The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (UAWG) today published updated Working Drafts of User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0 and Implementing UAAG 2.0, which define how browsers, media players, and other "user agents" should support accessibility for people with disabilities and work with assistive technologies. These drafts have new examples of how UAAG applies in the mobile environment, an updated conformance section, and new definitions of level A, AA, and AAA. Learn more in the call for review e-mail and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Trends start everyday: an idea is adopted, passed on and before you know it it’s being discussed on design blogs. However, most trends vanish as quickly as they appeared. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everything will be trendy for 15 minutes. Once in a while, an idea is found to have something so fundamental about it that it thrives, even after the initial clamor dies down. Responsive design was one such ‘trend’ and flat-design looks like becoming another.

Flat design — which is more of a rejection of 3D artifice than it is a style — fits so perfectly into the contemporary landscape that it’s already hard to envisage a time when it wasn’t de rigueur.

To help you take the leap into flat design we’ve put together this great freebie: A free flat UI kit designed especially for Webdesigner Depot by Freepik.  As you know, Freepik.com is a leading search engine that indexes vectors, PSDs and photos free for personal and commercial use. It’s a great resource for graphic designers as their engine locates free graphic content and it displays the results in an orderly layout for easy access. 

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Cartonika: Vector Cartoon Characters – only $37!

Trends start everyday: an idea is adopted, passed on and before you know it it’s being discussed on design blogs. However, most trends vanish as quickly as they appeared. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everything will be trendy for 15 minutes. Once in a while, an idea is found to have something so fundamental about it that it thrives, even after the initial clamor dies down. Responsive design was one such ‘trend’ and flat-design looks like becoming another.

Flat design — which is more of a rejection of 3D artifice than it is a style — fits so perfectly into the contemporary landscape that it’s already hard to envisage a time when it wasn’t de rigueur.

To help you take the leap into flat design we’ve put together this great freebie: A free flat UI kit designed especially for Webdesigner Depot by Freepik.  As you know, Freepik.com is a leading search engine that indexes vectors, PSDs and photos free for personal and commercial use. It’s a great resource for graphic designers as their engine locates free graphic content and it displays the results in an orderly layout for easy access. 

See the full preview below and subscribe below to download the file. You can use the file for personal and commercial uses. Enjoy and share this with your friends!

Magnolia: 150+ Professional Infographic Elements – only $9!

In this Treehouse Quick Tip, teacher Jim Hoskins will show you how to write a simple JavaScript module. Modules are useful in writing JavaScript, because they allow us to write code that is less likely to interfere with other code on our page.

It allows us to selectively expose parts of the code to other programs running on our page. This makes our JavaScript code more resilient and easier to maintain.

The post How to Write a Module in JavaScript – Quick Tip appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Five students in UMBC's College of Engineering and Information Technology have been selected for major scholarships to pursue studies in cybersecurity-related fields under UMBC's participation in the National Science Foundation's Scholarship for Service (SFS) Federal CyberCorps program. As SFS Scholars, students receive full tuition, fees, annual reimbursement of professional development expenses ($3,000), a nine-month stipend ($20,000 for undergraduates, $25,000 for MS/MPS students, and $30,000 for PhD students) for up to two years (three years for PhD), and assistance with federal cybersecurity internships and career placement.

The awardees for AY13-14 are:

Nathan Price, MS (CMPE)
Punlada Muangrat, BS (IS)
Shannon Mcpherson, MPS (CYBR)
Alex Cooke, BS (IS)
Denis Danilin, MS (IS)

These new awardees will join existing UMBC SFS Scholars Oliver Kubik (BS, CMSC), Mary Mathews (PhD, CMSC), Brendan Masiar (MPS, CYBR) and Brandyn Schult (MPS, CYBR).

The CyberCorps program produces highly-qualified professionals to meet the United States government's increasing need to protect American's cyber infrastructure. While in the program at UMBC, SFS CyberCorps Scholars participate in special SFS program activities, have opportunities to engage in mentored research opportunities both at UMBC and its partners from industry and government, and must complete a paid summer internship for the federal government. Upon graduation, each student must work for the government (for pay) for one year for each year of scholarship received. Drs. Alan Sherman and Richard Forno direct the program under a five-year $2.5 million NSF grant received in 2012.

NOTE:  We expect to have additional SFS slots coming available in January 2014.  Applications for SFS support beginning in the Spring 2014 semester will be accepted through 12PM on Friday, 15 November 2013. All levels of study are welcome to apply — however, students must be admitted to (or already enrolled at) UMBC first before applying for SFS.

For information about SFS (including application information and instructions) and other US government-related cybersecurity scholarships available, please visit cisa.umbc.edu.

