All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Robert Provine, Psychology, in Times Higher Education

Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccuping, and Beyond by Robert Provine, professor of psychology, was reviewed in the UK’s Times Higher Education on November 15.

“Provine fearlessly explores the borderlands of scientific experimentation by studying these non-verbal outputs of the body, these behaviours that hardly any funding agency would consider serious subjects for enquiry and that would barely elicit interest beyond the Ig Nobel Prize judges. Incidentally, Provine surely deserves an Ig Nobel, because those awards are given for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. That is exactly what he has been doing for most of his scientific career, and that is probably what we should do here: laugh first and then think.”

The full review can be read here.  Previous coverage of the book and Provine’s work can be found here.

Anne Rubin, History, on The Current

One hundred and fifty years after the U.S. Civil War, a new secessionist movement is growing south of the border. On Friday, CBC radio’s “The Current” spoke with a man who wants his state to say secede from the union to protest the reelection of Barack Obama.

Contributing to the discussion was Anne Rubin, associate professor of history and expert on the Civil War, who spoke about the historical precedent for secession and whether it could happen today.

“Then, [secession] was a very legitimate way to read the constitution, and the states that did secede did so in a very careful and legalistic way,” she explained.

“The larger question of whether states can successfully secede from the union was settled by the Civil War. It’s not possible and it’s well-nigh impossible to form a new confederacy,” she said.

The entre conversation can be heard here.

Looking Back on a Thrilling NCAA Tournament Run for UMBC Men’s Soccer

Looking Back on a Thrilling NCAA Tournament Run for UMBC Men’s Soccer

“Extraordinary” is an apt word to describe the UMBC men’s soccer team’s dash to an America East championship, a first-round victory on penalty kicks in the NCAA men’s soccer tournament against Old Dominion University and a heartbreak exit, also on penalty kicks, against the nation’s fifth-ranked team and defending NCAA men’s soccer champions, the University of North Carolina (UNC), on the Tarheels’ home field on Sunday, November 18.

A single number shows the extraordinary quality of the Retrievers’ run: UMBC’s defense, led by junior goalkeeper Phil Saunders, kept its opponents off the scoreboard from open play for a staggering 420 minutes over the team’s last four single-elimination tournament games.

The 2012 UMBC men’s soccer team’s America East championship ensured the team’s second appearance in the NCAA Men’s Soccer College Cup in the last three years. And the 2012 team matched the achievements of a 2010 squad that was also one of the best in UMBC soccer history. The 2010 team beat a Princeton University squad that was ranked 10th in the nation before also falling on penalty kicks to The College of William and Mary in the second round.

“We’re so proud of the achievements of men’s soccer team and coach Pete Caringi,” said UMBC president Freeman A Hrabowski III, who observed that academic achievements have also been a hallmark of the university’s men’s soccer program.

Indeed, the day after their first round NCAA victory over Old Dominion, the men’s soccer team was also recognized with a 2011-2012 College Team Academic Award from the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA). The team earned that distinction by being among the 221 men’s programs in America with a cumulative grade point average of 3.0 or higher. (The university’s women’s soccer team also was recognized with the same award, and UMBC was one of only 150 programs in which both its men’s and women’s programs received the NSCAA award.)

The 2012 Retrievers won their way to an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament with a victory over the University of New Hampshire in the America East championship game, held on November 10 at Retriever Soccer Park. After losing junior forward Pete Caringi III (who had been named America East Striker of the Year) to an injury in the championship game’s fourth minute, the Retrievers displayed the necessary determination and grit to take the game to overtime and then triumph on penalty kicks – with Saunders making two penalty saves and being named the championship’s outstanding player

The joy of winning a place in the NCAA tournament on a chilly Saturday night was quickly replaced by determination to make a mark in the Men’s Soccer College Cup. And UMBC would have to do that the hard way: playing on the home fields of their opponents.

First up on Thursday, November 15 were the Monarchs of Old Dominion University who had been ranked in the top-25 in collegiate men’s soccer at various points of the 2012 season. And for the second contest in a row, a hard-fought 0-0 game ended once again with a scoreless double overtime and a UMBC win on penalty kicks to advance to a second round game against the University of North Carolina at UMBC’s Fetzer Field.

