This week the UMBC chess program will field a team in the 2012 Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship which will take place December 27-30 in Princeton, NJ.

The UMBC team is shown here along with GM Sam Palatnik (Chess Program Associate Director), Alan Sherman (Chess Program Director and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering) and  NM Igor Epshteyn (Chess Program Coach). The current team lineup includes Giorgi Margvelashvili (Captain), Niclas Huschenbeth, Sasha Kaplan, Nazi Paikidze and alternates Sabina Foisor and Adithya Balasubramanian.

The Pan-Am tournament has been held annually since 1946 and determines the top university chess team in the Americas. UMBC's chess team has competed in the tounament since 1990 and won or tied for first place nine times, a record unmatched by any other college chess team. The top four U.S. schools in the Pan-Am will advance to the President’s Cup, the Final Four of College Chess which will take place in early April in Herndon, Virginia. The Final Four which was started in 2001 determines the top U.S. college team. UMBC's chess team has won the Final Four a record six times.

Live commentary featuring GM Ronen Har-Zvi will be broadcast on the Web at livestream and results and pairings will be posted regularly on the tournament website.

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Our giveaway of three dot grid books from Dotgrid.co has recently ended. We had over 170 Six Revisions readers participate in this giveaway! In this post, you’ll get a chance to see who the three lucky winners are.

The Winners

Below are the three winners of black A5 dot grid books from Dotgrid.co:

• Andrea
• Srecko
• Mayur

Congratulations to our winners! The winners should’ve already gotten an email from the founders of Dotgrid.co containing information about how to claim their prize.

About Dotgrid.co

Dotgrid.co creates dot grid books, which are wire-bound books with dot grids. The books are created using sustainable materials.

Currently, the dot grid books come in two sizes, A4 (which costs about $22.60) and A5 (costing about $16).

Special 10% Discount for Six Revisions Readers

Upon checkout, use the code below before December 31, 2012 to get a 10% discount on your orders (shipping cost excluded):

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About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

Just yesterday we released our latest project to the world: Code Cards! Now you can code your own holiday greeting with HTML, CSS, and just a touch of inspiration.

We wanted to showcase our five favorite cards, from a talking Spock to a bouncing Merry Christmas — check them out!

A moving CSS3mas!

A neon pink holiday

A bouncing Feliz Navidad

Happy minimalistic holidays!

Spock says "Logical Holiday" in Hungarian

Didn't make one? No worries, there's still time before New Year's. Enjoy!

Last Friday, an advocacy organization called Autism Speaks uploaded a video to YouTube that shares the story of 14-year-old David Shapiro Sharif. But in the face of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which gunman Adam Lanza was said to have suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, some believe that the video misrepresents the disorder.

According to AgeOfAutism.com blogger Anne Dachel:

“David’s message is hardly a cause for alarm. He evokes images of Rain Man. He has excellent verbal skills and it’s easy to imagine that kids have always been like this. I wonder how this would go over if we were shown a boy flapping his hands, unable to speak, wearing a helmet.”

The Executive Director for Autism Speaks, Matthew Asner, has responded by saying that the video is meant to reflect one child’s experience with autism—not everyone’s:

“In the speech, David says himself that there are some of us who are more high functioning than others. I wanted to produce something that could aid me in teaching people what autism is, and by no means am I giving them a master’s degree course in autism.”

A quick scan of the video’s comments on YouTube shows an overwhelmingly positive reaction to “My Name is David,” but Dachel maintains that the video should have showed some of the darker sides to autism.

Educational? Misleading? Let us know in the comments below.