Find out more here: http://umbctraining.com/about/employment-opportunities
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The Web Performance Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation and two First Public Working Drafts today:
Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.
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Talk about a hands-on experience. What started as a class project in entrepreneurship has turned into a real-life business opportunity for a handful of University of Maryland, Baltimore County students.
The group of students, who were part of a fall 2012 freshman seminar class on entrepreneurship and innovation, have sold the intellectual property rights for their class creation — a campus navigation mobile application — to Hanover’s Tecore Networks. The goal of the class was for students to work together to develop an idea for a product or service, then work together to bring their idea to market.
Read more at http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2013/10/14/umbc-students-turned-entrepreneurs.html
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Masking Module Level 1. CSS Masking provides two means for partially or fully hiding portions of visual elements: masking and clipping. Masking describes how to use another graphical element or image as a luminance or alpha mask. Clipping describes the visible region of visual elements. Comments are welcome through 10 December. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity.
]]>Meet Christine. She is a history major and current Undergraduate Research Award (URA) Scholar. Her research examines the Lost Colony of Roanoke as an historical and cultural phenomenon, specifically looking into the origin of the Dare Stones in order to define the root of the Lost Colony’s appeal to Americans and as a part of North Carolinian folklore.
How did you find your mentor for your research project?
I had taken Dr. Bouton’s 342 history class on the American Revolution as a freshman and loved the passion he had for American history. When I began looking for a mentor, he was one of the first professors who came to mind; I knew he would have invaluable insight into not only the research process, but into the specific research I hoped to carry out.
How did you know this was the project you wanted to do?
The Lost Colony is a story I grew up with, having spent much of my time growing up at the Outer Banks, North Carolina. During a stay there September of 2012, I visited Manteo and was intrigued even more by the mystery of the missing colonists. Interestingly enough, however, few people I spoke to outside of North Carolina had ever heard of the story – and as a born and bred Southerner, and an historian as well, I knew I had to do what I could to help preserve not only the legacy of the Lost Colonists, but their continued influence through myth, legend, and fact upon the American conscience.
Is this your first independent research project?
This is my first funded independent research; however, I’m simultaneously continuing to do research on Civil War-era Virginian plantations that grew out of a history class taken during my sophomore year at UMBC.
Do you get course credit for this work? How much time do you put into it?
I am not conducting this research for course credit. I spend about 20 to 30 hours a week on the project; during late July, I am spending ten days traveling to Manteo, North Carolina, as well as visiting Brenau University, Emory University, and East Carolina University in order to interview folklorists, historians, and locals of the Manteo (originally Roanoke) area.
How did you hear about the Undergraduate Research Award (URA) program?
I was aware of the URA program through attending the URCAD presentations each spring.
Read her abstract here...
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Today's leaders must be able to communicate vision in such a way that the audience is engaged and everyone understands and internalizes the message. Effective leadership communication gives purpose and meaning to the work that people do. Leaders should strive to communicate vision with a sense of integrity, building trust as an individual and as a leader.
This course provides a general introduction to vision communication, including its nature and its purpose. You will be guided through numerous techniques and methods for a leader to successfully communicate vision, such as personalizing and multiplying a clear message, communicating enthusiasm in an authentic way, and making the organization's vision the employees' own vision. Materials designed to support blended learning activities aligned with this course are available from the Resources Page.
This is course number: lead_05_a02_bs_enus
Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.
For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.
To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.
]]>The following is a guest post by Parker Bennett. Parker is a bit of a regular around here, known for tackling common problems with unique solutions. This time he's back at it creating complex shapes that have image backgrounds, shadows, and curves, yet are flexible.
I love to collaborate on design because it often pushes me to try new things. Recently, I was given a design comp something like this: a rounded compound shape serving as a fixed header, with a textured inset that had an inner shadow all around (a "well"). Well, I thought, how hard could this be?
Curvy!
One answer was super easy, of course: I could have opted to slice up an image and use transparent .png files for the curvy bottom - shadow and all - with an "end-cap" that would allow the right-half to resize responsively (the first column was designed to be fixed-width).
But I wanted more flexibility down the road, so I decided to tackle it using CSS. Here's the approach I wound up taking, Nothing whiz-bangy, just good old CSS:
CodePen turned out to be indispensable for all my experimentation, as well as for client review. One big advantage was being able to write in SCSS and quickly see the result: I could try different widths, colors, shadows, border radii, etc., just by changing variables.
I used variables for certain heights and widths, as well as box-shadow and border-radius sizes, then used those to calculate additional sizes - using ratios where it made sense to tie elements of the design together.
Variables rock!
