Courtesy of “Students Teaching About Racism in Society” (STARS)

Halloween at one point and time was very simple. People dress up as witches, superheroes and etc.

But lately there has been a growing trend in ethnic costumes that rely on racial stereotyping in implicit and explicit ways.

For years now, groups have rallied against these costumes due the insensitivity to ethnic cultures.

The controversy is not limited to the US.  In 2005, Britain’s Prince Harry dressed up as a Nazi creating a firestorm of criticism.

Opponents of this issue say that Halloween is a time for fun and suggest these costumes do not perpetuate racism.

But to many others the spectre of partygoers in blackface, or dressed as in ninja costumes, or in a cheap sombrero, not only misrepresent ethnic enclaves, but perpetuate unflattering stereotypes.

Halloween may be a holiday to some but it is not a holiday from America’s racial reality. 

With all the great costumes available, people should have no problem finding great alternatives to the ethnically-charged garb. 

What are your thoughts? What’s your costume this year?

OPEN HOUSE – University of Maryland School of Nursing - Saturday, October 27, 2012 at 9:00 a.m.

655 West Lombard Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

The University of Maryland School of Nursing offers two academic paths for entering the nursing profession:

Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN)

• For students who want to complete the last two years of their

undergraduate degree in nursing

• For people with a bachelor’s degree in a field other than nursing

• Full- and part-time options are available

• Offered at the Baltimore campus and at the Universities at Shady

Grove in Rockville

Master of Science – Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL)

• For people with a bachelor’s degree in a field other than nursing

• 16-, 21-, or 23-month full-time plans of study are available

• Offered in Baltimore only 

RSVP by October 25 to:  openhouse@son.umaryland.edu or by phone at410-706-0501 (select option #2).

http://nursing.umaryland.edu

Murder Mystery Theater

(seb)

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

7:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

All Guests = FREE

CSEE Colloquium

Emerging Challenges in High Performance Computing: Resilience and the Science of Embracing Failure

John. T. Daly
Advanced Computing Systems Program at the Department of Defense / Center for Exceptional Computing

1:00 p.m. Friday, 9 November 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

Resilience is about keeping the application workload running to a correct solution in a timely and efficient manner in spite of system failures. Future extreme scale supercomputers are likely to suffer more frequent failures than current systems: As devices scale, they are more susceptible to upsets due to radiation and to errors due to manufacturing variances. The probability of multiple bit upsets is growing, since an event is increasingly likely to impact multiple nearby cells. The use of near-threshold voltage in order to reduce power consumption also increases error rates. Thus, we can expect more frequent hardware failures, and a significant rate of undetected soft errors. While it is desirable to have failure-free system hardware and software, this goal may not be achievable at reasonable cost as both hardened components and methodologies to design and test critical software tend to be extremely expensive. The challenge is to construct a system out of less than perfectly reliable hardware and software that nevertheless behaves as a reliable system from the perspective of the user.

John T. Daly is a computer systems researcher for the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) Program at the Department of Defense / Center for Exceptional Computing (CEC). He is focused on the problem of keeping supercomputer applications running toward a correct solution in a timely and efficient manner in the presence of system degradations and failures. His research interests include mathematical modeling and analysis of failure, reliability, fault tolerance, calculational correctness, and throughput for applications at extreme scale. Before coming to the CEC, John was a researcher and resilience technical leader in the High Performance Computing (HPC) division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a software engineer and application analyst for Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems. He is a nationally recognized expert in resilience with 25 years of experience developing, porting, and running applications as an early adopter of many of the world's fastest supercomputers. He holds degrees in engineering and applied science and aerospace engineering from Caltech and Princeton University.

    — more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks –