Single Carrot Theatre seeks a qualified STAGE MANAGER for our upcoming production of Promenade: Baltimore!

This production does not take place in a theatre but rather on the streets around the city of Baltimore while the audience watches actors from a bus that drives a 12 mile round trip journey from Single Carrot Theatre. We are looking for a Stage Manager that is adaptive and flexible.

About the Promenade: Baltimore

Single Carrot Theatre seeks Venue Managers for our upcoming production of A SHORT REUNION

Show Description:

To celebrate our epic 10th Season, we’ve commissioned playwrights from our past to write brand-new, never-before-seen shorts for SCT.

Prajit Kumar Das, Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin, App behavioral analysis using system calls, MobiSec: Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics of Mobile Systems and Networks, IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, May 2017.

System calls provide an interface to the services made available by an operating system. As a result, any functionality provided by a software application eventually reduces to a set of fixed system calls. Since system calls have been used in literature, to analyze program behavior we made an assumption that analyzing the patterns in calls made by a mobile application would provide us insight into its behavior. In this paper, we present our preliminary study conducted with 534 mobile applications and the system calls made by them. Due to a rising trend of mobile applications providing multiple functionalities, our study concluded, mapping system calls to functional behavior of a mobile application was not straightforward. We use Weka tool and manually annotated application behavior classes and system call features in our experiments to show that using such features achieves mediocre F1-measure at best, for app behavior classification. Thus leading to the conclusion that system calls were not sufficient features for app behavior classification.

A reflection by Women’s center staff member, Kayla Smith.

Full disclosure: I’m a Beyonce stan. I support pretty much everything she does. There are very few things Beyonce can do that I wouldn’t damn near worship. Needless to say when she released pictures from her maternity shoot I was ready to bow down.

Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement on Instagram

I scrolled through her website looking at all the maternity pictures in awe. The symbolism of a black woman evoking the Virgin Mary and the goddess Venus was not lost on me as I looked through the pictures feeling overjoyed for her and hopeful for my own future. She looked regal and glowed  with pride. This pregnancy announcement was radically different from her first, and was shrouded in much less mystery. I was reminded that in 2015 Beyonce suffered a miscarriage and I was so happy that she could announce another pregnancy with confidence. I even lamented to my boyfriend hoping that I would be as beautiful as Beyonce whenever I decide to have kids.

Beyonce as the Goddess Venus, pictured with a bust of Nefertiti.

To my surprise, outside of the BeyHive bubble, not everyone responded to the maternity shoot in the same way I did. Comment threads are filled with comments that call the maternity shoot “tacky,” “extra,” and “self absorbed.” Articles were written criticizing not just the image, but Beyonce and the announcement itself.

I can understand criticism, and I’m sure Bey can handle it. But one article in particular really felt like something was off. The author calls the Instragram picture “a brave woman who has the optimism to kneel down in front of a million flowers, get their wedding veil back on again, and know that bar the bump, the rest of their body is in perfect condition. People, this is not what pregnancy looks like.” A stranger, telling the public that Beyonce’s actual pregnancy isn’t what a pregnancy looks like. The author invalidates the actual pregnant woman, who is controlling her exposure and the narrative surrounding her pregnancy, by saying that, because it doesn’t look the way she expects pregnancy to look, it isn’t valid. In the days following the announcement I found myself falling down the rabbit hole of reading more and more articles criticizing Beyonce and her announcement. My excitement for her began to fade, and I wondered if maybe she should have avoided the criticism all together by being less flashy, or less “extra.”

Beyonce being pregnant on a car. I’m not sure why, but I’m here for it.

I started to think about women who hide their pregnancies in order to avoid backlash from their employers and peers and the expectations thrust onto women about the proper way to compose themselves during their pregnancies and once they become mothers. In 2016, when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave birth to her child, she didn’t tell anyone when she was pregnant because she didn’t want to “perform pregnancy.” She’s quoted saying, “I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy. We don’t expect fathers to perform fatherhood. I went into hiding. I wanted it to be as personal as possible.” Knowles-Carter and Adichie are both controlling the narrative around how much access the public has to their pregnancies.

I know I’m not nearly as famous as Beyonce or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie so I’m probably not going to have any articles written about me whenever I get pregnant, but I will still be a black woman carrying a child in a society where people feel entitled to comment on a woman’s appearance and police how she carries herself. Black women are not only harshly criticized for their appearance, we are also subjected to racist perceptions around black pregnancy. There is the assumption that black women are someone’s “baby mama” or that the pregnancy was an accident. Black women are not afforded the same respect as other women when they decide to bear children.

Beyonce and her first child Blue.

