1 John 4:9-12 (NLT) - “God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love-not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.”

“Community brings out the best in us. And the worst. Community life brings a painful revelation of our limitations, weaknesses and darkness; the unexpected discovery of the monsters within us is hard to accept…”

“If the church is to be a radically reconciled community, it must be a fellowship where we are so secure in each other that we can share our feelings honestly without fearing rejection. We must create an environment where we confess our sins to each other, ask each other for forgiveness…And we must be able to lovingly confront one another and be willing to be confronted with our own sins.

“Reconciliation, you see, is not a warm feeling; it is love, and love always acts. Reconciliation is a unity of heart, mind and purpose. Our reconciliation is reveled and completed as we work hand in hand to reach out to bring others into fellowship with God and with us.”

“The believing fellowship must be a living demonstration of the love that God gives us for one another…To do the work of reconciliation, then, we must begin by being a reconciled fellowship…Our love for each other gives credibility and power to our witness…We must be a reconciled fellowship on mission. And our mission is to bring others into fellowship with God and with us” (John M. Perkins, With Justice For All, p.148-149, 143-144).

“Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.” The church is a ‘come-back’ people. We are always coming back into the reconciling love of God. This reconciliation is what defines us and what identifies us as God’s people. At the core of who we are together is God’s reconciliation. Therefore, this is the core of what we do and what will always keep us together and keeping us growing together. Deeper than our diversity is God’s reconciliation.

Let’s thank God for this central reality in our lives together. Let’s ask Him to increase this understanding and way of living together so that we will reveal how wonderful God’s love is - that His love will be brought to full expression in and through us.

-TR

UMBC CSEE Seminar Series

Genetic ancestry predicts striatal dopamine D2 receptors

Dr. Corinde Wiers
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, MD

1-2pm Friday, 2 December 2016, ITE 229, UMBC

Genetic ancestry was recently found to be associated with cortical geometry, cortical surface, and total brain volume in humans. Despite ethnic differences in allele frequency in dopaminergic genes associated with dopamine D2/D3 receptor availability (D2R), no study to date has investigated the relationship between genetic ancestry and striatal D2R. Here, we show that genetic informative markers significantly predict dorsal striatal D2R in 117 healthy ethnically diverse residents of the New York metropolitan area using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with [11C]raclopride, while correcting for age, sex, BMI, education years, and estimated socioeconomic status based on individuals’ ZIP codes. Striatal D2R may thus be modulated by genetic ancestry, although differences in environmental factors between ethnic groups could mediate these effects. Findings may have implications for pharmacological treatment targeting D2R, such as antipsychotic D2R antagonists.

Corinde Wiers, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, in the Laboratory of Neuroimaging of Nora D. Volkow, M.D. After her studies in Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Sussex University (UK) in 2010, she completed her PhD in Psychology at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and Free University Berlin (Germany) in 2014, where she investigated neural underpinnings of automatic approach behavior to alcohol cues, and neural effects of behavioral trainings in patients with alcohol use disorder. The main goal of Dr. Wiers’ research is to understand cognitive, neurobiological and (epi)genetic processes involved in drug addiction, using functional MRI, PET, psychophysics and molecular techniques. She currently works on how peripheral epigenetic markers relate to brain functioning in drug addiction and other psychiatric disorders. Further research interests include the neurobiology of sleep, effects of sleep deprivation, comorbidities of sleep and substance use disorders, and how neuroimaging techniques can be of use for treatment in psychiatry.

Host: Tulay Adali

About the CSEE Seminar Series: The UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering presents technical talks on current significant research projects of broad interest to the Department and the research community. Each talk is free and open to the public. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future talks.

Organizers: Tulay Adali and Alan Sherman

The post talk: Genetic ancestry predicts striatal dopamine D2 receptors, 1pm Dec 2, ITE229 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

This article, by Morgan Mullings, originally appeared in The Retriever.

The Women’s Center at UMBC is seen as a critical resource on campus to many students, staff and faculty. Within the time span from July 2015 – June 2016, the Women’s Center along with their outside programs and outreach services received 8,642 visits, organized 153 programs and had 126 community members utilize their one-on-one support from the Women’s Center Staff.

Despite servicing such a wide platform, their operating budget as of their 2015–2016 annual report is $1,237.

