President Loh

Loh:  University Presidents, Senators Discuss Importance of Scientific Research to Economy

Science Coalition:  Washington, DC – "University leaders and U.S. Senators gathered for a roundtable discussion today at the Capitol on the vital role university-based scientific research plays in fueling innovation and sparking economic growth.  The event was organized by the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, chaired by Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), and included participation by Sens. Daniel Akaka (HI), Benjamin Cardin (MD), Kay Hagan (NC), Bernard Sanders (VT), and Debbie Stabenow (MI) and the following university leaders: Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University in Boston, Mass.; James Clements, president of West Virginia University; Daniel Fogel, president of the University of Vermont; Allan Gilmour, president of Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich.; Michael Johns, chancellor of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.; Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland; Samuel Stanley, president of Stony Brook University in Long Island, NY; and Randy Woodson, chancellor of North Carolina State University. The universities are members of The Science Coalition.  The university leaders discussed the many ways in which federally funded university-based research helps fuel the economy – from being local economic engines to helping drive industrial innovation to enabling America to compete in the global economy.  'Our system of higher education and research has been the envy of the world,' said Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland. 'Federally funded university research has been a driving force in our economy since World War II and has helped the U.S. lead the world in science, technology and innovation that make a difference in our lives. However, other nations are watching and emulating us,' he said. 'They realize that research universities are a fundamental component of an innovation economy. We risk losing our competitive edge because we are pulling back at precisely the time that other nations are investing heavily in scientific research.' "

University of Maryland President Offers Support for Campus Merger Study

Baltimore Business Journal:  "The University of Maryland, College Park’s president has expressed his support for studying a merger of the state's flagship institution with the University of Maryland, Baltimore.  In a letter to the university community, President Wallace D. Loh pledged to work closely with UMB President Dr. Jay Perman on the study, should the General Assembly approve it. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller proposed the merger as a means to establish a top-10 research university in the state.  Combined, the two campuses would have 40,000 students and $1.1 billion in research funding.  A state Senate subcommittee included a request that the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents study the merger in the state budget bill March 21. If that budget language stays intact, a merger study and plan would be due Dec. 15." 

Do Other College Presidents Fly First Class?

Washington Post:  "Allen Sessoms, president of the University of the District of Columbia, landed in hot water this month with the disclosure of travel records that show him flying first-class to conferences and official visits around the country and overseas.  It turns out UDC policy generally forbids 'luxury' travel -- although it's still somewhat hazy whether that rule applies to the president.  In a news conference Monday, Sessoms said he had to travel frequently for fund-raising and marketing, major components of every president's job, and to keep UDC competitive with the likes of Georgetown.  By chance, Georgetown President John DeGioia was in our office on Tuesday, meeting with The Washington Post's editorial board. So we asked how he travels. His answer: business class. 'We have rules about these things,' he said.  (For those who have never flown business class, including myself, Wikipedia helpfully explains that it is a category between economy and first class. On some airlines, it is the highest tier of service.)  I queried several other universities about the travel habits of their presidents. I have, as of this writing, two responses. They may be skewed. My survey was voluntary, and any president who flies first-class might want to lie low just now.  University of Maryland President Wallace Loh 'travels coach in the continental U.S.,' said Beth Cavanaugh, a university spokeswoman. 'He has not done any international travel yet, but when that happens, policy allows him to travel business class.' When he is Earth-bound, Loh drives a hybrid Toyota Camry."

On Campus

A Bit of Siberia in Maryland

Maryland Daily Record:   "The Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy Sciences has joined the Maryland International Incubator at the University of Maryland, university officials announced. The Siberian branch, the largest in the Russian Academy of Sciences, plans to collaborate with the University of Maryland, other educational institutions and businesses to develop joint technology and business projects to create new products for U.S. and international markets. The incubator is a program of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute in partnership with the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development."

Smith School Creates New Framework for Networks Sharing Electronic Medical Records

Business Journals:  "The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business has developed a new framework to help states and Washington, D.C., create self-sustaining and effective networks for the exchange of electronic health records. The center assessed the DC Regional Health Information Organization (DC RHIO), Washington's primary health information exchange (HIE). The DC RHIO is managed by the District of Columbia Primary Care Association (DCPCA) and funded by the city government.  The center rated the DC RHIO among the top 20 percent in the nation as a fully operational exchange and provided recommendations to make the organization sustainable through operating revenue.  With new federal policy, all health organizations -- doctors, hospitals, laboratories, Medicaid organizations, etc. -- will eventually have to shift to electronic health records to utilize, exchange, and share the information. Full adoption is still years away and more than $18 billion is being provided to help incentivize the process. 'Much of the country has a long way to go to getting electronic health records implemented and able to share health information seamlessly,' said P. Kenyon Crowley, associate director of CHIDS. ...  The CHIDS HIE Evaluation Framework -- co-authored by Ritu Agarwal, professor and Dean's Chair of Information Systems, and director of CHIDS; Sunil Mithas, associate professor; and Crowley -- offers a methodology for assessing any RHIO across the nation. HIEs are evaluated on five key performance components: the value creation and sustainability of its business model; organizational structure and decision-making processes; technology; community engagement; and trust in the system."

