King's Dominion Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00am

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: SOLD OUT!

Renaissance Festival Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 10:30am 

All Guests = $20

Ticket #: 16 of 49

Homecoming Comedy Show: BJ Novak

(seb)

Saturday, October 13, 2012

8:00pm

RAC

All Guests = $10

Ticket #: 220 of 2000

Ira Glass Lecture

Saturday, October 13, 2012

10:30am

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = $5.00 (limit 1/ID)

Ticket #: 40 of 70

Midnight Premiere: Paranormal Activity 4

(seb)

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 1 of 260

Hershey Park Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 12:00pm

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: 8 of 48

Psalm 24 (NIV)

⁷ Open up, ancient gates!
Open up, ancient doors,
and let the King of glory enter.
⁸ Who is the King of glory?
The Lord, strong and mighty;
the Lord, invincible in battle.
⁹ Open up, ancient gates!
Open up, ancient doors,
and let the King of glory enter.
¹⁰ Who is the King of glory?
The Lord of Heaven’s Armies—
he is the King of glory.

Reflection

King David proclaims God’s kingship over all and celebrates that the King of Glory is our God. He declares that He is the Creator-God, the holy God, and the Divine Warrior. God invites us to live in His holy presence, and only those with clean hands and a pure heart may enter in. How is this possible? It is possible because it is not about appearances but about the condition of our hearts and lives, and God Himself has made our hands clean and our hearts pure through Jesus Christ the Lord and Savior. We can have single and loyal devotion to the Lord and seek to live in line with His heart and desires because the Divine Warrior, the Lord Almighty, the King of Glory is with us.

Response

Let’s trust in the grace and power of the glorious King who makes us His and enables us to worship Him with loyal devotion. Let’s draw near to Him, offering to Him our hearts, our hands, our lives in worship of Him.

Tender Loving Calls is an innovative, interactive and easy to use subscription telephone messaging service, designed to improve the quality of life for aging seniors and help families take better care of their aging loved ones from a distance.
    
    The associated web site TLC-Connect is to be for the family caregivers and is to be a dual-purpose social learning networking and marketing site. Recent research has shown that family caregivers are very active users of the internet, particularly social networks, both on and offline. They are keen to connect with others to discuss and learn from each others experiences. There are many web sites devoted to providing information on all aspects of aging and caregiving, however very few (if any) encourage communication and collaboration between their visitors. My aim is not just to provide information but to encourage users to share their experiences, using the blogging, forum systems and specialist groups within the TLC site, with the notion that ‘a problem shared is a problem solved’. 
    
    We have an interim web site at http://www.tenderlovingcalls.com and are currently building a full scale social learning network to take its place. We are looking for Interns who are interested in working to help develop an active and engaged community of users. In the process they will explore a different application of social networking that goes way beyond the world of Facebook and Twitter. Running a large scale focused social network is very much like being the producer of a live daily TV program. They will work directly with me to learn and master techniques which encourage active and sustained engagement within this community. They will have the opportunity to develop and explore their own ideas pertinent to  creating an engaging online environment designed to serve people (especially family caregivers) who are deeply concerned about providing care for our aging community.
    
    If you have any interest you can see some of my past projects at http://www.digitalslate.com.

IF INTERESTED, apply via UMBCworks or send your resume to Christine Routzahn at the Shriver Center (routzahn@umbc.edu)

Google has added an “entity disambiguation” feature along with auto-complete when you type in your search query. For example, when I search for George Bush, I get the following additional information in auto-complete.

As you can see, Google is able to identify that there are two George Bushes’ — the 41st and the 43rd President and accordingly makes a suggestion to the user to select the appropriate president. Similarly, if you search for Johns Hopkins, you get suggestions for John Hopkins – the University, the Entrepreneur and the Hospital.  In the case of the Hopkins query, its the same entity name but with different types and thus Google appends different entity types along with the entity name.

However, searching for Michael Jordan produces no entity disambiguation. If you are looking for Michael Jordan, the UC Berkeley professor, you will have to search for “Michael I Jordan“. Other examples that Google is not handling right now include queries such as apple — {fruit, company}, jaguar {animal, car}.  It seems to me that Google is only including disambiguation between popular entities in its auto-complete. While there are six different George Bushes’ and ten different Michael Jordans‘ on Wikipedia, Google includes only two and none respectively when it disambiguates George Bush and Michael Jordan.

Google talked about using its knowledge graph to produce this information.  One can envision the knowledge graph maintaining, a unique identity for each entity in its collection, which will allow it to disambiguate entities with similar names (in the Semantic Web world, we call it as assigning a unique uri to each unique thing or entity). With the Hopkins query, we can also see that the knowledge graph is maintaining entity type information along with each entity (e.g. Person, City, University, Sports Team etc).  While folks at Google have tried to steer clear of the Semantic Web, one can draw parallels between the underlying principles on the Semantic Web and the ones used in constructing the Google knowledge graph.