The Retrievers rode their defense again in the first half of its match against the defending NCAA champions, scratching and clawing their way to halftime with a clean sheet. The team put more pressure on the Tarheels in the second half and through two scoreless overtime periods, but once again, the game came down to penalty kicks.

This time, however, a Retriever team that had lived by the penalty kick found its luck had turned. North Carolina’s goalkeeper Scott Goodwin made three saves on UMBC penalty tries, while Phil Saunders could only save one of the Tarheels’ attempts and won the penalty round 3-2.

The Retrievers ended their 2012 campaign at 11-4-7, but the team’s torrid close to the season (including seven wins, one loss and one tie in their final eight games) and wins in the conference championship and the first round of the NCAA tournament not only have earned the 2012 squad a treasured place in UMBC athletics history, but also show that UMBC is on the rise in the ranks of collegiate soccer.

“We lost to a very good team, a championship team, so we have nothing to hold our heads down about,” Coach Caringi told reporters after the loss to North Carolina. “I am very proud of these guys and what they accomplished since they’ve been here. They put UMBC on the map in soccer.”

(11/19/12)

 

 

Ph.D. Defense: Semantically Rich, Policy Based Framework to Automate Lifecycle of Cloud Based Services

November 19 at 10:00 am, ITE 325B

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. Traditional models of software development are very time consuming and labor intensive for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. Virtualized services are often composed of pre-existing components that are assembled on an as-needed basis. We have developed a new framework to automate the acquisition, composition and consumption/monitoring of virtualized services delivered on the cloud. We have divided the service lifecycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption and have developed ontologies to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. These are represented in Semantic Web languages. We have developed a protocol to automate the negotiation process when acquiring virtualized services. This protocol allows complex relaxation of constraints being negotiated based on user defined policies. W e have also developed detailed ontologies to define service level agreements for cloud services. To illustrate and validate how this framework can automate the acquisition of cloud services, we have built two applications from real world scenarios. The Smart cloud services application enables users to determine and procure the cloud storage application that matches most of their constraints and policies. We have also built a VCL broker application that allows users to automatically reserve the VCL Image that will best meet their requirements. We have developed a framework to measure and semi-automatically track quality of a virtualized service delivery system. The framework provides a mechanism to relate hard metrics typically measured at the backstage of the delivery process to quality related hard and soft metrics tracked at the front stage where the consumer interacts with the service. While this framework is general enough to be applied to any type of IT service, in this dissertation we have primarily concentratated on the Helpdesk service and include the performance rules we have created by mining Helpdesk data.

Thesis Committee:

Dr. Yelena Yesha (chair)
Dr. Tim Finin (co-chair)
Dr. Milton Halem
Dr. Yaacov Yesha
Dr. Aryya Gangopadhyay

Remembering William “Bill” Hathaway, Emeritus Instructor of Emergency Health Services

FROM: Bruce J. Walz, Chair, Department of Emergency Health Services

It is with sadness that I report the passing of Emeritus Instructor William “Bill” Hathaway on November 1st after a battle with lung cancer. Known by his students as “Uncle Bill,” professor Hathaway served as the department’s undergraduate management track coordinator. He taught at UMBC from 1981 till his retirement in 1999.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, November 15, at Ascension Episcopal Church, located at 253 S. Main St., Amherst, VA 24521. Condolences may be sent to the Hathaway family at 125 Garland Avenue, Amherst, VA 24521-2521.

The following is an excerpt from The Baltimore Sun obituary:

After graduating from West Point in 1961, he served in an artillery unit until joining the Army Intelligence Corps, where he worked in Washington for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He resigned his commission in 1969 and his decorations included a Bronze Star, Air Medal, Joint Service Commendation Medal and Army Commendation Medal.

After leaving the Army, he taught eighth-grade mathematics in Baltimore public schools and managed a treatment center for delinquent boys.

He earned a master’s degree in personnel administration in 1968 from George Washington University. He also earned a second master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Hathaway joined Dr. R Adams Cowley, who had founded in 1961 what became the Maryland Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. From 1974 to 1981, Mr. Hathaway held a variety of positions including chief coordinator of the Maryland Division of Emergency Medical Services, director of planning and development for the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services, and later its director of field services, where he oversaw an annual budget of $5 million and 70 employees.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Hathaway’s expertise led him to travel overseas to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Estonia and Latvia, as a member of training teams that helped develop emergency care systems based on Maryland Shock Trauma.