DeMaurice Smith to Give Commencement Address at Maryland

Comments on the Vitriolic side to this post.
NBC Sports:  "NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith will tell graduating seniors at the University of Maryland to floss and wear sunscreen (or perhaps give slightly less cliched advice) when he delivers the school’s commencement address on May 19. The school has announced that Smith was chosen to give the speech at this year’s graduation ceremony.  Brian Toll, a graduating senior and chairman of the committee that chose Smith as commencement speaker, said he was inspired by Smith’s life story.  'He came from humble beginnings to get to where he is today, which speaks to the personality he possesses and the story he can tell,' Toll told Maryland’s student newspaper. 'Just because of the position he holds and the way he articulates himself, we think he is absolutely relatable.'  Maryland chose Smith even though he’s a graduate of the law school at ACC rival Virginia."

Defenders of the Humanities Look for New Ways to Explain Their Value

Chronicle of Higher Education:  Washington:  "A crowd of nearly 200 people gathered here on Monday to listen to a series of academic luminaries speak passionately about the importance of the humanities. Though billed as a 'Symposium on the Future of the Humanities,' the talks were less about new directions than about the value of traditional humanities in an era of gutted budgets, and against the insistence, even by many in academe, on measurable 'outcomes' in higher education. ... In large part, as several of the participants noted, the speakers were preaching to the choir: mostly other humanities scholars and administrators from small, liberal-arts colleges. They may have been preaching to a particular section of the choir: the more traditional among humanities scholars.  'There hasn't been a lot today about how the humanities are changing and what we can be, not just what we have been,' said Neil Fraistat, director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park, during a question-and-answer period. 'Part of that narrative is that we're digitizing our entire culture. And the humanities are becoming more collaborative and more interdisciplinary.'  In an interview, a colleague of Mr. Fraistat's sounded a similar note. 'I'm not feeling this elegiac mood on my campus,' said Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, a professor of English and associate dean for academic affairs at Maryland. 'What I see more often is a celebration of that plethora [of cultural objects available for study] and a real effort to guide students in how they use it.'  Though she agreed that humanities scholars have not done a good job of communicating the importance of their work outside academe, she said scientific researchers had been no better at speaking to a wide audience. 'I think if you were to talk about science in terms of pure science, the conversation would be very much the same. The people doing basic, nonapplied research feel very marginalized and cut off from funding,' she said.  Ms. Loizeaux pointed to the governor of Pennsylvania's plan to cut state spending on higher education by 50 percent. 'It's wrong to separate out humanities from that issue,' she said."

College Award Letters Are Now Arriving in Mailboxes

Get out your pencil -- comparing awards takes some math
Baltimore Sun:  "Many parents and their college-bound children are in the process of completing perhaps their most important school assignment: evaluating financial-aid award letters.  Colleges and universities this time of year notify families about the grants, loans and other financial aid they can expect to receive if the aspiring student attends the school.  But letters don't make it easy for families to compare the bottom-line cost of one college to another. There's no standardization of award letters, which can make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.  'They are quite confusing. They are a marketing document rather than telling you the real cost of college,' says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the financial aid sites FinAid.org and Fastweb.com. 'They are all about explaining how you can afford to attend that school, even if you can't afford to attend that school.'  Some letters give detailed information on the cost of attendance, while many others provide incomplete or no figures so families have to do their own homework. And letters often contain cryptic acronyms or abbreviations that can confuse families and lead them to assume the aid package is more generous than it is, Kantrowitz says.  Adding to the confusion are unresolved budget fights in Congress, putting the popular Pell Grant in doubt. The House wants to slash the maximum Pell Grant -- which is awarded to the neediest of students -- by $845 to $4,705. With no resolution in sight, the University of Maryland, College Park and other schools are adding a disclaimer to award notifications that the Pell Grant could be reduced later.  'A lot of institutions held off letters' as long as possible, says Sarah Bauder, assistant vice president for financial aid and enrollment services at College Park. Prospective students generally have until May 1 to respond to award letters. So get out your pencils and be prepared to flex those math skills."

Dorland, Stehr, Hultman, Milton:  Nuclear Power: What's Next?

WUSA-TV, Washington:  "At the University of Maryland a panel of scientists says there are still many questions unanswererd about the nuclear crisis in Japan and what the ultimate effect might be on the United States not only in terms of radiation dangers, but also future energy policy.  'No one's figured out what to do to stop the current situation,' said Professor Bill Dorland at the University of Maryland. So scientists aren't sure how much radioactive material will ultimately be spewed into the air or sea. But so far, the dangers are very low because of the distance to America's west coast. Things could change if there is an explosion.  'If there were a big event, what is it and how high in the atmosphere did it get to, those things will be most crucial in determining where it goes,' stated Dr. Jeff Stehr.  Even as the uncertainty in Japan continues, Wednesday, President Obama acknowledged that nuclear power will still be an energy option in the United States. That's why these experts say many tough questions need to be asked.  'Whether the regulations we have in place are sufficient, whether our first response preparations are sufficient,' said Professor Nate Hultman.  Or if corners are being cut when first responding to a crisis as apparently happened in Japan.  Professor Donald Milton said, 'Like here, Tepco has outsourced a lot of this work, those guys were not Tepco employees, they were poorly trained.' " Finally, these experts say that the condition of America's aging nuclear reactors, which are now entering their fifth decade, must be paid attention to and safety upgrades implemeted in light of whats happened in Japan."

