The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of CSS Style Attributes. Markup languages such as HTML and SVG provide a style attribute on most elements, to hold inline style information that applies to those elements. This draft describes the syntax and interpretation of the CSS fragment that can be used in such style attributes. Comments are welcome through 31 October. Learn more about the Style Activity.

UMBC has been selected for the Enhancing Student Financial Education project, a best practice project aimed at enhancing financial education, with special emphasis on addressing the needs and understanding the financial circumstances of graduate students.

The study is funded by TIAA-CREF and is being conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC dedicated solely to the advancement of graduate education and research (www.cgsnet.org). All graduate students received an official link via their UMBC email accounts for the survey.

The goal of the project is to provide best practices to universities to help them improve financial education based on the unique needs of graduate and undergraduate students. We would like to hear about your perspectives on topics such as financing your education and your exposure to financial education resources.

If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this research study, contact the Office for Research Protections and Compliance at (410) 455-2737 or compliance@umbc.edu.

To begin the survey, please use the link that was sent to your email, with the subject: "UMBC Graduate Student Financial Perspectives Survey,"then follow the online instructions. We estimate that this survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. The link from your email is uniquely tied to the survey and your email address. Please do not forward the email message.

Participants who complete the survey will be eligible for a series of drawings that lead to prizes in the form of UMBC bookstore gift cards. Participants who do not win a prize in the first drawing will be entered into subsequent drawings. Therefore, when you participate early, you have more chances to win.

• Participants who take the survey by October 4th will be entered into the drawing for a chance to win a gift card worth $250.

• Participants who take the survey between October 5th and 18th will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a gift card worth $100.

Participants who take the survey between October 19th and 31st will be entered into the drawing for a chance to win one of three gift cards worth $50.

Thank you for your participation. Please reference the link that was sent to your email on Thursday, October 3, 2013 with the subject:

UMBC Graduate Student Financial Perspectives Survey; $250, $100, $50 prizes

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of two Candidate Recommendations:

• CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3. This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.
• CSS Fonts Module Level 3. This CSS3 module describes how font properties are specified and how font resources are loaded dynamically. The contents of this specification are a consolidation of content previously divided into CSS3 Fonts and CSS3 Web Fonts modules. The description of font load events was moved into the CSS3 Font Load Events module.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Using WAI-ARIA in HTML. Using WAI-ARIA in HTML is a practical guide for developers on how to add accessibility information to HTML elements using the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) specification, which defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It is developed by the HTML Accessibility Task Force in coordination with the HTML Working Group and the WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG).Learn more about the HTML Activity and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Do you ever wonder what your faculty expect of you? Have you been given directions or instructions, but wonder what your faculty is asking of you? Do you have questions about what professors are looking for during the dissertation process, or how they interpret performance on comprehensive exams? Do you wonder if your professors are saying x, but really mean y? Professors have expressed that when they say X …, they mean X.  Is there a way to listen differently? Is there a way to be sure that you are understanding expectations clearly?

Each year, PROMISE; Maryland’s AGEP and The Graduate School at UMBC host a dinner seminar to allow graduate students to ask questions of faculty. This year, the  ”When Faculty Say ‘X’ … ” seminar will be held on Friday, October 11, 2013 in the first floor lecture hall of Academic IV (The George and Betsy Sherman Building) at UMBC. A full-course dinner will be served.
This is your chance to ask the faculty any questions about expectations, understanding requirements, how they say “no”, how they show their approval, express sentiments using body language, etc. You can ask any and all questions during the seminar, or post questions (anonymously) in advance as a comment on this website. 

• UMBC Students, please RSVP here: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/18932
• Students from other schools, RSVP by commenting here, 1) Name 2) School 3) Department.  This seminar is free!

*ALL* students are asked to post questions for faculty here! These can remain anonymous. Faculty will answer your questions at the dinner seminar on Friday, October 11, 2013.

—————-

Photo reference: Partial cover image from Steven Strogatz’ The Joy of x — A Guided Tour of Math from One to Infinity, from NY Times Blog “Steven Strogatz and The Joy of x“ http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/joy-of-x/?_r=0

—————

Related PROMISE article:

Communicate with your faculty (A message for new and continuing grad students.)

Do you ever wonder what your faculty expect of you? Have you been given directions or instructions, but wonder what your faculty is asking of you? Do you have questions about what professors are looking for during the dissertation process, or how they interpret performance on comprehensive exams? Do you wonder if your professors are saying x, but really mean y? Professors have expressed that when they say X …, they mean X.  Is there a way to listen differently? Is there a way to be sure that you are understanding expectations clearly?

