The Science major asks, “Why does it work?”
The Engineering major asks, “How does it work?”
The Business major asks, “How much does it cost?”
The Liberal Arts major asks, “Would you like fries with that?”

Yeah, we’ve all heard that joke. Gets us every time. Right?

But don’t throw out your diploma yet.

 There’s always big debates on which college majors are the best. “Which One Will Get You Money” vs. “Which One Do You Enjoy Most”. For many people, the two often intercede. For the rest? Well. We hope you like the smell of fast food.

Despite this, recent studies have shown that the skills learned in Liberal Arts degrees -English, History, Philosophy etc.-  bring their own perks to a person’s career. Employers like hiring people that bring new skills to the table. In fact, Professor Nicholaos Jones makes another groundbreaking point in his own essay : 

Are you ready? You sure?

Staring Salaries vs. Mid-career Salaries are two different things (duh).

Liberal Arts might have lower starting salaries, but by the middle of their careers, Graduates with a Liberal Arts degree have caught up -if not surpassed- their peers in STEM careers.

Why is this? Well, mostly because Liberal Arts majors don’t have a specific job they are training for -instead, they are taught different skills that are suitable for a wide number of jobs. A Theatre Major knows how to communicate with large groups of people, they’re charismatic, empathetic. An English Major might be taught to think outside the box. History Majors might be pros at synthesizing and organizing information.

So what are these people trying to say? Lots of things probably, but, as life isn’t a multiple choice quiz… maybe we should take our liberal arts major and happily roll with it.

And when we say “roll”, we’re hopefully not talking about hamburgers.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Quantum Computing Seminar

The Strange World of Quantum Computing

Samuel Lomonaco, CSEE, UMBC

2:30-3:00 Tuesday, 5 November 2013, ITE 325b

This talk will give an introductory overview of quantum computing in an intuitive and conceptual fashion. No prior knowledge of quantum mechanics will be assumed. This is the first of a series of talks based on the four invited lectures given at Oxford. PowerPoint slides can be found online here.

Samuel J. Lomonaco is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is internationally known for his many contributions in mathematics and in computer science. His research interests span a wide range of subjects from knot theory, algebraic and differential topology to algebraic coding theory, quantum computation, and symbolic computation. In quantum cryptography, he has shown how quantum information theory can be used to gain a better understanding of eavesdropping with quantum entanglement. In quantum computation, he has shown how Lie groups can be used to solve problems arising in the study of quantum entanglement. In 2000 Professor Lomonoco organized the first American Mathematical Society short course on quantum computation.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Virgin America Safety Video #VXsafetydance

We’re all pretty sick of the generic, “here’s your oxygen mask, we love our customers” airline safety video. But Virgin America recently created a new video where the only sick thing is the beat. According to the company,

Gone are the days of struggling to pay attention to the demonstration in front of you, watching very formal information about fire exists and seatbelts merge into a blur of words. Now, the possibilities for what a safety video can be are endless.

It looks like this video may have endless updates.

The Federal Aviation Authority just announced that passengers can now keep there phones, laptops and electrical devices powered on during lift off and landings. The phones cannot be used to place phone calls but employed for music, games etc. 

Virgin promises to update its safety video regularly to incorporate the new FAA changes … even offering a talent audition via instagram for new performers.

Perhaps other airlines can take a hint for how to make their flights less bland. Or perhaps, they could hire the director of Step Up 2: The Streets to film their safety videos.

M.S. Thesis Defense
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Fast Modular Exponentiation Using Residue Domain Representation:
A Hardware Reference Implementation and Analysis

Christopher D. Nguyen

12:00–2:00pm, Tuesday, 5 November 2013, ITE 228, UMBC

Using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) we engineered and analyzed the first hardware implementation of Phatak’s reduced-precision residue number system (RP-RNS) to perform modular exponentiation.

Residue number systems (RNSs) provide an alternative representation to the binary system for performing integer arithmetic used in applications such as public-key cryptography and digital signal processing. They offer full parallel computation for addition, subtraction, and multiplication increasing performance from O(K) to O(lg K) for a K-bit number. However, base extension, division, and sign detection become harder operations.

RP-RNS is a new set of algorithms that uses approximation and a time-memory trade-off to address the hard operations. The partial reconstruction (PR) algorithm addresses base extension and the quotient-first scaling (QFS) algorithm addresses scaling. RP-RNS modular exponentiation uses the PR and QFS algorithms. RP-RNS improves performance of modular multiplication in an RNS with range [0, M-1] from the O((lg n)^2) delay of current systems (e.g. Cox-Rower) to a theoretical O(lg n) delay where n is the word-length of M.

Our implementation is based on Phatak’s description and recommended architecture diagrams. We found even low-end FPGAs can store over 30 channels of logic. Following the recommendation of parallel look-up table (LUT) access, we distributed the LUTs to be local to each channel. We found this recommendation applied to QFS exceeds the capacity of today’s high-capacity FPGAs (e.g. Xilinx Virtex-7) for modest 2,000-bit divisors. We propose several improvements to increase feasibility; one is to store the LUTs external to the FPGA, which would introduce a performance penalty per look-up.

Committee: Alan Sherman (chair), Dhananjay Phatak, Chintan Patel and
Ryan Robucci

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

The typochondriac

Welcome to Alcatraz

Agressive Twitter follower

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

Braxton: A brush flavored script font – only $19!