UMd to Begin Holding Cybersecurity Seminar Series Next Month

Associated Press:  "The University of Maryland will hold a cybersecurity seminar next month made possible by a sponsorship from Google. The university announced Tuesday that the series will begin with a talk by Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers, entitled 'Can We Make the Internet Safer?'  The seminar, scheduled to begin April 7 in College Park, is being organized by the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. Other speakers at the seminar will talk about the impact that cybersecurity threats and protective measures are having on privacy, social networks, business and national security.  A second seminar will be held April 21.  The university says Google has committed to a three-year sponsorship of the new series. It will include three seminars a semester."

Colleges Coach Students to Stay in Academic Game

UM reverses a negative trend growing elsewhere
With only 42 percent of American college students graduating, states look for ways to increase that number
CBS News:  "Ask any high school kid. Few things are as stressful as trying to get into college. And staying in can be equally challenging.  Only 42 percent of American college students actually graduate. On Tuesday, Vice President Biden announced $20 million in grants to help states improve that number. CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller reports some colleges are tackling the problem head on. ... 'Institutions that really succeed track what's happening to their students in the first week, in the first month. When their attendance falls off, or when their homework doesn't get turned in,' says (Katie) Haycock (The Education Trust).  'They act aggressively in that moment.'  The University of Maryland used that approach to significantly raise its graduation rate over the last decade from 60 percent 82 percent with smaller classes, mandatory tutors and courses tailored to their students' needs.  'Our job is to provide students with degrees,' says Lisa Kiley, assistant dean, undergraduate studies, University of Maryland. 'It's not to weed out those we don't think are capable of doing it.' "

Clarice Smith:  The Answer, My Friends

Folk legends flock to honor industry forerunner Dick Cerri
Gazette Newspapers:  "No matter the talent, no matter the crowd -- nobody, but nobody, wants to go on first.  Just ask famed folkie and humorist Christine Lavin, who recently discovered she has been scheduled as the opening act for the 25th annual World Folk Music Association (WFMA) benefit concert Saturday at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.  'But I'm a team player,' she says dryly, adding that she can think of no better way to kick off the proceedings than with a startling rendition of the national anthem. The new one, that is -- as written by Washington Post columnist (and longtime Lavin fan) Gene Weingarten, based on the Bill of Rights and set to the tune of 'The William Tell Overture.'  Hum along to the intro: 'It's okay if you pray/ You can own a gun/ You can say what you may about anyone/ You can meet in the street, you can march and strut/ Been wronged? You can sue his butt.'  The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner will even introduce her.  'We thought of making printouts of the lyrics and asking everyone to stand and sing along,' Lavin laughs.  For Saturday's concert, which is being held in celebration of folk godfather Dick Cerri's 75th birthday, Lavin will join luminaries like Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limeliters, Schooner Fare, The Shaw Brothers, Side by Side, Steve Gillette, Carolyn Hester and Donal Leace."

U Maryland Cuts Energy Usage with Mass Lighting Replacement

Campus Technology:  "As part of a larger, ongoing energy conservation program, the University of Maryland in College Park recently overhauled lighting on its campus, a move that's expected to save 1.4 million kilowatt hours per year.  The institution replaced 12,000 light bulbs with 6,600 more energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs, which the the university reported will amount to about $153,000 in energy savings each year.  The campus chose Columbia Lighting e-poc fixtures from Hubbell Lighting.  According to Conservation Manager Susan Corry, the installation of the new lighting fixtures is part of a larger smart technology program expected to cut university energy costs substantially, conserve water, and replace old equipment that's reached the end of its useful life. When the program is done, it's expected to cut building energy usage by a fifth and to save $1.7 million a year.  In February 2010 the university's Sustainability Council set recommended policies on lighting levels to use throughout the campus, based on recommendations from the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America. For example, offices, classrooms, and labs should have 30 to 50 foot candles, depending on the tasks on desks or table tops and hallways should have five to eight foot candles. A foot candle is the illumination equal to the amount of light produced by a single candle at a distance of one foot, equivalent to a little less than 11 lumens. Fifty foot candles would be nearly 550 lumens, equal to about 0.8 watts.  The university began its efforts by upgrading nine of the oldest and highest energy consuming buildings on the campus. In April 2009 the U Maryland signed a $20 million energy performance contract with Johnson Controls to retrofit those nine campus buildings. The campus has an overall goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. President C.D. Mote Jr. signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment in May 2007."

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Off Campus

Ban on Rooftop Furniture Angers UMd Students

Silly season: 
Washington Post:  "The Diamondback editorial was withering this morning. 'Ridiculous Regulation' the headline blared in the University of Maryland newspaper. 'Nothing short of asinine' and a 'clutch of nannies,' the writer raged.
The target of the attack: Obama’s health-care law? The lack of financial industry regulation? No. The College Park City Council and a new buzz-kill ordinance that threatens a school tradition: drinking on rooftops.  The council last week banned placing lawn furniture atop buildings. Violators face a $200 fine for a first offense and $400 for repeated running afoul of the law.  College Park City Council member Marcus Afzali told the U-Md. newspaper the regulation aims to prevent an accident. 'It’s only a matter of time before someone gets injured up there,' he said. 'We thought we had to do something to curtail that behavior.' A student called the ban 'unnecessary' and another said rooftops are not just for partying: Students often go up there to study during nice weather."