Designer Olivia Cheng and her Codecademy team's project Mars Watchtower was selected as a winner for Virtual Participation in the International Space Apps Challenge. We interviewed her to find out how the magic happened.

What led you to apply for the hackathon?

I saw it on Twitter and thought to myself, "Wow, it would be so awesome be involved in that" and then, "Well, why not?" I couldn't attend any of the physical hackathons, but I saw there was a virtual location option. Couldn't hurt to try!

How did you find your team?

I reached out to the Codeacademy group The Open Source Project to see if anyone would be interested, and got positive responses. I thought it would be a good fit since any project submitted to the Space Apps Challenge would be open source, and our team ended up with 5 members total.

What was it like to working together virtually?

I always planned on contributing to one of the GitHub projects started by the group, but I hadn't expected to work with other members in real-time—there's a big difference.

Because of the time zone difference, we took shifts coding—one of us about to sleep would fill the other people in on the progress and what tasks remained. There were hiccups, of course—occasionally someone would accidentally overwrite another person's code, and sometimes a whole page of code would get wiped if Cloud9 IDE crashed while saving (oops!).

Any advice for people who want to do a hackathon?

Plan well. Do as much planning as possible ahead of time or in early hours because you have limited time to do what you need to get done. If you're in a team, have a project manager to coordinate everyone's efforts. Collaborating online can be a lot harder than in person, especially when you can't just walk over to your teammate to quickly discuss something, so set up a workflow ahead of time.

We ended up using Workflowy for managing tasks and Cloud9 IDE for sharing code. Cloud9 IDE allowed us to write, edit and run our code with other team members simultaneously without the hassle of setting up individual local environments.

So... what's next?

I'll keep the project up on GitHub here so that team members (or anyone else) can continue to contribute. Although we didn't win any global awards, our work paid off—we were selected as one of four winners for Virtual Participation.

As for the Codecademy group, I've been talking with the leaders of The Open Source Project and there are some ideas floating around to kickstart some projects in a hackathon-style… so we'll see where that goes :)

Top Charts is a new feature for Google Trends that identifies the popular searches within a category, i.e., books or actors. What’s interesting about it, from a technology standpoint, is that it uses Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide a universe of things and the categories into which they belong. This is a great example of “Things, not strings”, Google’s clever slogan to explain the importance of the Knowledge Graph.

Here’s how it’s explained in in the Trends Top Charts FAQ.

“Top Charts relies on technology from the Knowledge Graph to identify when search queries seem to be about particular real-world people, places and things. The Knowledge Graph enables our technology to connect searches with real-world entities and their attributes. For example, if you search for ice ice baby, you’re probably searching for information about the musician Vanilla Ice or his music. Whereas if you search for vanilla ice cream recipe, you’re probably looking for information about the tasty dessert. Top Charts builds on work we’ve done so our systems do a better job finding you the information you’re actually looking for, whether tasty desserts or musicians.”

One thing to note is that the Knowledge Graph, which is said to have more than 18 billion facts about 570 million objects, is that its objects include more than the traditional named entities (e.g., people, places, things). For example, there is a top chart for Animals that shows that dogs are the most popular animal in Google searches followed by cats (no surprises here) with chickens at number three on the list (could their high rank be due to recipe searches?). The dog object, in most knowledge representation schemes, would be modeled as a concept or class as opposed to an object or instance. In some representation systems, the same term (e.g., dog) can be used to refer to both a class of instances (a class that includes Lassie) and also to an instance (e.g., an instance of the class animal types). Which sense of the term dog is meant (class vs. instance) is determined by the context. In the semantic web representation language OWL 2, the ability to use the same term to refer to a class or a related instance is called punning.

Of course, when doing this kind of mapping of terms to objects, we only want to consider concepts that commonly have words or short phrases used to denote them. Not all concepts do, such as animals that from a long way off look like flies.

A second observation is that once you have a nice knowledge base like the Knowledge Graph, you have a new problem: how can you recognize mentions of its instances in text. In the DBpedia knowledge based (derived from Wikipedia) there are nine individuals named Michael Jordan and two of them were professional basketball players in the NBA. So, when you enter a search query like “When did Michael Jordan play for Penn”, we have to use information in the query, its context and what we know about the possible referents (e.g., those nine Michael Jordans) to decide (1) if this is likely to be a reference to any of the objects in our knowledge base, and (2) if so, to which one. This task, which is a fundamental one in language processing, is not trivial, but luckily, in applications like Top Charts, we don’t have to do it with perfect accuracy.

Google’s Top Charts is a simple, but effective, example that demonstrates the potential usefulness of semantic technology to make our information systems better in the near future.