and what those circumstances are vary widely.

If you aren't caught up, here's some linkage. Bruce Lawson did an end of the year report. This provides a nice history of the work behind trying to standardize a solution. Mat Marquis wrote up a succinct summary of where all the major browser vendors are at (no consensus). Tim Kadlec has a nice summary of the situation. Dave Rupert has been talking about it as well.

An important thing to understand here: all of this talk is focused around images in the HTML. Content images.

This problem is largely solved in CSS. If the image being added to the page doesn't need to be in the markup, you can use media queries in CSS to handle the conditions and change the image accordingly.

/* Look ma, responsive images */
    
    body {
      background: url(mountains-small.jpg);
    }
    @media (min-width: 500px) {
      body {
        background: url(mountains-medium.jpg);
      }
    }
    @media (min-width: 800px) {
      body {
        background: url(mountains-large.jpg);
      }
    }

Of course, sometimes images do need to be in the markup. That's what <picture> and srcset and srcN are all trying to solve. It's a tough job. The solutions needs to:

• Deliver only one final src
• Be semantic
• Be accessible
• Be backwards-compatible
• Accomodate art-direction
• Accomodate all the conditions we deem important
• Accomodate future conditions we aren't even thinking about yet
• Work independently of any other language/technology
• Be agreeable to authors AND standards people AND browser vendor people

Why is it so hard for everyone to agree? Nobody involved is evil. Nobody is is sitting in a dark castle tower laughing maniacally. Nobody is intentionally delaying a solution. At least as far as I know.

I suspect the problem is the browser vendor people are trying to:

1. Make educated guesses as to the difficultly of implementation.
2. Make educated guesses on what the future would be like with the particular implementations in place.

While authors:

1. Are pretty sure we know what we need.
2. Are concerned about our needs on our projects and, while we care about the web as a whole, have less perspective on that.

And standards people need to:

1. Make sure nothing gets broken.
2. Cover as many needs as possible.
3. Also make educated guesses on what the future would be like with the particular implementations in place.

And after they have make all those guesses, they argue for/against the solutions presented. It makes sense that there is disagreement, because it is hard to back up a guess with data. A lot of people are just shooting from the hip. Mix in egos and politics and its amazing it has even gotten this far. I'm rather astounded we have web standards at all (knock on wood).

But I digress. What if you need responsive images in your markup right smurfing now? Because, let's say, theoretically, that there is a crapload of devices loading webpages out there with a huge array of screen sizes and screen densities and screen colors and internet speeds and such. Oh wait.

Even if you're like, screw standards, I just want to do whatever I have to do right now to solve this. These are the options:

• Skip the src attribute, let JavaScript figure out what the conditions are, inject src. 90% of "new" responsive images solutions I see are this in some flavor¹.
• Get the server involved. Have a cookie (or the like) available with conditions data in it. Intercept the HTTP Request for the img src, check the conditions data, serve up an appropriate image right from the server.

There are existing solutions for both of those techniques, with slightly different ways of going about it. I guide you to those in this article.

And remember a markup-based solution possibly isn't the only place to handle this. There are other ideas floating around that take completely different roads:

• Perhaps a new image format can help with this inherently.
• Perhaps servers could help us somehow automatically.
• Perhaps a new protocol could help.
• Perhaps we should be able to control browsers prefetching behavior directly.

All the #hotdrama we're having with just the HTML solutions would almost surely happen when we start down those roads.

So yeah, hard.

¹ If you're going to make another one of these, I humbly request that you make it like a polyfill and use a syntax that already has some momentum.

Why Responsive Images Is So Hard is a post from CSS-Tricks

by Karly Trinite

If you had to name one thing that could have been better at the last conference or meetup you attended, what would it be? I bet you’d say that the speaker or content could have been better in some way. Think back to the last boring presentation you had to sit through. Maybe that investment of time could have paid off if the presenter knew you felt this way.

I created Onslyde to solve this problem. It’s a free service and open-source project that (hopefully) will make public speaking easier and conferences better.

The motivation for the project came from my own speaking engagements in the tech industry. I wanted to see how many people in the audience actually agreed or disagreed with what I was saying. I also wanted to leverage their experience and knowledge to create a better learning environment.