Students

Designing a Strategy to Find Investors

Washington Post: 
The entrepreneur
"With a grandmother working in the Iranian fashion industry, Sofia Samrad became instantly addicted to the design of clothes. Half Persian, half British, Samrad grew up in London and moved to Washington when she was 16 years old. Since moving to the United States, the fashionista has tried her hand at modeling and designing, all while balancing her schoolwork and other activities. Her interest in fashion remained strong through her schooling, leading her to launch her own clothing line this month at the age of 20."
Samrad
“Digitalebas is a clothing line that combines unique London fashion with a Persian flare. The concept behind the name was the blending of a digital modern London society with the Farsi word for clothing, ‘lebas.' I started designing and making clothing at age 14 in London, and since I moved to Washington I have been modeling and designing clothes while attending school at the University of Maryland, College Park.  I launched my spring 2011 collection on March 4, 2011 at the Beauty Is Skin Deep Fashion Benefit for Skin Cancer at the French Embassy. I will also be launching customizable dresses in the following months. My target market is women ages 18 to 30 and I am specifically targeting my clothing toward sorority girls in the Washington, New York City and Los Angeles regions. I'm only using social networking to expand my brand, including starting a blog on which students from all across the country to help market the line.
I designed six dresses and had 50 made of each. The first three are sold out and I only have about 10 remaining of each of the other three. I am making a small profit, but it is very minimal. I've been selling to friends to get the clothing out there. Eventually I'd like to sell my clothing in local retail stores and possibly open up my own store. To target the sororities, I'll be holding fitting days. It's been going really well so far. My main question is how do I go about obtaining funding to expand my line. My parents have been helping so far, but I need to find other sources of funding for the company."

RAK Crown Prince Receives Student Delegation from University of Maryland, USA

Zawya, UAE:  Ras Al Khaimah, March 24, 2011: "H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi, Crown Prince of Ras Al Khaimah, today received a delegation of students from the University of Maryland of the US who are currently visiting the country at the Ruler's Court here.  The student delegation from the Robert H. Smith School of Business are on a nine- day visit to the UAE as part of their UAE Global Immersion Course to gain firsthand knowledge about the government, culture, policies and business practices in the country. The 45- member delegation was led by Dr. Mark Wellman, Teaching Professor and Director, CPS Program in Business, Society and the Economy, University of Maryland. Welcoming the delegation, Sheikh Mohammed bin Saud hoped that the visit would provide students an opportunity to gain new insights about the UAE and a better understanding of the cultures, business practices and social environments of the two countries. In the freewheeling discussion that followed, Sheikh Mohammed bin Saud provided the students an overview of the UAE government and its institutions, the development agenda pursued by the country, its business and economic policies, and answered questions from the visiting students on a wide range of topics."

Md. Team Wins Dandia on Fire

Penn State Daily Collegian:  "Glaring lightbulbs illuminated an abandoned dressing room strewn with bottles of vitamin water, portable speakers, boxes of makeup, hair ties and safety pins.  More than 100 dancers had cleared the scene and now stood on stage at Eisenhower Auditorium, nervously anticipating the award ceremony that followed Dandia on Fire, Penn State’s annual intercollegiate South Asian dance competition. Nine teams hailing from Indiana to Maryland showcased pride for their Indian heritage through garba-raas performances. Garba-raas is a traditional Indian style of dance characterized by three elements featured in the event’s tagline: Dandia on Fire — Passion, Power, Soul.  The teams competed for cash prizes and points for the chance to perform at Raas All-Stars, a final garba-raas championship held in Dallas.  Two former garba-raas dancers and six South Asian dance instructors reviewed the performances based on formations, choreography, stunts and overall feel, said Dipen Patel, a member of the Dandia on Fire board.  While attendee Megan Cyran said she’s familiar with a variety of dance styles, including ballet and jazz, Dandia on Fire introduced her to the world of South Asian dance.  'It’s not the contemporary or classical dance that I’m used to,' Cyran (sophomore-accounting) said. 'But it’s colorful, and I like that they blended modern music and the music of their heritage.'  The University of Maryland’s team, EntouRAAS, won first place at the competition, while Bentley University’s BizRaas placed second.  EntouRAAS Co-Captain Vinay Khetarpal said a solid garba-raas performance relies on the team’s ability to instill its own excitement and energy in the audience.  'We dance with a show-off mentality that plays with the audience,' Khetarpal said. 'You make faces on stage. You do funny things to increase the unity between the audience and the stage.' "

Terp Thon Raises Nearly $140,000 for Children's National

The Sentinel:  "University of Maryland students shattered national records for the second year in a row Saturday, raising $139, 629 for Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., in the largest second Dance Marathon ever.  A reported 775 participants flooded Ritchie Coliseum and stood on their feet for 12 hours -- without ever sitting -- to show their support for the patients, families and staff at Children’s National. More than 1,200 students registered with Terp Thon, raising a minimum of $50 each for the cause.  Terp Thon, the student philanthropy organization that coordinated the Dance Marathon event, did not anticipate such a success when they first started planning for it in September. 'Last year was our first year and we won the national award for the most successful first Dance Marathon ever, raising $56,000,' said Hallie Dunn, an executive board member of Terp Thon said. 'This year, we set our hopes for $100,000 but were nervous that we wouldn’t reach it. I still can’t believe that we more than doubled our goal.' Throughout the year, Terp Thon held fundraisers and campaigns to spread awareness and raise money. The organization reached out to students, local businesses and corporations to make this year’s Dance Marathon a success, said Amy Butler, the organization’s executive director."