For most projects I use a centered .page-wrap that's a percentage of the browser window. But when you pin your header to the top using position: fixed, it's no longer contained by the page-wrap. One solution is to start the page-wrap after the fixed header, and include a header-wrap that duplicates the width, margins, and padding of the page-wrap (details in this CodePen).
To maintain the illusion of the scrolling content being in a "cut-out" section below, I used overflow: hidden to crop the header's drop shadow at the sides. This meant a second wrapper div, in order to also maintain a little padding between the content and the window frame at small widths (yes, I'm just that anal).
Naturally, I wanted to keep the markup lean, and not depend on source order for the layout. I used pseudo elements where they seemed to make sense, and relied a lot on absolute positioning to put things in their place - using z-index to change how they overlapped. Because absolute positioning removes the element from the layout flow, I would need to compensate at times, for example, adding padding to other elements to fill that space.
As I worked out the positioning, I found I could paint myself into a z-index corner thanks to the peculiarities of stacking order: z-index requires positioning to work, un-positioned elements render first, and it's easy to lose track of what elements are constrained by "stacking context" - for example, pseudo-elements can't rise above the z-index of their parent (see demo on CodePen).
I also changed the z-index of shadows, making them a separate pseudo element. This let me tuck shadows behind objects where they needed to be obscured or, as on the sides of the .main scrolling content, raise them up to cover anything that reached the edge so as not break the illusion of depth.
/* elements that reach the edges of .main need to fall
under edge shadow to maintain "cut-out" illusion */
.well-sides {
/* child elements absolute */
position: relative;
overflow: hidden; }
.well-sides:before, .well-sides:after {
content: "";
display: block;
position: absolute;
/* higher than any z-index in .main, lower than header */
z-index: 99;
/* shadow size */
top: -20px;
height: 120%;
/* shadow size */
width: 20px;
background: transparent; }
.well-sides:before {
left: 0;
/* negative spread */
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 20px -20px 20px -20px rgba(0,0,0,0.35);
-moz-box-shadow: inset 20px -20px 20px -20px rgba(0,0,0,0.35);
box-shadow: inset 20px -20px 20px -20px rgba(0,0,0,0.35); }
.well-sides:after {
right: 0;
/* negative spread */
-webkit-box-shadow: inset -20px 20px 20px -20px rgba(0,0,0,0.35);
-moz-box-shadow: inset -20px 20px 20px -20px rgba(0,0,0,0.35);
box-shadow: inset -20px 20px 20px -20px rgba(0,0,0,0.35); }Unfortunately, there's no practical way to create an object with a concave curve in CSS. Where the two rounded rectangles joined, I used a "patch" to cover the inset box-shadow "seam" and extend the textured background into the area of the inner corner. Then I overlapped it with a rounded white corner, creating the negative space as a positive. Finally, I added a normal box-shadow to the rounded corner (cropped by overflow: hidden) to blend it in with the inset box-shadow.
Outset shadow in "patch" had to be "opacified" a bit to match inset.
The inner circle
For the other inner curves I positioned a transparent square with one rounded corner and a thick white border on either side to complete the illusion. I used the border-radius and box-shadow sizes as variables to determine the size and placement of the corners.
Here's how I put the pieces together:
Slideshow here. If reading through syndication, see the real blog post to see the slideshow.
It's true I like a good challenge, but working it out this way also gave me a lot of flexibility during the process, and a head start on a mobile responsive layout (straightening the curvy bottom at smaller sizes, truncating the menu, etc.). At any rate, I hope you found some useful bits in my way-too-thorough exploration. If you have any questions, comments, or corrections, drop me a line: parker@parkerbennett.com.
Well Rounded: Compound Shapes in CSS is a post from CSS-Tricks
]]>The theme of the fourth volume of Trans-Scripts is
"Constructing (Dis)Ability." We welcome a wide range of submissions
from a variety of disciplines. Founded in 2010, Trans-Scripts is a
student-run and edited interdisciplinary journal, and the editorial collective
of graduate students come from diverse academic fields, including English,
History, Culture & Theory, Psychology and Social Behavior, Anthropology,
Philosophy, Women’s Studies, and African-American Studies. Faculty advisors
represent an even more varied range of disciplines. All submissions will be
reviewed by both students and faculty to ensure the highest quality of work.
Though the journal is primarily a forum for student work, faculty are welcome to contribute as
well. We also publish editorials by renowned experts on each theme covered.
For more information, theTrans-Scripts
journal can be accessed at the following website: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/collective/hctr/trans-scripts/ . Please
direct all general inquiries about the journal or any comments on published
pieces to our 2013-2014 volume’s Editor-in-Chief, Andrea Milne, at
milnea@uci.edu.
The deadline for submissions is January 10, 2014.