Presentations today are mostly unidirectional, with a single presenter giving information to the audience. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Now, with the ubiquity of mobile devices, everyone in the room can contribute to the conversation and make it better. Many books have been written on the topic of collective wisdom. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki states:

“… a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts.”

For the past year, I have been putting this thesis to the test, enabling people to interact with and change the content that I deliver. It’s been a lot of fun and work, and now you get to see the result.

Ratings And Feedback

When we look at current systems of rating and feedback at conferences, most of them are reactive, meaning that participants rate the session after it’s over. This is why most people don’t even rate sessions, unless they are asked or forced to by the doorkeeper. Those who do rate sessions might not care to be accurate (giving all 5s or 4s and then hurrying to the coffee line). Other attendees might have enjoyed the majority of the talk, but then got upset by the last slide or by the way the speaker ended the talk.

If these people decided to rate the presentation, how many stars do you think they would give? Perhaps 3 or 4 stars because of their anger at the end, but who really knows? Without context, a low rating doesn’t tell the speaker which part of the talk an attendee didn’t like.

Real-time feedback gives context to a rating, making traditional feedback unnecessary. Conference organizers and speakers no longer have to rely solely on Twitter hash tags and reactive ratings to see how well things went. We can now visualize exactly how the audience felt at any millisecond of a presentation.

Real-Time Ratings With Onslyde

Giving a presentation that allows for real-time feedback is like riding a bicycle down a really steep hill for the first time. You have no idea whether you will crash and burn or come out with an adrenaline-filled scream at the other end. And it’s just as much fun for the audience.

With Onslyde, you get an accurate measure from the audience while you’re speaking. If you see that a lot of people are disagreeing with what you’re saying, you can adapt: Ask audience members for their thoughts, or maybe move on to another topic. When you’re presenting, actually seeing how the audience collectively feels in real time and then responding accordingly is a very cool experience.

The worst thing a presenter can do is tell the audience something it already knows or say something totally wrong. The audience wants to be intrigued and entertained by you. But too many speakers seem to think this requires GIFs of cats. Well, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun but I’m an adult now, and I don’t go to thousand-dollar conferences to look at funny pictures of cats. I do want to be able to challenge you, engage with the content and tell you when you’re wrong.

So, let’s talk about how the audience indicates whether you’re right or wrong. Onslyde’s remote control gives audience members between two and four ways to interact, depending on the type of session. It works for both normal presentations and panel discussions.

For presentations:

• Any slide can be agreed or disagreed with.
• Presenters can poll the audience by asking a question and giving two answers to choose from.
• Remote devices are updated with content for each slide.

For panel discussions:

• Anyone (either panelist or audience member) can be agreed or disagreed with.
• Votes are on a rolling average, meaning that they expire after 15 seconds (or a time specified by the moderator).
• Any audience member can request to speak. This option will add them to a queue on the main screen.

All remote devices receive real-time updates based on the slide or current speaker. In individual presentations, the speaker can specify content or images to send to all remotes per slide. For example, if a bulleted list is on the current slide, you could send it to the remotes by adding class="send" to the markup:

    <section class="slide">
    	<ul class="send">
    	<li>Onslyde makes you a better presenter.</li>
    	</ul>
    </section>
    

We’ll go over the technical details in the next section. For now, note how easy it is to broadcast markup to everyone’s remotes.

Edge Conf, hosted at Google’s New York office in October 2013, was the first time ever when the audience participated in real time (via Onslyde) during an entire conference.

What If There’s No Wi-Fi?

At this point, you might be thinking that this is a cool idea, but what about the 99% of conferences that have shaky or no Wi-Fi connectivity?

A presentation will work with or without an Internet connection; however, with no connection, it will just be like a normal presentation, and the audience would not be able to interact.

If you have a smartphone with a tetherable data plan, you can tether your laptop and enable Onslyde to connect from a mobile phone. It might sound crazy, but the lightweight messages that are sent across the wire still allow the presentation to run smoothly.

Even if Wi-Fi at a conference is unstable, the audience can always connect to the presentation with their mobile device’s data plan. I’ve personally given six or seven presentations with Onslyde and haven’t run into any issues so far.