I still have a lot of life to live before I have children, but in the digital age I wonder about what my own pregnancy announcement will look like, if I have one at all. Would I be willing to weather the storm of criticisms thrown at me or would I be more private? I often wonder what kind of mom I will be on social media. Will I be Beyonce, performing pregnancy from the day of my pregnancy announcement to the child’s birth or will I be Adichie, and keep the public away from the very personal and miraculous process that is pregnancy?

Two years ago, when I decided I wanted to have kids one day, I fantasized about telling anyone who would listen about my pregnancy; however, after seeing the backlash women of color face online it’s easy to understand why it would be tempting to keep a pregnancy quiet altogether.

Beyonce being flawless during her Grammy’s performance.

This is where I come back to Beyonce. Instead of covering her pregnant belly up when she performed at the Grammys, she evoked the image of a Nigerian fertility goddess. She performed covered in gold and jewels, literally beaming like the sun. She took every criticism about being over the top and threw it all right back at her critics.

Women of color are already told how to act, how to sound, how to dress, and how to treat other people;however, like Beyonce, I refuse to let society tell me how to carry a child.

To say the least, the Retrievers baseball team is off to a rough start. After a solid 28-23 season in 2016, the Retrievers have stumbled out of the gate. As of Sunday, the team is off to a 1-5 start. The scores do not give any signs of optimism early on.

Through six games, the Retrievers have a point differential of minus-19. In that same span, they have allowed 40 runs. In all but one game, they allowed at least four runs.

With such a slow start, the Retrievers can’t point to one specific reason for their early futility. They have a grotesque .203/.284/.255 batting line with no home runs. They have struck out 57 times so far and have only walked 19 times.

In addition, the Retrievers have struggled on the mound. UMBC pitchers have a combined 6.35 ERA in the first half dozen games. Opponents are hitting .288 against the Retrievers.

The first three games were not pretty. The Retirevers faced the Liberty University Flames and the St. John’s University Red Storm in the Lexington County tournament. In the season opener against the Flames,  UMBC blew a 5-4 lead in the seventh inning. Liberty redshirt senior Sammy Taormina smacked a three run homer over the right field fence to put the Flames ahead for good.

The next two games against the Red Storm were bloodbaths. St. John’s outscored the Retrievers 23-3 in the two game series. UMBC used eight pitchers in the two games, giving up 30 hits, including nine extra base hits. In the brief series, the Retrievers batted .246 with just one extra base hit.

The following weekend’s series against the Gardner-Webb University Running Bulldogs was not as lopsided; however, the Retrievers still struggled. They took a 3-0 lead into the fourth inning when the Bulldogs began to storm back. Sophomore third baseman/shortstop Luke Kaesmeyer’s run-batted in (RBI) single and sophomore pitcher Michael Austin’s two wild pitches tied the game up. Gardner-Webb scored the deciding run in the bottom of the eighth on an RBI double by junior shortstop Paul Trick.

The final game of the series provided some hope for the Retrievers. Sophomore righty Jacob Christian pitched a splendid game. He hurled seven and two-thirds innings of shutout baseball, allowing two hits and striking out twelve in a 6-0 victory.

While things may seem bleak now, there is reason for optimism. That reason is found in last season’s calendar. Last season, the Retrievers started 1-6 as well while on their way to a 2-9 record. However, the Retrievers rebounded by winning 11 of their next 12 games, ultimately finishing the season five games over .500.

It is only March, so there is plenty of time for the Retrievers to turn their fortunes around. Their next chances come this week. The Retrievers go to the University of Delaware to face the Red Hens. They then finally play their home opener against the Towson University Tigers. Then, the Retrievers head back out on the road to face University of North Carolina Asheville.

The post UMBC baseball starts slow, just like last year appeared first on The Retriever.

2 Corinthians 3:16-18 (NIV) - “But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

Through the Word and by the Spirit we witness the Presence and the wonder of God, and in that reality we are transformed into becoming more and more like Jesus. The Word brings us into the Spirit-led encounters of ‘beholding’ the Lord. The Bible says that whenever we turn to the Lord (first at salvation and now in the Spirit-led freedom of turning to Him again and again) we enter into His presence and can know/see Him for who He is. Daily we turn away from all that has enamored us, and yet can never truly satisfy; and instead we turn to the Lord who alone can satisfy and bless our lives.

Today let us turn to the Lord, and turn away from all the things that have enamored us more than the Lord. Let’s ask for the Spirit’s empowering and freedom to know the heart of God, and be deeply satisfied and awed by Him. Turn and keep turning to the Lord this week. He alone can transform our heart and desires, creating in us the same passions and pursuit that Jesus had.

-TR