Beutel: Muslim Americans Have Been Extremely Active in Combating Terrorism

CNN:  Answering today's six OFF-SET questions is Alejandro J. Beutel, the Muslim Public Affairs Council's Government & Policy Analyst. Alejandro, the author of several academic papers, articles and reports on topics of Islam, international security, religious liberty and democratization. In addition, has addressed a number of government, academic and civil society forums on these topics. Currently a Master's Degree candidate in Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, Alejandro received his BS in International Relations and Diplomacy at Seton Hall ...
You are scheduled to attend Thursday's hearing in Washington D.C. on the "radicalization of American Muslims" called by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-New York). What will you specifically be watching for?

"The initial intent of the hearings came from misinformation about the Muslim American community and our "breeding ground" for radicalized Muslims. However, during the past few months, King has changed his tuned to say that most Muslim Americans are not tied with radicalization and that he is going after a small portion of the community. What I'm looking for during the hearings is whether or not there continues to be a shifting rationale for his broad-brushed hearings. I’m also looking to see what specific data he has to backup any of his assertions that Muslim American communities don’t partner with law enforcement."

Rep. King appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We're talking about al Qaeda," he said. "We're talking about the affiliates of al Qaeda, who have been radicalizing, and there's been self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community, within a very small minority, but it's there. And that's where the threat is coming from at this time." To what degree is al Qaeda recruting within the United States and, to your knowledge, are they having success?

"Like all other Americans we're concerned about terrorism and recruitment. However a middle path is needed - neither underestimating, nor overestimating the attractiveness of the terrorists. Seasoned experts like Brian Michael Jenkins, put it best: 'There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad—about one out of every 30,000 -- suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence.' We agree."

 

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People

David Broder Dies; Pulitzer-Winning Washington Post Political Columnist

Washington Post:  "David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday at Capital Hospice in Arlington of complications from diabetes. Mr. Broder was often called the dean of the Washington press corps - a nickname he earned in his late 30s in part for the clarity of his political analysis and the influence he wielded as a perceptive thinker on political trends in his books, articles and television appearances. In 1973, Mr. Broder and The Post each won Pulitzers for coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation. Mr. Broder's citation was for explaining the importance of the Watergate fallout in a clear, compelling way.  As passionate about baseball as he was about politics, he likened Nixon's political career to an often-traded pitcher who had 'bounced around his league.'  He covered every presidential convention since 1956 and was widely regarded as the political journalist with the best-informed contacts, from the lowliest precinct to the highest rungs of government. ... Mr. Broder largely withdrew from daily reporting after the 2004 campaign but continued his column. He also taught journalism at the University of Maryland and, as he had throughout his career, continued to mentor younger generations of reporters."

Warner, Hier-Majumder:  UMd Establishes Fund in Honor of Justin DeSha-Overcash

Two university faculty members established the fund for students who, like DeSha-Overcash, struggle to pay their way through school.
College Park Patch:  "The University of Maryland has established a foundation in honor of Justin DeSha-Overcash, a physics and astronomy double major who was killed in his College Park home in January.  The Justin DeSha-Overcash Summer Research Award will provide funds to out-of-state undergraduate students 'eager to pursue research opportunities and explore a world of possibilities,' said a letter written by Saswata Hier-Majumder and Elizabeth Warner, two faculty members who worked with DeSha-Overcash during his time at the university.   DeSha-Overcash was renowned among friends and coworkers for his work ethic, which enabled him to hold down multiple jobs at a time in order to pay his way through school. At the time of his death, DeSha-Overcash worked both as a tutor for athletes and as an undergraduate staff member at the UMd. Obvervatory. Financing his studies was a neverending challenge for DeSha-Overcash, and Hier-Majumder and Warner hope that the fund will ease the burden for other students in similar positions.  'It is our hope that this award will allow a student to stay at Maryland to conduct research that he or she is genuinely interested in rather than be forced to take a job that simply pays the bills,' the letter said.  Checks can be made payable to The University of Maryland College Park Foundation (UMCPF) with a memo line designating the gift to the Justin DeSha-Overcash Award. Donations may also be made online here -- just search 'Overcash' and follow the links."

