BLADE RUNNERS

On a Thursday night at the Retriever Activities Center, amidst a hard-fought pickup game of basketball  and  wrestling practice on large mats, a group clad in loose-fitting, traditional Japanese-style garments clashes with wooden training swords called shinai.

These warriors are members of the UMBC Kendo Club, students of the samurai tradition of kendo, or “The Way of the Sword.” Over a 90-minute training session, they engage with head-and-body-armored instructors from a group called Baltimore-Annapolis Kendo in controlled exercises and watch demonstrations of the sort of action group members might expect in kendo competitions.

The club was founded in 2010, when club president and co-founder Christopher Nam ’13, biology, transferred to UMBC from Virginia Tech, where he’d taken up kendo as a way of dealing with ADHD. “When I thought about all the clubs UMBC had to offer, I felt that kendo was a better alternative to many,” says Nam, who observes that kendo disciplines not only the body, but also the mind.

Instructor Phil Van Den Berghe ’09, computer science, agrees. “On the surface, it looks like just a lot of fighting and hitting with sticks, but it’s a lot deeper than that,” he says. “The real purpose of kendo isn’t to learn how to fight, but to learn how to be a better person.”

The club initially held its sessions off campus due to lack of space, but full recognition as a club sport last year has spurred interest and membership. Kendo club vice president Mirsaid Parmanov ’13, biology says: “I can definitely see the club being here for a long time.”

 – Nathan Glover ’12

POWER PLAY

UMBC’s chess team is a regular contender at the annual President’s Cup, also known as the “Final Four” of chess. But UMBC’s elite chess players recently sought out a game in a different venue: the state capitol building in Annapolis.

During this year’s session of the Maryland General Assembly, UMBC’s chess team was formally recognized on the floor of both the state’s Senate and its House of Delegates with a citation from Speaker Pro Tem and UMBC alumna Adrienne Jones ’76, psychology.

Members of the team also stayed to play a series of friendly chess matches with the members of the Maryland General Assembly Chess Challenge, including Senators Jamie Raskin, Bryan Simonaire and Ulysses Currie. (Currie co-sponsored the Senate recognition of the team with Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, Jr.)

“We ended up playing for about two hours games with some of the senators,” said Sabina Foisor ’12, modern languages and linguistics, a team member who is currently a graduate student at UMBC.  “We all had a good time and hope to be able to do it again.”

Collin Wojciechowski ’13, political science and media & communication studies, who also serves as UMBC’s government relations assistant, observed that the event was not set up as tournament-style play, but rather a sort of round-robin in which each student played a legislator multiple times.

“From what I saw,” says Wojciechowski, “a legislator never won a game.”

–  Nicole Ruediger

WORD POWER

For most people, Scrabble is just a word game. For Linda Oliva, it’s a ticket to the world.

Oliva, an assistant professor of secondary education at UMBC, plays in three local clubs, including one on campus, and teaches the game at school Scrabble clubs. She has played on the national competitive circuit for 12 years, attended the national tournament six times and even competed in Italian.

This summer, in fact, she’s going on a three-week Adriatic cruise, “playing Scrabble when we’re not visiting amazing places.” It’s her fourth Scrabble cruise.

The game got her started, but fellow players keep her interested. “You play with such diverse people,” she said. She’s met musicians and mathematicians, retired librarians and a man determined to visit every Starbucks. “They’re a colorful group,” she said.

Dr. Oliva usually travels with her friend, Dave Engelhart, to two tournaments a month.  They’ve taken their boards — hers is custom-made — to tournaments in South America, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.

“The good thing about scrabble is anybody can play,” she said.

And, in fact, Oliva is such a believer she has spread the Scrabble obsession to several Baltimore area schools, including Mount Pleasant Christian School, her first club, and Arbutus Middle School, where she has led their club to regional and national tournaments for three years.

She teaches strategies for winning — rules about words and keeping an eye on those double- and triple-word scores.

“There’s always the first play. And then there’s the best play,” she said.

Her students have learned.

“And then they beat me,” she said.

“Coaching kids when they make a great move and get all these points, it’s really joyful,” Oliva explains. “They really enjoy playing and learning,”

Oliva got hooked on the game playing with her family in Silver Spring. They not only played Scrabble, they finished each game by using all the words on the board to tell a story.

Eventually Oliva discovered study is the key to winning and she started beating her older sister, Debbie, who is now a teacher.

Important words good players know:

• All the two-letter words. “You shouldn’t even step foot in the club if you don’t know your two letter words,” she warned.
• Unusual words such as “howf.” “They are all good Scrabble words,” she said.
• Seven-letter words. (Remember “retinas.” It’s a high-frequency bingo word.)

Oliva has a curiosity about words — from their meanings to working out anagrams – to the point where she’s worn out a dictionary. “I love it because I keep learning,” she said.

–  Mary K. Tilghman ’79

UMBC’s Scrabble Club meets Mondays in the Administration Building lobby, 7-11 p.m.

A SIDELINE VIEW

It doesn’t get much better than watching your favorite team win the Super Bowl – especially if you work closely with them and get to be there in person.

Alan Sokoloff ’82, health science and policy, headed to New Orleans earlier this year as one of the team chiropractors for the Baltimore Ravens. Sokoloff helps tend to player injuries, but he also assists healthy Ravens in getting their joints functioning as efficiently as possible in order to gain a competitive edge.

“At the NFL level, that one one-hundredth of a second makes a huge difference between getting tackled and scoring a touchdown,” he says.

A back injury in college from carrying disc jockey equipment was what first prompted Sokoloff to see a chiropractor. He grew so fascinated by the profession that he ended up studying it.