“After I went from being coordinator to assistant director my pay increase came out of our baseline budget so after that money went away our new baseline budget is $1,237,” explained Megan Tagle Adams, assistant director of the Women’s Center.

The baseline budget, also known as the operating budget, is the funding the Women’s Center receives from the state of Maryland. However, this budget continues to grow smaller as the years go on. Their budget has been slowly decreasing over the past several years with last year’s operating budget at $4,469.

“A lot of it is we’ve never had a huge budget to begin with but when I look back from our archives ten years ago and what not, it was higher and then when there had to be budget cuts they had to get taken from some places,” Adams continued.

“The Women’s Center is very important as is our other offices on campus so it’s some of those hard decisions but there will be year after year of budget cuts so sometimes it was only one percent budget cuts but we have such a small budget and those cuts happen year after year. It’s sort of like the death by a thousand paper cuts… ”

Jess Myers, director of the Women’s Center, said, “I think one of the challenging things about the budget at UMBC in general is that a lot of offices are really struggling financially. So, sometimes I acknowledge that the university has made some really hard decisions.”

“Of course I think that [the Women’s Center is] really important but in the grand scheme of the university there’s lots of people that are really important,” Myers continued.

Housed under academic rather than student affairs, the Women’s Center does not have access to student fees from undergraduate tuition like many other campus resources. They utilize other forms of funding with a heavy reliance on co-sponsorships. Some of their biggest partnerships being the Mosaic Center, ResLife, Off Campus Student Services, the Honors College and the Dean’s Office.

“It’s definitely difficult to provide the programming that we want to provide because we are absolutely depending on co-sponsors. That’s how we’re able to do things like Take Back the Night and Critical Social Justice,” said Adams.

In addition to being vital to funding, programming is dependent on the co-sponsorships as well.

“For example, last year we got over $9000 in co-sponsorships, which is great but we don’t know if we’re going to get those co-sponsorships until we start planning the program. We just really hope they say yes. We can’t plan them ahead because it’s so dependent on what type of co-sponsorships we’ll get.”

They also utilize a GiveCorps page through the Office of Institutional Advancement to raise money for their Returning Women students, as well their 25^th anniversary celebration.

“There’s been things that we would love to do but we just can’t and I think the hard thing about it too is not just that we have a small budget but people don’t realize it. The just assume that we have money for things,” Adams continued.

“The significant piece for us is that those [budget] cuts can’t come from our staff … we have to protect the salaries and because our budget’s so tiny most of our budget really is just salary.”

Often, the Women’s Center attempts to come up with ideas to further their budget; however, due to the limitations of their staff budget, funds set aside to pay full-time employees, there are not enough people in positions of power to back the Center.

However, the Women’s Center has had a heavy reliance on a separate funding account, their carry forward funds. For the past six years, the Women’s Center’s carry forward funds have been in use with $12,217 of the funds reported in their 2015–2016 Annual Report.

“It’s been our rainy day fund that we saved. That’s what we’ve been using… and we’ve made it last for a very long time… ” Adams explained.

That fund is expected to run out this year.

Due to this, the Women’s Center foresees a lack of publicity and outreach. However, even if they receive more visitors, increased demand could also become an issue. “We want more people to come here and also we need more money to do the programs to bring them here or to get the staff to meet with them and offer them resources and support,” she continued.

“Sometimes it’s like, what could we be if we just had more money,” said Myers.

In the wake of recent events such as the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s electoral victory, John Rennie Short explores why there has been widespread resistance to economic, political, and cultural globalization in a new article in The Conversation.

Short, a professor of public policy, traces the origins of globalization back to the end of World War II when the Allied countries set up a new order focused on free markets and trade, coupled with the establishment of international organizations with the idea that it would curb economic nationalism.

He then explains how this later led to money moving more freely around the world, with eventual global shifts in manufacturing and a loosening of trade restrictions.

“As a result, there was a global redistribution of wealth. In the West as factories shuttered, mechanized or moved overseas, the living standards of the working class declined. Meanwhile, in China prosperity grew, with the poverty rate falling from 84 percent in 1981 to only 12 percent by 2010,” Short writes, adding, “the backlash against economic globalization is most marked in those countries such as the U.S. where economic dislocation unfolds with weak safety nets and limited government investment in job retraining or continuing and lifetime education.”