David Driskell Prints, Part II

Maryland's Driskell greatly influences the Connecticut arts scene ...
Hartford Courant slide show:  "It's the season of David C. Driskell in Connecticut museums.  In New Haven, a student-chosen exhibit 'Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery,' which includes Driskell's 2002 screenprint, 'Dancing Angel,' continues through June 26 at the Yale gallery. It was curated by students from Yale and from the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland in College Park, where the exhibit originally was shown. It opened at Yale last month with a lecture from Driskell, who is known as much as an educator, curator, scholar and collector as he is an artist.  But the big Driskell event has been happening at the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. The massive show of his prints over a half century, 'Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking,' with its 75 pieces, proved too large for the center, so it was broken into two parts. The first, which opened back in October, ran through early this month. The concluding half opened last weekend and runs through August. A run of more than nine month makes 'Evolution' in its two parts one of the longest-lasting shows in the state, and at more than nine months in length, the longest in Amistad history.  And yet, it is also one of the most popular exhibits in Amistad history, according to Alona C. Wilson, assistant director and curator for the Amistad Center. Driskell is recognized as one of the most respected names in African American art and culture. His curating of the 1976 exhibit 'Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1759-1950' laid the groundwork for the field of African American Art History.  He's become a cultural advisor to stars including Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, who consult with him on buying African and African-American works. He was also chairman of the Department of Art from 1978-1983 at University of Maryland, where he is now professor emeritus."

Grimm:  SXSW 2011, Austin: The Year of the Librarian

The Atlantic:  "Tech for tech's sake is over. In a year when social media is helping inform our coverage of everything from political upheaval in the Middle East to the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan, your app better do something more than be cool.  I kept coming back to the librarians as I talked to people at SXSWi because this micro-track mirrored what I saw tweeted and written about the conference as a whole. Interactive didn't feel blindly focused on discovering the killer app. Tech didn't feel like an end unto itself -- rather, it was about processing data with a purpose; data for a greater good.  I met with Justin Grimes, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Maryland who has done significant work on open government standards, and works with the formidable Carl Malamud on digitizing federal archives. I told him about my theory that librarians were the lens through which to view SXSWi, and he started nodding. 'Librarians are the boots on the ground,' Grimes told me. 'We don't care what the tech is, we care about what the user actually needs. That's our mandate.'  There was, by my count, a panel or a meet-up showcasing librarians every day of this year's SXSWi. Let's start with the most fundamental of technology questions -- Internet access. Rural librarian and technologist Jessamyn West noted at her Friday panel that 22 percent of Americans are still without Internet at home, and 35 percent are without broadband. And, simply offering broadband at libraries or community hubs isn't enough. Users who only access Internet services at their local library, said West, are not as fully engaged with the social web. 'The cloud is not real to those who can't access it,' declared West."

Athletes for Gay Rights

Inside Higher Ed:  "Hudson Taylor, who graduated last year from the University of Maryland at College Park, was a dominant force in college wrestling. He is a three-time All-American, tied for fifth in career pins in the all-time National Collegiate Athletic Association record books, and holds the school record for career wins at Maryland. Now assistant wrestling coach at Columbia University, Taylor said that he hopes to become best known not for his wins on the mat, but for taking a stand against homophobia and transphobia in sports. Taylor, who is straight, founded Athlete Ally a few months ago as 'a resource to encourage athletes, coaches, parents, fans and other members of the sports community to respect all individuals in sports, regardless of perceived or actual sexual-orientation or gender identity or expression.' As of Monday, more than 2,000 individuals have signed Hudson’s Athlete Ally pledge, 'to lead my athletic community to respecting and welcoming all persons.' Hudson’s nonprofit organization is one of the few of its type supporting the acceptance of gay and lesbian athletes, particularly those playing at the intercollegiate level. There are few openly gay and lesbian athletes in the NCAA’s high-profile Division I. Last year, however, Kye Allums became the first openly transgender Division I basketball player when he came out as a member of the women’s team at George Washington University. ... Hudson said he hopes his organization and the pledge can help change attitudes about gays and lesbians in sports -- a community he admits has not always been accepting of those who are different -- one individual at a time.  'The athletic community is a diverse one and there are many different layers to it,' Hudson said. 'This pledge is aimed at anyone that’s involved in sports in any way. Sports have the potential to reach people at an early age about what is and what is not acceptable. For instance, today’s coaches were yesterday’s athletes. Athletics is not one-dimensional. As someone in the wrestling community, I’m just trying to reach as many people as I can and get people to join the discussion on this issue.' "

Don’t Dare Doubt Doron’s Devotion to Israeli Hoops

Jerusalem Post:   "Shay Doron will only be celebrating her 26th birthday on Friday, but she has already achieved more than most basketball players accomplish in an entire career.  After helping the University of Maryland to its first ever national title in 2006 and becoming the first Israeli to play in the WNBA the following year, Doron has lifted local basketball to unprecedented heights in recent seasons. The 1.75-meter guard has led the national team to three straight European Championships, with Israel making only two previous appearances in the EuroBasket tournament before she entered the scene.  Perhaps the crowning moment in her career came last Thursday, when she captained Elitzur Ramle to the Eurocup title, helping the club become the first Israeli women’s team to win a continental competition.  And to think Doron was labeled by some as not being Israeli enough just a few years ago.  Doron was born in Ramat Hasharon, but left the country three years later when her family moved to Long Island, New York. After being away for eight years the family returned to Israel and Doron joined Ramat Hasharon’s youth system. She soon stood out and was promoted to the side’s senior roster before her 16th birthday.  However, despite having a seemingly secure future in the local league, Doron and her family chose to leave everything behind and go to America in order to realize her dream of playing at the highest levels. She joined “Christ the King” High School in Queens, New York, the only Jewish girl among 1,800 students in the Catholic school.  But, indeed, that was the place to be to further her career, and Doron quickly excelled, becoming the first girl from New York to play on the McDonald’s All-American Team before joining Maryland upon graduation.  In 2005, she led the USA to the Maccabiah title, providing further proof for those who said that she is far more American than Israeli."