After leaving Maryland’s Division of Emergency Medical Services, he became an EMS instructor at UMBC, where he remained until retiring in 1999.

Gov. Harry R. Hughes appointed him to the Maryland Emergency Numbers (911) Systems board in 1979 and reappointed him in 1984. Gov. Parris N. Glendening honored Mr. Hathaway with a Governor’s Citation for his “distinguished service as an instructor at UMBC and for his efforts to develop Maryland’s Emergency Medical System.”

After moving to Amherst some years ago, Mr. Hathaway served on the town planning commission and county library board and volunteered with Meals on Wheels. He was also a master gardener and enjoyed landscaping projects.

Surviving are his wife of 33 years, Lillian Wray; a son, William Kristin “Kris” Hathaway of Ellicott City; a daughter, Susan Hathaway Scotto of Columbia; and five grandchildren. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.

Kimberly Moffitt, American Studies, in Election Coverage

Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American studies, served as an election expert for two radio program in the days leading up to and following the November 6 election.

On Monday, November 5, Moffitt appeared on the “Marc Steiner Show” to weigh in on the final day of a tight race.  Moffitt questioned whether the race was actually as tight as the media portrayed it to be.

“I see it as the media’s role to make sure we are engaged in this way and to believe that there is something to tune into, so that we make sure to either tube into their station, or show up at the polls tomorrow.  I’m not sure it’s as neck and neck as we are positioning it to be, but I believe it is good business for it to be neck and neck,” she said.

Following the election, Moffitt appeared on “Midday with Dan Rodricks” on Thursday, November 8 to discuss the results.

“We’re now at the place where I think the GOP has often acknowledged the 80s as its heyday.  And largely that’s linked to Reagan and his time representing and serving our country. But he himself always counted the 50s as America’s heyday.  And I think where we are now, the reality is that neither of those decades mean anything significant or monumental, especially to the under 40 crowd and certainly to ethnic minorities.  And based on that, the GOP seemed to be a political party that disconnected and removed from any sense of what those two populations in this country would be able to support and endorse,” she said.

Claudio Galindo, LLC, Recognized by Baltimore Mayor Rawlings-Blake

Claudio Galindo of UMBC’s Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph. D. program was recently recognized by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for her work within the Latino community of the city and state, according to a statement from the regional community organization CASA de Maryland.

The mayor’s statement came as part of the city’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. Speaking on Dr. Galindo, Rawlings-Blake said that “when President Obama announced his program to allow immigrant students for deferred action and work authorization in the United States this past summer, Claudia was one of the first to volunteer to assist with the process. Since the first community DACA clinic at CASA de MD on August 16, Dr. Claudia Galindo has volunteered over 50 hours helping students fill out applications, and reviewing supporting documents”.

The UMBC community commends Dr. Galindo on her important work with the Latino community of Maryland, and wishes her well in her future endeavors with CASA de Maryland.

Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College, in The New Republic

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, discussed the young adult novel Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, byKatherine Marsh, in her latest column in the New Republic.

The historical novel follows the story of Jepp, a court dwarf in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands of the late sixteenth century. Spitz compares Jepp’s story – in whichhis destiny is defined by his body and dictated by the whims of others – to the plight of the story’s adolescent readers.

“Adolescents are newly encased—like Jepp—in bodies that seem too small (or too large) but never a match for what is inside them, which nobody else can see…. despite the plethora of insignificant choices accorded them, young people’s lives are not in their hands, and they often feel cooped up in prisons not of their making,” she writes.

“As one reads Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, present and past entangle just as childhood and adulthood spar.”

The column, “The Age of Adolescence,” appeared online on November 7.

Jessica Berman, English, Gives Talk

Jesica Berman, professor of English, recently gave a talk at Vanderbilt University on entitled, “Documentary Interruptions: Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and the Media of War.”  The talk was part of the second annual Modernist Mini Jamboree, a celebration of modernism in literature and film sponsored by the English Department and the Program in Film Studies and took place on Friday, November 2.

