Ocean City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 8:30am

All Guests = $15

Ticket #: SOLD OUT!

Humanities Without Apology

Office of Institutional Advancement

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

7:00pmm

Performing Arts & Humanities Building, Proscenium Theater

All Guests = FREE

(No ticket numbers available)

New York City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 8:00am

All Guests = $30

Ticket #: 50 of 106

King's Dominion Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00am

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: 4 of 49

Renaissance Festival Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 10:30am 

All Guests = $20

Ticket #: 1 of 49

Homecoming Comedy Show: BJ Novak

(seb)

Saturday, October 13, 2012

8:00pm

RAC

All Guests = $10

Ticket #: 97 of 2000

Midnight Premiere: Paranormal Activity

(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 #: 2 of 48

Isaiah 42:10-17 (NIV)

10 Sing to the LORD a new song,
his praise from the ends of the earth,
you who go down to the sea, and all that is in it,
you islands, and all who live in them.
11 Let the wilderness and its towns raise their voices;
let the settlements where Kedar lives rejoice.
Let the people of Sela sing for joy;
let them shout from the mountaintops.
12 Let them give glory to the LORD
and proclaim his praise in the islands.
13 The LORD will march out like a champion,
like a warrior he will stir up his zeal;
with a shout he will raise the battle cry
and will triumph over his enemies.
14 “For a long time I have kept silent,
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant.
15 I will lay waste the mountains and hills
and dry up all their vegetation;
I will turn rivers into islands
and dry up the pools.
16 I will lead the blind by ways they have not known,
along unfamiliar paths I will guide them;
I will turn the darkness into light before them
and make the rough places smooth.
These are the things I will do;
I will not forsake them.
17 But those who trust in idols,
who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’
will be turned back in utter shame.

Reflection:

We love our music, sing our songs, and even have our great worship songs. We may have extensive collections of songs by artists such as Matt Redman or Hillsong. God has certainly used this music to touch hearts and help bring us into worship. But the sound and style pretty much match the styles we hear on the radio and in bars or basements. In many ways, our cultural preferences match the world’s.

What God does in our lives is so radically different that there is no worldly sound to match it… nothing. His “new song” goes beyond the musical styles of this culture or any other and transforms a broken world, turning the darkness into light and making the rough places smooth. He will not be stopped in His plan of salvation. He will no longer keep silent and hold back.

Response:

Let’s pray that we would catch the “new song” and “new rhythm” that God is singing to us. We want to be those who sing for joy, shouting from the mountaintops and giving glory to the Lord. Let’s also ask the Lord to open the hearts of those we are ministering to, so they may also catch this new song. May God’s light shine in the darkness, turning rivers into islands and drying up the pools.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Human Sensor Networks for Improved Modeling
of Natural and Human-Caused Disasters

Oleg Aulov, Computer Science Ph.D. Student, UMBC

1:00pm Friday, 14 September 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

This talk will discuss the importance of different roles that social media can play in management, monitoring, modeling and mitigation of natural and human-caused disasters. We will present a novel approach that views social media data as a human sensor network. These data can serve as a low-cost augmentation to an observing system, which can be incorporated into geophysical models together with other scientific data such as satellite observations and sensor measurements. As a use case scenario, we analyze the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. We gather the social media data that mention sightings of oil from Flickr, geolocate them, and use them as boundary forcings in the General NOAA Oil Modeling Environment (GNOME) software for oil spill predictions. We show how social media data can be incorporated into the GNOME model to obtain improved estimates of the model parameters such as rates of oil spill, couplings between surface winds and ocean currents, diffusion coefficient, and other model parameters. Other social media mining and citizen science projects performed by groups outside of UMBC, on air quality, earthquakes and the Fukushima disaster will also be summarized as related work.

Oleg Aulov received B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO, in 2004 and M.S. degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Computer Security and Information Assurance from George Washington University, Washington, DC, in 2006. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD. His topics of interest include social media mining, citizen science, machine learning, trust establishment and management, information assurance, and social engineering.

For more information and directions see http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks

With the country in the grips of a tight (and extremely long) election, we at USDemocrazy are trying to make sense of it. Sometime a cartoon can make better sense of it than any blog post. Check out this cartoon from the Baltimore Sun.