Umaria Sinhawansa & Dushyanth Weeraman live in concert, Saturday, April 29, 2017. 

*See the flier image attached for more information.

Tickets: $30.00.

Presented by Kala Lanka Foundation of Washington DC.

For more information: Upali 240-441-4715, Sarath 301-946-8167, Mahinda 301-728-6723.

**UMBC SLSA is not affiliated with this event.

Perhaps as early as March, a satellite the size of a loaf of bread is set to launch from Wallops Island, Va., to the International Space Station. Then, from inside the space station, the UMBC-built satellite will be released with three other small satellites, one by one, into orbit.

From its perch higher than the Space Station, HARP, or Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter, is primarily concerned with what is happening below.

The satellite is equipped with a camera that measures aerosol particles and how they interact with clouds.

The UMBC-built spacecraft is one of six small satellites that are set to launch in the coming months. Each is set to provide observations of climate in a new way. While HARP is looking at clouds, others are studying hurricanes, weather patterns and greenhouse gases. NASA is looking to use the smaller satellites more for science since they are cheaper and allow for more risk.

It was built at UMBC’s Laboratory for Aerosol and Cloud Optics over the last three years (the science goes back a decade). A team that included high school students, faculty, undergraduates and postdocs worked on developing the satellite. The lab also has a partnership with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt that allows access to the center and NASA engineers to work on the project.

“We basically have people going all the way from designing to fabricating, turning nuts and bolts, all the way to doing the science behind it,” said Vanderlei Martins, the physics professor who developed the satellite and is leading the effort.

Aerosols appear as both a naturally occurring variety of the particles, such as sea salt, smoke or volcanic ash, as well as their artificial form that are pollutants. Aerosols affect sunlight by scattering it, and also form the building blocks of clouds.

“Every single cloud on Earth starts from those particles,” Martins said.

The observations from above will help Martins and scientists from other departments to understand the interaction of aerosols with the clouds as they form.

Imaging and measurements generated by the satellite’s camera provides one look at “how things are changing as we change our planet,” Martins said.

Emitting particles into the atmosphere changes how the clouds are formed, but Martins said more information is needed to understand the processes behind those changes. The data that is collected has implications for understanding how the weather and water cycle is affected, as well the energy balance of the planet.

The team has conducted flyovers via plane to take measurements, but Martins said getting a view from above the Earth will provide an even better picture of the wavelengths of the clouds that scientists are seeking to observe.

The first window for a potential launch is in late March, but Martins said that time is not guaranteed.

A thought-provoking memoir about love, loss, and survival published earlier this year by Nancy Rankie Shelton has received a 2016 Best Book Award. Shelton, a professor of education, is the author of 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival (Garn Press, 2016), a book that has made significant contributions to the growing body of literature on living and dying well.

The i310 Media Group announced the 2016 Best Book Awards earlier this month, which included more than 2,000 entries from mainstream and independent publishers. Shelton’s book received the Best Book Award in the Health: Death and Dying category.

The book encourages readers to overcome fears of cancer, remain loving and strong, survive the death of a loved one, and continue living. The story traces Shelton’s husband Jack’s fight with lung cancer and the stress and confusion of managing his treatment. The book reflects on the 35 years the couple was together and the family’s relationships with others over the years.

In a review posted earlier this year on the Garn Press website, the reviewer notes, “Nancy Rankie Shelton’s 5-13, A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival is a breathtaking read. It is work of great courage but also a literary triumph. Like an uncut diamond it is rough reading in places and then the light fractures and you feel the surge of an enduring human spirit who is not frightened to love, face death, and then reimagine her life.”

In a press release announcing the 2016 Best Book Award winners, Jeffrey Keen, President and CEO of i310 Media Group, stated that “the 2016 results represent a phenomenal mix of books from a wide array of publishers throughout the United States,” adding, “our success begins with the enthusiastic participation of authors and publishers and continues with our distinguished panel of industry judges who bring to the table their extensive editorial, PR, marketing, and design expertise.”

Professor Shelton is the author of 23 publications appearing in prominent academic journals and leading publishing companies specializing in literacy research and/or education policy. Her teaching areas focus on reading and language arts, literacy/culture and composition theory/practice. Her research interests include children’s writing development, effects of mandated instruction on elementary literacy development, literacy/art connections, and children’s literature. Read more about her work on the education department website.

UPDATE: Saturday, January 7, 2017 - UMBC Transit resumes shuttle services at 4:15pm.  The Downtown route will be detoured via to Baltimore Street due to construction/roadwork on Pratt Street.  Riders boarding the shuttle from Pratt St. and Light street should look for the bus on Light St. Please check here for the latest weather related advisories and updates on Transit inclement weather procedures etc. 

For further assistance call the campus status hotline at 410-455-6789 or visit UMBC Inclement Weather and Emergency Closing Procedure.

1.  "Constitutive description of human femoropopiteal artery aging."

2.  "Morphometric roadmaps to improve accurate device delivery for fluoroscoopy-free resuscitative endovascular balloon occulsion of the aorta."

3.  "In situ longitudinal pre-stretch in the human femoropopiteal artery."

"RANK/RANK control Brca1 mutation-driven mammary tumors."

This research was conducted with their undergraduate mentor, Dr. Laundette Jones, Epidemiology & Public Health, UMB, while they were MARC Scholars training in her lab (http://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/profiles/Jones-Laundette/).

Kwadwo is currently in a MD/PhD program in Health Science Technology at Harvard/MIT.  Nnamdi is in a PhD program in Biomedical Sciences at The University of Michigan.

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has recently released its Special Issue, which includes Dr. Craig Saper's video/presentation "Disrupting Scholarship.":

 

""In “Disrupting Scholarship” Craig Saper explores both alternative forms of publishing and alternative models of academic infrastructure. To his mind, there has been a conservative move in digital humanities, evident in its focus on visualizing, mapping, and charting, all of which work to preserve a fixed notion of the humanities. The question is this: what could the humanities be if it were not engaged in the fixing of meanings? Multimodal scholarship has been an important development in this respect, Saper argues. He is particularly interested in how reading will change to adapt to new forms of multimodal publication and, vice versa, how publishing will respond to such new reading practices. Saper provides examples in the form of his own experiments with publishing books that are precisely about the reading process, and his attempt to set up a university press for multimodal works and community-based scholarship at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. In these experiments, Saper stresses, the publication process itself is to be seen as part of the process of writing. It is thus important to think about knowledge in relationship to the objects of study, where these objects are models for the form of the publication, based on their own sensibility: infrastructure here becomes poetry."

Check out Dr. Saper's piece here: 

 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0019.212/--disrupting-scholarship?rgn=main;view=fulltext