After attending chiropractic school in Iowa, Sokoloff returned to Baltimore to open his own practice. He interned with the United States Olympic Training Center, earning a spot on the medical team for the 1998 Goodwill Games and 1999 Pan Am games. Those experiences led him directly to a spot with the Ravens, with whom he has worked for 13 years.

Sokoloff says that being able to make a difference when it comes to a player’s performance is the real motivation for his football work. “It’s not all glamour,” he says, “but there’s so much satisfaction in knowing you’re one of the thousands of doctors who have actually gotten that far.”

And it doesn’t hurt, of course, to get to see the Ravens win it all in the Superdome.

“There’s just something about all that confetti falling,” Sokoloff says.

 – Laura Lefavor ’13

Oracle has just announced the release of their Java Platform Enterprise Edition 7, Java EE7 with many new HTML5 development related features to the new framework.

MIT Technology Review’s first mobile-focused conference featured some big names and big news.

Last night we wrapped up our first Mobile Summit, a two-day event dedicated to an incredibly important and exciting area of technological innovation.

There has been furious debate in the last twenty four hours on the merits and failings of Apple’s iOS7 update, and the most hotly debated subject is the new icons.

They’ve been hailed as a daring, and radical move, and they’ve been condemned as a half-hearted Android rip-off.

Apple are hoping that they’ll mark the start of a sustainable alternative to skeuomorphism that isn’t constrained by flat design.

Personally, I’ve always hated most of the iPhone’s native icons, I find icons like the sunflower image — I’ve never taken a photograph of a sunflower in my life — to be both naïve and a little lazy. I was optimistic therefore that a redesign would mean carrying something a little more thoughtful in my pocket in future. The result however, is a mixed bag:

iOS6 & iOS7 comparison by nielsboey.

Some consistency has been attempted; the communication icons (Phone, FaceTime and Messages) are the same ectoplasmic green. Whilst the FaceTime icon is an improvement if only because the original icon was so poor. The white phone and speech bubble have considerably less contrast than their prior incarnations and are therefore less clear.

The Passbook icon may be a success, it blends more easily with the rest of the icons than the previous version. The Mail icon is also a success, despite the poor gradient, the well established icon is clean and easy to read. The Music player icon is also a success, its color differentiating it from the rest of the set, although the brackets joining the dots to the main stems on the musical note look a little clumsy.

Much was has been made of Apple dropping the green felt and wood look from icons like the Game Center, but it’s hard to see the icon’s new incarnation as much more than a middle weight designer’s attempt to portrait everything, and nothing in one fell swoop.

There are the traditional issues Apple has with americanisms: the Maps icon looks like an American sat nav, but it’s unlike a map elsewhere in the world. Surely a map is one of the simplest icons to draw?

By far and away the biggest flop is the re-design of the Newsstand icon. Featuring the words ‘News’, ‘Art’, ‘Travel’ and ‘Sports’ it is supposed to represent a variety of magazines. Will it be redesigned for Germany, or Japan, or China, or Swaziland? If there’s one rule that icon designers should live (and die) by it’s this: if you have to add text to explain your drawing, you didn’t draw it well enough.

The rest of the icons are largely an attempt to ‘flatten’ the existing designs. So Stocks is a flat version of the earlier version. Weather looses its gloss as does Videos. Curiously the Camera icon has managed to retain inner shadows and a similar gradient to its earlier version.

The singularly biggest issue — apart from the color — is that so many of the icons are clearly intended to be round, but are crammed inside rounded rectangles. iTunes, Clock, AppStore, Compass, Safari, all feature circles larger than their predecessor. With the exception of Clock — which has never had enough space — each circle has been enlarged to decrease the amount of space between it and the edge of the icon. This results in an awkward, uncomfortable effect.

I suspect that these icons were originally designed as circles to match the circular number input elsewhere in the OS, and Apple either lost their courage, or couldn’t rationalize the other icons in a similar vein.

And that is probably the biggest problem with the iOS7 redesign; Apple set out with good intentions, but their fear of profit margins kept them from designing something truly exciting.

What do you think of the icons in iOS7? Which is the best, and which is the worst? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, uses flat smartphone image via Freebiesbug.

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Donald F. Norris, professor and chair of public policy at UMBC, has published an op-ed in today’s Baltimore Sun that gives a sense of scale to Joe Flacco’s $20 million Ravens contract in relation to education funding in Maryland.

Norris writes, “We could do a lot with $20 million to support the education of our students that would further ensure that they graduate with the best learning possible, and would make even more certain that, no matter where their futures take them, they are as well equipped to succeed as possible.” Read the full op-ed at the Baltimore Sun.

“Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown and Howard County Executive Ken Ulman shook up Maryland’s 2014 gubernatorial race by announcing they will run as a ticket for the Democratic nomination in 2014. Politically and electorally, it’s a shrewd and gutsy move,” writes UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller in today’s Baltimore Sun.

Schaller notes, “Picking running mates before the primary remains unconventional,” with most gubernatorial and presidential candidates assuming they should make solo nomination bids and pick running mates only after receiving the nomination. Brown and Ulman, however, are positioning themselves as a complementary ticket, highlighting Brown’s service in the state legislature and executive levels and Ulman’s experience as county legislator and top county official. The candidates are also complementary in the voters they will draw, with Brown’s support in Prince George’s County, Montgomery County and Baltimore City, and Ulman’s strength in Howard County and Baltimore County.

How might gubernatorial aspirant Doug Gansler compete with the ticket? Schaller suggests he “convince rising star and openly gay [Del. Heather] Mizeur to join his ticket, setting up an epic clash for power within the post-O’Malley Democratic Party.”