Feeling the urge for a little theater with a Retriever twist? Mark your calendar for the June opening of Grieving for Genevieve, a play by Kathleen Warnock ’80, INDS. Not only does the show play at the alumna-owned Venus Theatre in Laurel, it stars Karen Costanzi ’92, theatre, as Genevieve.

Venus artistic director Deborah Randall ’94, theatre, chose the play as part of the 2013 season for its thematic fit, but she’s also very excited to work with Warnock, whose plays she greatly admires. Grieving for Genevieve won the John Golden Award for Excellence in Playwriting in 2005, and Warnock has racked up a number of other accolades for her work.

“It is definitely exciting to work with a fellow UMBC alum.  I first met Kathleen at a UMBC theatre event and we exchanged publicly an adoration for Joan Jett in a talk back,” said Randall, who was a 2012 UMBC Alumna of the Year winner.

“I’m always excited to work on a script with multiple female characters that defy the norm in terms of mainstream theatre expectations.  The fact that she sets Grieving for Genevieve in Baltimore in the 90’s had another kind of amazing appeal.  Almost every day we work I yearn for crabs and a piece of Hausner’s strawberry pie.  Mostly, the thing that excites me about Genevieve is the way that she’s captured the truth of the world.  She’s penned this with a blood honesty that comes from the heart and I could feel that the first time I read it.”

The play runs June 6 – 30 (Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m.). For more information, visit the Venus Theatre online.

Stay tuned for a feature about Kathleen Warnock in the Summer 2013 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Read more about Randall in this piece from UMBC Magazine.

In today’s world, almost everything can be purchased by dubious means. If people want it badly enough, they will find a way to obtain it illegally or underhandedly.
Including, it would appear…dinosaurs.

               The United States had the distinct honor of returning over a dozen illegally smuggled dinosaur fossils to the government of Mongolia. The collection included two Tyrannosaurus baatars (relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex), six Oviraptors, and “several” Gallimimuses.

Several of the fossils, including one of the Tyrannosaurus baatars, had been confiscated from an auction after they had been sold by a Florida fossil dealer last June.

Perhaps it goes to show that for some, the opportunity to own an authentic piece of natural history is simply too strong to resist. For the rest of us, a trip to the museum ought to still be enough.

In today’s world, almost everything can be purchased by dubious means. If people want it badly enough, they will find a way to obtain it illegally or underhandedly.
Including, it would appear…dinosaurs.

               The United States had the distinct honor of returning over a dozen illegally smuggled dinosaur fossils to the government of Mongolia. The collection included two Tyrannosaurus baatars (relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex), six Oviraptors, and “several” Gallimimuses.

Several of the fossils, including one of the Tyrannosaurus baatars, had been confiscated from an auction after they had been sold by a Florida fossil dealer last June.

Perhaps it goes to show that for some, the opportunity to own an authentic piece of natural history is simply too strong to resist. For the rest of us, a trip to the museum ought to still be enough.

Social media is useful for more than just sharing pictures of what you ate for lunch.

By examining geotagged posts on Twitter, researchers at Floating Sheep have been able to construct a map of common racial, homophobic and other discriminatory slurs across the the US.

The map, which is called “Geography of Hate,” builds on a previous project from the research center that shows the locations of racial slurs against President Obama. According to researchers, the purpose of this new project is to better examine the use of social media as a platform for hate:

The prominence of debates around online bullying and the censorship of hate speech prompted us to examine how social media has become an important conduit for hate speech, and how particular terminology used to degrade a given minority group is expressed geographically.

Instead of analyzing the tweets algorithmically based on key words, the researchers are now examining each tweet individually to weed out non-derogatory uses of the words and slurs in question. About 150,000 tweets were flagged and categorized by a group of students from Humboldt State University between June 2012 and April 2013.

The derogatory tweets in any given place are weighted by the total amount of tweets in the area, meaning some results are not what one would expect–Orange County, California produced the most hateful tweets, but its significant amount of Twitter activity in general made it less prominent on the map than other areas.

Interested in learning more about the results of this study? Check out the details here.

The System Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Raw Socket API. This API provides interfaces to raw UDP sockets, TCP client sockets and TCP server sockets. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The side project series is a series of posts in which we’ll be taking a look at the best of designers’ side projects. To get things started, this week we’re going to be looking at Type Fight, a side project by designers Drew Roper, Ryan Paule and Bryan Butler.

Type Fight plays host to weekly “fights” in which two designers are asked to create a typographic treatment of the same character and then have their final designs voted on to determine whose is best. So far, Type Fight has hosted 61 guest fights between design heavyweights such as Alex Perez, Rogie King, Brendan Pittman, and Aaron Eiland, to name a few. There is also an ongoing battle between Drew and Ryan, who are now due to face off for an 11th time.

At the moment the site is on hiatus whilst currently being redesigned. However, you can still check out the old site and all of the fights that have previously taken place.

Here’s our collection of some of the highlights:

Which of these characters are your favourite? Do you have a similar side project? Let us know in the comments.

MEGA Android Bundle: Templates, Icons & more – only $18!

The side project series is a series of posts in which we’ll be taking a look at the best of designers’ side projects. To get things started, this week we’re going to be looking at Type Fight, a side project by designers Drew Roper, Ryan Paule and Bryan Butler.

Type Fight plays host to weekly “fights” in which two designers are asked to create a typographic treatment of the same character and then have their final designs voted on to determine whose is best. So far, Type Fight has hosted 61 guest fights between design heavyweights such as Alex Perez, Rogie King, Brendan Pittman, and Aaron Eiland, to name a few. There is also an ongoing battle between Drew and Ryan, who are now due to face off for an 11th time.

At the moment the site is on hiatus whilst currently being redesigned. However, you can still check out the old site and all of the fights that have previously taken place.

Here’s our collection of some of the highlights:

Which of these characters are your favourite? Do you have a similar side project? Let us know in the comments.

MEGA Android Bundle: Templates, Icons & more – only $18!

In this episode of The Treehouse Show, Nick Pettit (@nickrp) and Jason Seifer (@jseifer) talk about HTML Video and the Web as a Gaming Platform.

Here are the links for the week:

Cross browser compatible HTML5 videos | CatsWhoCode.com
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/cross-browser-compatible-html5-videos

Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming | The Mozilla Blog
http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/03/27/mozilla-is-unlocking-the-power-of-the-web-as-a-platform-for-gaming/

jQuery 2.0 Released | Official jQuery Blog
http://blog.jquery.com/2013/04/18/jquery-2-0-released/

jQuery Builder
http://projects.jga.me/jquery-builder/

shame.css — CSS Wizardry — CSS, OOCSS, front-end architecture, performance and more, by Harry Roberts
http://csswizardry.com/2013/04/shame-css/

User Inter Faces
http://uifaces.com/

Single page apps in depth (a.k.a. Mixu’ single page app book)
http://singlepageappbook.com/single-page.html

Responsive Multi-Level Menu | Codrops
http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/04/19/responsive-multi-level-menu/

The post HTML Video and the Web as a Gaming Platform | Treehouse Show Ep 39 appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Page Visibility. This specification defines a means for site developers to programmatically determine the current visibility state of the page in order to develop power and CPU efficient web applications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.