The following full-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

Entry-Level Copywriter - Agora Incorporated - 9260803
Laboratory Research Technician - University of MD, Baltimore - 6260790
GA/R & D Chemist - Randstad North America - 9260809
Medical Scribe in ER Department - Scribes STAT - 9258445
Marketing and Communications Coordinator - Business Suites of Columbia - 9260758

Benefits Operations Administrator - Aon Hewitt - 9260740
Sales - Beverage Division - PepsiCo - 9260710
Research Assistant - Boox Allen Hamilton - 9260668
Software Developer - PCR Educator - 9260683

On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines within the next month.

Dupont

Position:  Associate Investigator - Early Career R&D - 9260355
Resume Submission End:  September 27, 2013

T. Rowe Price
Position:  Investment Fellowship - 9260121
Resume Submission End:  September 27, 2013

SB & Company, LLC
Position:  Audit Staff - 9260581
Resume Submission End:  September 30, 2013

GE
Position:  Information Technology Leadership Program - 9259928
Resume Submission End:  October 3, 2013
Position:  GE Aviation Summer 2014 Engineering Co-Op - 9259930
Resume Submission End:  October 2, 2013

Lockheed Martin
Position:  Engineering Career Opportunities (CS/CE) - 9260278
Resume Submission End:  October 3, 2013

DRC
Position:  IT Consultant - 9260559
Position:  Engineer - 9260565
Position:  Developer - 9260561
Resume Submission End:  October 10, 2013

Deloitte
Position: Federal Security & Privacy Consultant - 9259839
Resume Submission End:  October 14, 2013

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.

The Workforce Recruitment Program for College Students with Disabilities (WRP) is a recruitment and referral program that connects public and private sector employers nationwide with students and recent graduates with disabilities who are qualified and interview through the program. 

This year they have decided to conduct phone interviews.The deadline to initiate the registration online is September 25, 2013.  Deadline to complete the application is September 30, 2013. Phone interviews will be scheduled sometime between October 1st and October 18th.

To qualify for the program students must have 1) a disability, 2) be a U.S. Citizen, 3) be a current full-time student or have not graduated prior to December 2012 (unless the severity of the disability precludes the student from taking a full-time course load).  

To be eligible to interview the student must follow the steps on the attached flyer.

The possible opportunities are for both full-time and internships for all majors.

The program is run on an annual basis (fall semester).  Students who interviewed with the WRP last semester will need to reapply this semester.

What is Poka-Yoke?

Poka-Yoke is a Japanese term that means “mistake-proofing”. In other words, the goal is to make an object that prevents the user from messing up. We live in a complicated world, but good design concepts like poka-yoke help us navigate everyday experience. Small design features and visual clues can influence the safety and efficiency of everyday objects, even without realizing it. This concept is more prevalent in industrial design, but it applies to software as well.

For completeness, I should mention that poka-yoke is closely related to affordances, but they’re not interchangeable. An affordance is more of a cue that informs how the object should be used, but may not necessarily prevent a mistake.

The Good, The Bad, and The Poka-Yoke

In a typical bathroom there’s a great example and a terrible example of poka-yoke. Here’s a photo for reference:

Image courtesy Flickr user juhansonin.

The good example is the sink. Provided the pipes aren’t clogged, the small hole on the side of the sink should prevent any kind of overflows. The sink itself can only be used in one way; you turn the handle and then water comes out. It’s pretty difficult for the user to mess it up.

The bad example is the shower. There’s usually too many knobs, too many ways to pull and twist them, and too many things that leave the user confused. More than likely, mistakes will be made with undesirable outcomes before the user stumbles into the right settings. If you travel and stay in hotels a lot, you’re probably very familiar with this first world problem.

Poka-Yoke in Software

So what does this have to do with software design? Well, software tends to get pretty complicated pretty quickly. More functionality usually means more opportunities for failure.

Image courtesy Apple Inc.

The fingerprint sensor on the iPhone is a great example of a poka-yoke feature. Apple knew that people should utilize passwords for safety reasons, but few people did. Setting up a password and typing it in everytime can also be tedious, and there’s also a slight chance you can forget your password. The fingerprint sensor is a great solution to this, because it’s faster than typing in a password and even if it’s not 100% secure, it’s much better than nothing.

On the web, it’s almost impossible to make a website 100% foolproof. However, much like security, there are many techniques you can use that will act as deterrents and steer people towards their goals, but there are two big ones to look out for:

Remove And Combine Functions

First, most websites have way too many things that are clickable. Try to eliminate unnecessary functionality, and if you can’t get rid of it, try combining it with something else if it makes sense to do so. For example, many shows will combine temperature and water pressure into 1 knob. This eliminates the user’s ability to create a “hot-but-low-pressure” shower, but most people wouldn’t want that anyway. Minimizing functionality and clickable elements might seem obvious, but if your website is old and has suffered from some feature creep, it might be time to do some spring cleaning with a fresh perspective.

Avoid Failure States

Second, don’t allow the user to do things that could result in a failure state. I’ve seen way too many forms that let me type in lots of invalid input before submitting. It’s only after I click the button I find out that “usernames must be 8 characters long” or that I mistyped my email address or something else stupid (can you sense the frustration?). Real-time form validation is just one example of how failure can be prevented before it happens. Why even allow the form to be submitted if a field is invalid?

If you have any examples of Poka-Yoke design, I’d love to hear about it in the comments! It’s always so delightful when you come across one you haven’t spotted, because the best poka-yoke designs are the ones you’ve seen with your own eyes but haven’t consciously noticed.

The post Poka-Yoke: The Quest for Mistake-Proof Designs appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Kimberly Moffitt joins panelists on The Marc Steiner Show to continue the ongoing discussion on the mass shooting tragedy at the Washington, D.C. Naval Yard, last Monday.

The panelists, who also include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, E.R. Shipp, and Dr. Richard Vatz, professor, Towson University, shared thoughts on the speculative and often sensational media reaction to tragic events in the age of the 24-hour news cycle.

“This was a good news day for media because there was so much to talk about, so much to speculate on. I found much of the news coverage to be reactionary and sensational,” said Moffitt. “But, I also felt like it was doing exactly what we have seen about news media for a long time. And that is getting us, as viewers, to feed into the culture of fear.”

Listen to the full segment »