Each year, PROMISE; Maryland’s AGEP and The Graduate School at UMBC host a dinner seminar to allow graduate students to ask questions of faculty. This year, the  ”When Faculty Say ‘X’ … ” seminar will be held on Friday, October 11, 2013 in the first floor lecture hall of Academic IV (The George and Betsy Sherman Building) at UMBC. A full-course dinner will be served.
This is your chance to ask the faculty any questions about expectations, understanding requirements, how they say “no”, how they show their approval, express sentiments using body language, etc. You can ask any and all questions during the seminar, or post questions (anonymously) in advance as a comment on this website. 

• UMBC Students, please RSVP here: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/18932
• Students from other schools, RSVP by commenting here, 1) Name 2) School 3) Department.  This seminar is free!

*ALL* students are asked to post questions for faculty here! These can remain anonymous. Faculty will answer your questions at the dinner seminar on Friday, October 11, 2013.

—————-

Photo reference: Partial cover image from Steven Strogatz’ The Joy of x — A Guided Tour of Math from One to Infinity, from NY Times Blog “Steven Strogatz and The Joy of x“ http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/joy-of-x/?_r=0

—————

Related PROMISE article:

Communicate with your faculty (A message for new and continuing grad students.)

Designing websites can be a fun, engaging and rewarding career. What isn’t so fun is coding sites; we’re constantly hearing how a great design concept is hampered by the complexity of coding it. From CSS layout to HTML5 browser inconsistencies, there’s no escaping the fact that coding can be both hard and time consuming.

If you’re looking to build websites, but don’t want to go to the trouble of learning code, then you have a lot of possible options: you could build with WordPress, you could hire a developer, or you could opt for an online publishing suite that will do the hard work for you, and today we’ve got a money-off voucher to help you get started.

Webydo.com is an online service that lets you create and maintain HTML websites. A lot of services like this are appropriate for personal sites, but what stands Webydo apart is that you can build sites for clients with it.

The Webydo site itself was built with their own tools and their aim is to provide total design freedom for their customers. There are free, and premium options; with most features available for free and the usual options, such as a custom domain name, charged on a subscription basis.

It’s possible to set up an e-commerce site with Webydo, you can also host a blog — including a WordPress blog — by setting up a subdomain for your site. Webydo also handles all of your hosting on Akamai powered CDNs, which ensures your site is served in the fastest way possible, wherever it’s viewed from.

Start with a blank canvas, or if you need a little inspiration, by selecting a basic template, and then modify your grid to build a structure for your content. Add your images, text and other content and enjoy total control over color, scale and position. You can add forms, videos, even image galleries with a few clicks and Webydo’s widget system.

The drag and drop design process opens up web design as a career for anyone with design skills, you don’t need to spend months learning to code, or put your hand in your pocket to hire an expensive developer.

Once you’ve built and published your site, you want to get paid for the work and Webydo can help here too with their brand new Bill Your Client service. It allows you to invoice clients directly from your dashboard, and it’s clear from this how Webydo view themselves: they don’t just want to provide a simple service, they want to replace your entire toolkit in a single dashboard.

It’s important for me that every pixel will be exactly where I want it in order to create the digital universe I envision for my client’s site. Webydo provides me with total creative freedom. I’m hooked… — Sarit Evrani

As well as billing clients you can help them maintain their sites for the future using Webydo’s Share Your Site Design CMS feature. Share Your Site Design allows clients to change, delete or upload content to their websites. It really is a great feature and we can see a lot of developers who do know code being tempted towards Webydo, for this feature alone. It’s not as powerful as WordPress, but it’s a brilliant option if you just need something simple to reassure your client that their content is in their hands.

Webydo even has a white label feature called Build Your Brand that enables you to rebrand the Webydo dashboard with your own identity, so clients will think it’s all your own work. A great option for designers who make their living with small markups on the products they source for clients.

Webydo aims for pixel-perfect design, and the range of sites in their design spotlight shows just how flexible the system can be. Take a look at some of the great sites other designers have built with Webydo:

Webydo has a free option which is great for trying it out, but if you decide to purchase a premium plan you can use this voucher code: ProDesignerWDD278 to get 75% off their professional Premium yearly plan.

The voucher will be valid in 10 days, so you’ve got plenty of time to try out the free option and see if Webydo is right for you.

[ This is a sponsored post for Webydo ]

Have you used Webydo? How did you find the experience? Let us know in the comments.

Quirky Lunchbox Typeface (1,500+ glyphs) – only $17!