Berman’s Her recent book, Modernist  Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (Columbia  University Press, 2011), examines the connection between ethics and politics in  early twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys,  Mulk Raj Anand, Cornelia Sorabji, Max Aub and Meridel Le Sueur, and argues for  an expansive, transnational approach to the definition of literary modernism.

Remembering Scott Hannon, Research Assistant in Physics

TO: The UMBC Community

FROM: Larrabee Strow, Research Professor of Physics, and Sergio DeSouza Machado, Research Assistant Professor of Physics

We are deeply saddened to report that Scott Hannon passed away
Thursday night after a nearly two-year battle with cancer.  Scott
received his BA, and in 1990, his MS in Physics from UMBC.  He
remained at UMBC for the next 22 years as a Research Assistant in the
Physics Department/Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology.

Scott’s early work in the Physics Department’s Atmospheric
Spectroscopy Laboratory involved laser spectroscopy of carbon dioxide
and nitrogen molecular collisions, providing a new model for
understanding carbon dioxide absorption in the earth’s atmosphere.

Following this work he spent most of his career helping to develop and
use a new generation of high-spectral resolution infrared satellite
instruments that provide input for daily weather forecasts around the
world, and are now being used for climate trending.  He also developed
algorithms for the measurement of various atmospheric gases using
high-spectral resolution infrared satellite data, including nitric
acid, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, dust, and volcanic ash.

Scott had a particular talent for distilling complicated physics
models into computationally simple but accurate algorithms.  He
applied this talent to topics such as the atmospheric water vapor
absorption, and more recently the effects of solar radiation on
mesospheric carbon dioxide emissions.  His model for this “non-LTE”
emission is now the standard for models being developed by other
research groups around the world.

Scott’s work is known, and used, world-wide by many national
meteorological centers and research centers.  This includes two
algorithms he helped develop for atmospheric radiative transfer that
provide the basis for converting the measured satellite radiances into
atmospheric temperature and water vapor.  To this day, and most likely
for years to come, his fast radiative transfer algorithm called SARTA,
is run every day on both NOAA and NASA computers to analyze the daily
satellite data from two US satellite instruments (AIRS and CrIS), and
a European instrument (IASI).  Scott participated in the ground
testing of both the NASA AIRS instrument, and the NOAA/JPSS CrIS
instrument, and his models of the instrument hardware are also used
worldwide by many meteorological centers (Europe, Japan, New Zealand,
Australia, etc.).

Scott was very well known to students in the Atmospheric Physics
Ph.D. program, who often took advantage of his in-depth knowledge of
atmospheric spectroscopy and radiative transfer for their classes and
thesis research.  He was always ready and willing to help anyone who
asked, including outside academics and industry.

Scott worked very closely for over 15 years with the AIRS Project
Office at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  His advice and algorithms
were highly valued by JPL and he will be missed by many there.  One of
his last activities was to influence changes to the in-orbit operation
of the AIRS instrument in order to preserve the integrity of the
climate record produced by that instrument.

Scott’s quiet manner belied his intense commitment to integrity and
quality in everything he did.  He was one of those un-sung heroes of
science, quietly doing first-rate work with no interest in personal
accolades of any sort.  Unknown to many, Scott had a encyclopedic
knowledge of many topics, ranging from World History to Music, and he
was always happy to have friendly discussions on any topic.  His
presence and camaraderie, and willingness to help everyone, will be
missed by many.

Private services were held for Scott, and condolences may be sent to the Hannon family at 6614 Jacks Court, Mount Airy, MD 21771.

Earle Ellis, Geography and Environmental Systems, on the BBC

UMBC’s Earle Ellis, geography and environmental systems, spoke with BBC journalist Andrew Luck-Baker for a recent two-part article examining modern society’s potential contributions to the future fossil record.

In “Leaving our mark: Fossils of the future,” Luck-Baker wrote of one particular aspect of our culture which will likely remain for future scientists millions of years from now: the bones of small and medium-sized animals. Ellis told the reporter that an important aspect of this possibility is the way in which humans discard the bones of these domesticated creatures, whether they’re our pets or our meals.

For more on humanity’s potential legacy, click on  the link above, as well as the first-part exploring the possible record of our cities here.

UMBC UMBC
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 Directions & Parking

Resources

Important Contacts

Emergency Info

Contact Us

Apply

Top Stories of the Week

© UMBC: A University System of Maryland Member Institution