Professor Short analyzes how expanding free markets, with the creation of institutions such as the European Union, along with cultural backlash to globalization seen across the world, have all contributed in recent decades to the widespread resistance to globalization.

“The globalization project contains much that was desirable: improvements in living conditions through global trade, reducing conflict and threat of war through political globalization and encouraging cultural diversity in a widening cultural globalization,” explains Short. “The question now, in my view, is not whether we should accept or reject globalization but how we shape and guide it to these more progressive goals.”

Read the full article in The Conversation. It has also been re-published with the below news outlets.

Why there’s a globalization backlash (U.S. News and World Report) 
Globalization and its discontents (The Millennium Post)     
Globalization and its discontents: Why there’s a backlash and how it needs to change (SF Gate) 

Image: John Rennie Short in his office. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

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 Awardsearlier 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.

Image: Nancy Rankie Shelton. Garn Press photo. \

This story, by Max Cole, originally appeared here. 

Aefa the comfort chinchilla pauses after exploring the room. Photo by Megumi Gomyo.

Freshman Rachel Szpara has no ordinary dorm room. Underneath her loft bed is not a laundry basket or food storage, but a multi-level wire cage housing a hyperactive chinchilla named Aefa.

Gone are the days of service animals exclusively serving the visually impaired. Several residential students on campus cohabit with comfort animals, which are typically used to cope with symptoms of various mental illnesses.

Szpara, a resident of the Humanities LLC in Harbor Hall, is pursuing degrees in Asian studies and modern languages and linguistics with a focus on Chinese and Korean. She has obsessive-compulsive disorder and dysthymia, otherwise known as persistent depressive disorder.

“[People with mood disorders] often just want to be alone and don’t want to be with people,” she said. “An animal presence is more comforting.”

Concerned about the transition and moving away from home, she began looking in to the process of getting a comfort animal for school last summer. After contacting Student Disability Services, she obtained documentation from several physicians and waited for her approval. About six weeks later, it came.

Residential Life policy prohibits pets and animals (other than fish) in any residential facilities. It notes that service animals are permitted to access the areas in which their owner lives. While it does not mention comfort animals specifically, the Rights and Responsibilities goes on to say that, “Animals that are known to Residential Life Operations as an approved accommodation through Student Disability Services [are also permitted].”

Students interested in bringing a comfort animal on to campus must make arrangements with Student Disability Services and Residential Life. These requests are handled on a case-by-case basis.

Junior music major Jackie Smedley described the process as “exceedingly complicated.” She sent a letter from her counselor which was sent back because it was not specific enough. After the letter was deemed acceptable, she had to fill out a long form and wait for it to be approved.

Smedley, who has panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and depression, eventually received permission to bring her year-old cat, Furmata, to campus.

Following approval for her second year, Smedley had trouble getting Furmata into the residential hall due to the concerns of other residents and logistical issues. This year, she lives in Terrace Apartments. Fortunately, Furmata is a hit with her new roommates.

It’s not just cats that are popular with the student population. Sophomore environmental science and psychology double major Briana Yancy resides in Erickson Hall with her shih tzu, Teddy.

“People are really cool with it; he’s really friendly,” she said.

Yancy has found Teddy, now six months old, to be a tremendous help in coping with her anxiety, which often manifests itself in panic attacks. She is considering training Teddy as a service dog so that he will be permitted to accompany her in public places such as stores and restaurants.

The effectiveness of these furry sidekicks is not hard to prove: “My anxiety was bad when I started college—I had several panic attacks a week. Since getting Teddy, I’ve had one panic attack this entire semester,” Yancy said.

The post Furry friends offer comfort, camaraderie appeared first on The Retriever.

Photo by Shannon Carney

A change of major brought Matthew Hunt, a 30-year-old junior majoring in social work and minoring in history, to UMBC. Originally a business major at College Park, Hunt realized that the corporate world wasn’t for him and that he had a passion for social work. The major wasn’t available at his old school, which made UMBC a good option.

Hunt moved to Maryland from Washington, D.C. with his family due to the crime in the city. He began college right after high school, but due to some personal struggles and a busy work schedule, he had to take a break. Deciding that he wanted a degree to give him more options for his future, Hunt returned to college as an adult learner – a student over the age of 25.

Finishing out his first semester here, Hunt has felt UMBC’s warm welcome.

“I’ve met a lot of cool people and really interact well with a lot of my classmates,” Hunt said. “I think it helps that I look younger so some of my classmates think I’m their age. Maybe I’m just young at heart.”

And he does have a young face, looking to be in his early 20s. Though he looks like he might still be living with his parents, Hunt faces many challenges that are common among adult learners. He rents his own apartment and takes several classes as well as working a full-time job. 

Hunt currently works for Jubilee Association of Maryland, an organization that supports developmentally disabled adults. He hopes to become a social worker to further support that community.

“My cousin’s son has Down syndrome and I met him and loved him and decided that’s what I want to do,” Hunt said.

Echoing the concerns of others, Hunt worries about how the election results will affect the social programs on which developmentally disabled adults depend.

“I’ve been very nervous. Especially with Medicare and Medicaid [President-Elect Trump] might cut. That could affect a lot of our clients,” Hunt said, his voice dropping. “It’s really up in the air with what’s going to happen, and that’s scary.”

He hopes that one day he can work to help change policy on a more direct level.

“My dream is to maybe one day be a lobbyist for [people with] developmental disabilities because I see how much the money helps. The funding can help them,” Hunt said.

For now, Hunt is working hard to complete school and fulfill his goals of obtaining his bachelors and then his masters. He feels positive about his choice of school.

“Coming to UMBC feels like a fresh start,” Hunt said.

The post Earning a degree to support the disabled appeared first on The Retriever.

A small group of dedicated supporters gathered on October 21, despite steady rain, to celebrate the Herbert Run Greenway (HRG), a 1.4 mile pathway that begins at the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park and follows the Herbert Run stream as it meanders across UMBC’s campus and through the university’s Conservation and Environmental Research Areas.

The event included a ribbon cutting and community hike to enjoy recent improvements designed to increase the HRG’s visibility and to make it a recreation destination on campus. These updates include new directional signs labeling the route and trail map brochures, as well as an expanded website.

Patricia LaNoue, director emerita of interdisciplinary studies, advised the group of students who designed the Herbert Run Greenway in 1995, and she has stewarded it ever since. The greenway opened in 1996, but has been a hidden gem for much of that time, unknown to many in the campus community. LaNoue and a core group of students are dedicated to changing that.

Sarah Burton ‘16, environmental studies, and Ethan Griffin ’18, interdisciplinary studies, have been working to increase visibility of the HRG under LaNoue’s steadfast guidance and motivated by her passion for the project. Burton shares, “There are green spaces on campus. I want to encourage students to take advantage of our green resources.”

Griffin hopes the entire campus community will utilize the HRG for a variety of purposes, including both recreation and research in areas from geography and environmental systems to urban design to life sciences. “We want faculty, staff, and students to use it, and we also want them to seek to understand it in the context of their disciplines,” he says.

Griffin and UMBC Eco Ambassadors now provide trail tours each spring at UMBC EcoFest and on a rolling basis throughout the year, and there is interest in expanding this public engagement. “Every year we hope to involve more students, staff and faculty in leading tours as part of orientation for incoming students and new faculty and staff,” says LaNoue.

The HRG runs alongside UMBC’s new events center, currently under construction, and the building’s footprint carefully avoids several historic trees that have been in place since before the American Revolution. That project has provided some funding for trail updates, to mitigate any impact of construction on the greenway. Looking ahead, the HRG team plans to create an advisory council to preserve the greenway as UMBC continues to grow, and to facilitate maintenance.

LaNoue sees the greenway as an essential complement to classroom experience at UMBC, connecting students to the campus, themselves, and each other in unique ways. “It provides a way to see elements of nature on campus and find a place for reflection and repose,” says LaNoue, who notes that students who traverse the greenway “discuss ethics and religion, policy and land use, ecology and athletics,” while also taking in the sound of the stream and the tracks of local wildlife.

Just as she enjoys helping UMBC students find their place in the world, LaNoue also treasures seeing them “find their place along the trail.”

Image: Sarah Burton ’16 (right) gives regular tours of the Herbert Run Greenway. All tours include a stop at Pig Pen Pond, shown here. Photo by Tanvi Gadhia, UMBC sustainability coordinator.