Below you can see the network statistics from a talk I gave earlier this year. Even though the conference had stable Wi-Fi, attendees were connecting through their mobile data plan:

Some have suggested bringing SMS into the picture, as a fallback. This would enable attendees to vote by sending text messages to the server. If you have other ideas, please leave them in the comments!

Building An Interactive Presentation

The Onslyde framework plugs into any HTML-based presentation system. For now, it supports presentations written with the following:

• RevealJS,
• Impress.js,
• Bespoke.js,
• plain HTML.

Currently, there is no nice WYSIWYG tool for building a slide deck. A tiny bit of HTML knowledge is required to build a presentation, but that’s it — no JavaScript or other programming. This is good because you don’t have to log into the system to edit your deck minutes before going on stage. You can change the markup at any time, and you will be ready to present after refreshing the browser.

The following use cases show how to add interactive elements to a presentation.

Audience Members Vote on (i.e. Agree or Disagree With) Any Slide

This comes out of box, no set-up required. Onslyde is built around “slide groups.” “Agree” and “Disagree” votes can only be given once in a slide group. This lets you focus on a particular topic with multiple slides and not be bombarded with votes on each screen.

    <section class="slide-group">
    	<section class="slide">
    		<p>Onslyde makes you a better presenter.</p>
    	</section>
    </section>
    

The buttons above will become active once the presenter moves to a new slide group.

Ask Unlimited Questions With Two Answers

To create an onscreen poll, use the following markup:

    <section class="slide-group">
    
    	<section class="slide" data-option="master">
    		<h3 class="send">
    		What is your favorite JavaScript framework?
    		</h3>
    	</section>
    
    	<section class="slide" data-option="jquery">
    		<div class="send">
    		Time to talk about jQuery!
    		</div>
    	</section>
    
    	<section class="slide" data-option="querySelector">
    		<div class="send">
    		Let’s go into more detail about core JavaScript!
    		</div>
    	</section>
    
    </section>
    

By adding the markup above to your presentation, the bar chart in the following image will be automatically created and populated as votes are submitted:

The buttons at the top will illuminate on the remote controls, and attendees may start voting:

Send Content to All Devices at Any Time

Notice how the remote control’s image shows the title of the poll? As mentioned, this is because we added class="send" to the parent element of the heading.

    <section class="slide">
    	<h3 class="send">
    	What is your favorite JavaScript framework?
    	</h3>
    …
    

The sent markup will appear below the button options.

You can also send something completely different than what is shown by the projector. Instead of sending the title of the poll, you could send the names of other JavaScript libraries for attendees to research:

    <section class="slide">
    	<h3>
    	What is your favorite JavaScript framework?
    	</h3>
    
    	<div class="none">
    		<ul class="send">
    		<li>Zepto</li>
    		<li>xui</li>
    		<li>…</li>
    		</ul>
    	</div>
    

Raffle or Giveaway: Random Selection of Audience Member

To me, one of the funnest parts of this tool is giving away swag at the end of a talk. You can randomly select anyone who is connected by adding the following link to your slide deck:

    <a href="javascript:onslyde.slides.roulette()">Pick a winner</a>
    

Just place the link on the final slide and click it at the end of your talk. Everyone’s mobile device will flash red; then, the winner’s will turn yellow. Continue clicking to pick more people at random.

Best Practices

The easiest way to get started with each feature is to focus on how you want the audience to interact with you and your content. Here are some good rules of thumb that I have learned using this tool:

• Start each presentation with a poll on the first or second slide. This allows the audience to get their device ready, get connected and start giving their opinion. It’s fun to pose a controversial question about your presentation topic and watch the votes pour in.
• Polls can solicit a “Yes” or “No” feeling from the audience or go deeper. If you ask a question like, “Which JavaScript framework do you use?” and then give options for “AngularJS” or “Backbone”, you will be able to fork the slides. This is why preparing the slides beforehand is more rewarding. Onslyde will detect the majority vote, and when you go to the next slide, the losing slides will be removed from the presentation (temporarily) and only the slides from the winning option will be shown.

Getting Started

Presentations can be created at onslyde.com. And the open-source back end that manages a presentation’s feedback is hosted on GitHub. Anyone can run the server and host their own instance of the entire Onslyde stack if they wish.