Comic Riffs: ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’

Jeff Kinney's “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules” is the king of this week's movie box office numbers
Washington Post:  "For years before landing a publisher and then a studio deal, the Massachusetts-based Kinney worked as a designer and game developer at the online educational company Pearson -- yet he still dreamed of being a cartoonist. He graduated from the University of Maryland in the early ’90s after drawing a popular campus comic, 'Igdoof.'  But as other cartooning alumni of the school’s newspaper, the Diamondback, began to find mainstream success -- including 'The Boondocks' creator Aaron McGruder and comic artist Frank Cho -- Kinney struggled for that right opening. Finally, in 2006, his 'Wimpy Kid' concept was discovered at New York Comic Con.  Besides his book series, Kinney would also help launch another hit in 2007: Poptropica.com, a virtual world for children that now calls itself the most popular kids’ site on the Web, with 130 million fans. Yet writing was still an act of solitude ' it’s Hollywood and the soundstage that provide a communal experience.  'I think the most satisfying part about filmmaking is seeing a production in full bloom,' Kinney says. 'When I write, I write in isolation. It’s very exciting to see, for example, a roller-skating rink that was built from scratch just for a single scene in the movie. It’s exciting to think that it sprang into existence from an idea.' "

Busalacchi:  Study Says Navy Must Adapt to Climate Change

New York Times:  "A report commissioned by the United States Navy concludes that climate change will pose profound challenges for the sea service in coming decades, including a need to secure Arctic shipping lanes, prepare for more frequent humanitarian missions and protect coastal installations from rising seas.  The 15-month study, conducted by the National Research Council, accepts the scientific consensus that the climate is changing and that the effects are being felt now. Of particular consequence to American naval forces – the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard – are the melting polar ice cap, rising seas and increasingly frequent severe storms and droughts that could lead to famine, mass migration and political instability.  The report from research council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, builds on previous work by the Pentagon, State Department, the intelligence community and independent research groups that have concluded that climate change is a 'threat multiplier' that adds new and unpredictable dangers to global physical and political stability.  The primary authors are Frank L. Bowman, a retired Navy admiral who led the service’s nuclear propulsion unit, and Antonio J. Busalacchi, Jr., a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. They were assisted by a large number of climate and oceanography experts as well as corporate planners and active-duty military officers."

Doughty:  CIA Seeks Anyone, Anyone Who Can Speak 2 Languages

Live Science:  "Many Americans don't learn a second or a third language from birth, let alone a language that the CIA or U.S. Foreign Service might want. The situation has forced U.S. government agencies to learn how to cultivate the most talented second-language speakers from among college students with little to no other-language expertise.  But experts who help select and train raw talent also see an opportunity in the mass of recruits who start out speaking only English. That's because the U.S. represents a living laboratory for observing how adult brains change over time as they struggle to adapt to the new grammar and vocabulary of a second language.  'In U.S. education, we don't develop early bilinguals,' said Catherine Doughty, a language expert at the University of Maryland. 'We're dealing with monolinguals or people who have only studied foreign language, so that they don't really have any proficiency.'  Doughty spoke as part of a panel on Feb. 19 during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Washington, D.C. She and other speakers described the typical U.S. second-language program as being a series of disjointed classes where students often repeated what they had learned before. 'Imagine math [programs] where the middle school says, "We don't have any idea about what you studied," so you learn it again. It's the same with high school,' said Robert O. Slater, director of the U.S. National Security Education Program.  That situation drove Slater and the government to develop a flagship program for finding the most promising college students and putting them through intensive language learning. Yet researchers have just begun to figure out how to predict the most promising language students, and how to measure their progress.  The CIA has aimed to boost its ranks of foreign language speakers, with a special focus on recruiting speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Korean, Pashtu, Persian, Russian and Urdu."

Gates:  Theory of Everything ... Still Searching?

NPR:  "Monday night, I had the privilege to participate in the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, hosted by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The convener and master of ceremonies was Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the superb Hayden Planetarium, and the wonderful host of the PBS NOVA TV show scienceNow.  Joining me were five other theoretical physicists, some of them well-known to the general public from their books and documentary appearances: Katherine Freeze, from the University of Michigan, Brian Greene, from Columbia University, Janna Levin, from Barnard College of Columbia University, Sylvester James Gates, Jr., from the University of Maryland, and Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute near Toronto.  Tyson's task, which he fulfilled admirably well, was not trivial: to keep six physicists with different ideas and opinions in check, making sure we didn't veer into technically arcane topics, losing the audience. We could talk about quantum vacuum fluctuations, superstrings, the multiverse, and dark matter, but had to explain ourselves in English.  About 1,300 people came to listen as we discussed the night's topic: The Theory of Everything... Still Searching? The debate should be on video soon."