All of the features mentioned are integrated in each demo to show use cases. To begin your first presentation, go to the “Getting Started” section, where you will have the option to run a demo presentation or sign in and create a private one.

(Large view)

After you’ve signed in, the “Getting Started” page will give you options for setting up a poll. After hitting the “Preview” button, you must save the HTML to your computer in order to edit and present the slides.

(Large view)

An Onslyde presentation can be run anywhere. Essentially, it’s the same as saving a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation on your computer. Just click on the HTML file and run it from a Web browser — no need to install anything or run it from a server.

Regarding Keynote and PowerPoint

For those of you who use non-HTML slide decks, such as Keynote and PowerPoint, there are plans to create a transparent overlay on top of Windows and Mac OS X. This will allow presenters to use any presentation tool and to collect feedback in real time.

Understanding Audience Feedback

After your talk is over, you can view the analytics for your session. The votes for each slide are recorded so that you can track your performance at a fine-grained level.

For questions that the audience voted on, each option is recorded, along with the “Agree” and “Disagree” votes for each poll.

The other important pieces of data come from Google Analytics, including engagement times and what kinds of devices and mobile networks were used.

Google Analytics showed that real-time feedback was provided not just from the people in the room. (Large view)

From the above image, we can see that 281 iOS devices and approximately 113 Android devices were used at Edge Conf. Because the event was streamed live, over twice as many unique devices appeared as there were people in the room — people were participating and providing real-time feedback as they watched the live stream from their home or office around the world!

One other cool piece to this analytics puzzle is mapping voting times to the video. Edge Conf was streamed live, and the videos were subsequently added to YouTube. After finding a reference point in the video and calculating the starting time, we were able to map the charts to the videos. If you clicked on any data point from a session, the video would skip to that voting period. Try it out for yourself.

We were able to map the voting times to the conference videos. (Large view)

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, so much more valuable data can be pulled from the conferences we attend. Not only can we get an accurate snapshot of how speakers performed and how audience members felt, but we can change the learning experience for everyone.

This project is a use case for the mobile Web and a playground for the new technologies that are available to modern Web browsers, such as WebSockets and WebRTC. Many other companies and conferences provide similar services using native apps and proprietary hardware, but the convenience of opening a Web browser and being exposed to a new level of education and interaction is immeasurable.

Many thanks to Andrew Betts for helping me with this article and providing great feedback. He is also responsible for most of the features in the Onslyde panel and remote interfaces.

(al, ea)

© Wesley Hales for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

The University of Washington is thrilled to announce a new program, the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program (DDCSP@UW). The goal of this multi-year conservation immersion program is to broaden participation within conservation, and diversify what it means to be a “conservation professional.”

We are reaching out to you because we know that recruiting our target audience will take a strong partnership between faculty and staff mentors at the students’ home institution and our program faculty and staff here at UW, and we need a truly diverse group for the program to be transformative.

We’re looking for 20-25 freshmen and sophomores to join us for an 8 week immersion course this summer.  Our program starts in Seattle (3 weeks) and travels to various landscapes across the state (4 weeks) before returning to the UW campus at the end of the summer (1 week). Scholars don’t have to be environmental science, or even science, majors, but should demonstrate a commitment to the environment and to diversity, and be curious, creative and enthusiastic – incipient change-makers.

Conservation Scholars will:

• Explore conservation across urban, managed, and protected environments
• Connect conservation to cultural heritage and environmental justice
• Understand conservation in the context of food, water, biodiversity and climate
• Network with conservation professionals from agencies, NGOs, and academic institutions

The Year 1 experience, Classroom in the Field, starts on June 23rd, 2014. Doris Duke Conservation Scholars will have all travel, insurance, food and lodging paid during their 8-week summer experience and will receive a weekly stipend of $500. Year 1 Scholars may be invited to join a Conservation Solutions Team, or receive a prestigious Conservation Internship in subsequent summers.

* Note:
Our application will go live on the website later this month. Please strongly encourage any students who might be interested in the program to check out the website and apply, and please let us know at ddcsp@uw.edu if you have any questions or if you would like to set up a time to talk with us.