Whiz Kids: CEOs 40 and Under of Major Public Companies

Some started their business, some inherited it, and some very quickly worked their way up
Forbes:  "Here are the top 20. Some of them started their own businesses, while others joined established ones and quickly ascended. There are also lucky execs who knew all the right people, and some who took over family businesses. Regardless of how they got there, these young chief executives are the heads of the country's biggest publicly traded companies by market capitalization, as of Feb. 11, with CEOs 40 and under.  They lead a diverse list of companies, including sports car manufacturers, online travel sites, property insurers and electronic learning software makers. Michael Chasen, 38, heads a company that changed the educational experience for millions of students over the past decade. As a high school student, he wrote computer programs for local businesses, charging them $25 an hour for his services. He continued to build computer applications, and when he was 25 he dropped out of law school to start Blackboard, an online learning company. Today it has a market cap of $1.36 billion.  Whereas Chasen innovated in the classroom, 38-year-old Kevin Plank provided a new experience for athletes on the field. As a student at the University of Maryland, Plank developed his first business to sell roses for Valentine’s Day. It earned him about $17,000, and those revenues later helped him start a company to manufacture moisture-wicking fabric.  He was a senior on the college football team when he developed a prototype for a polyester-Lycra-blend T-shirt to keep him and his teammates dry. Fifteen years later he is the chief executive of Under Armour, an apparel company that now has a market cap of $3.56 billion."

Global Impact, Research

Salawitch:  Arctic May Face Record Loss of Ozone This Spring

Live Science:  "Cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere and the lingering presence of ozone-destroying pollutants, called chlorofluorocarbons, have set the stage for what could be a record loss in protective ozone over the Arctic this spring.  'We have done everything to protect the atmosphere from CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), still we get record ozone loses once in a while,' said Markus Rex, an ozone researcher with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.  'Right now, at the relevant altitude, we have lost about half of the ozone that should be there,' Rex told LiveScience.com.  Rex and other researchers from Europe, Russia and North America came to this conclusion based on data collected by 30 stations in and slightly south of the Arctic.  Global warming is also a likely contributor. Scientists believe it is responsible for cooling the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere where the ozone layer is located, approximately 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) above the Earth's surface. By trapping heat lower down and warming the surface of the Earth, greenhouse gases actually cool the stratosphere. In recent years, the coldest of stratospheric winter temperatures have been getting colder, according to the researchers.  [Earth's Atmosphere: Top to Bottom]  This year, more ozone has been lost over the Arctic due to unusually cold temperatures in the stratosphere, and these have been fed by a stronger circulation pattern called the polar vortex throughout the winter, according to Ross Salawitch, a professor at the University of Maryland, and one of Rex's collaborators.  The air inside this vortex, which is created by a combination of cold temperatures over the pole and the rotation of the Earth, is much colder than the air outside. That cooling leads to cloud formation inside the vortex and the ensuing chemical reactions that produce highly reactive molecules with unpaired electrons. These, in turn, react with ozone, breaking apart its three oxygen atoms.This is problematic because ozone blocks harmful radiation -- which can damage DNA and lead to skin cancer, among other problems -- from reaching the Earth's surface.  The same dynamics are responsible for the more infamous hole in the ozone above Antarctica. However, over the South Pole, the vortex circulation system is larger, stronger and more predictable from year to year, Salawitch said."

'Bacterial Dirigibles' Emerge as Next-Generation Disease Fighters

American Chemical Society:  "Scientists have developed bacteria that serve as mobile pharmaceutical factories, both producing disease-fighting substances and delivering the potentially life-saving cargo to diseased areas of the body. They reported on this new candidate for treating diseases ranging from food poisoning to cancer -- termed 'bacterial dirigibles' -- at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 'We're building a platform that could allow bacterial dirigibles to be the next-generation disease fighters,' said study leader William E. Bentley, Ph.D. 'The concept is unique.'   Bentley explained that traditional genetic engineering reprograms bacteria so that they produce antibiotics, insulin, and other medicines and materials. The bacteria grow in nutrient solutions in enormous stainless steel vats in factories. They release antibiotics or insulin into vats, and technicians harvest the medicine for processing and eventual use in people.  The bacterial dirigible approach takes bioengineering a step further. Scientists genetically modify bacteria to produce a medicine or another disease-fighting substance. Then, however, they give the bacteria a biochemical delivery address, which is the locale of the disease. Swallowed or injected into the body, the bacteria travel to the diseased tissue and start producing substances to fight the disease.  Bentley chose the term 'bacterial dirigibles' because the modified bacteria actually have the fat-cigar look of blimps and zeppelins, those famous airships of yesteryear. In addition, the bacteria seem to float like a blimp as they make deliveries.  The prototype bacterial dirigible is a strain of E. coli that Bentley and colleagues developed at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he is Robert E. Fischell Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Fischell Department of Bioengineering."

Is Nitrogen The New Carbon? Calculate Your N-Print

AP:  "You may know your carbon footprint, but do you know your nitrogen footprint?  Researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland have developed an online calculator to figure it out. While carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, some nitrogen compounds are so-called nutrients that can spawn oxygen-robbing algae blooms when they reach the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways.  Nitrogen pollution comes not only from excess fertilizer used on lawns and farms, but is also found in automobile and power plant exhaust. The website also has recommendations on how to reduce your nitrogen footprint, including cutting air travel, using renewable energy and eating less meat especially beef, because cattle require large amounts of feed."

Jin:  Weighing the China Model? Take a Deep Breath in Beijing

Dow Jones MarketWatch:  "Developed-world proponents of the 'China Model' often point to environmental degradation as an example of the intractable sort of problem authoritarian governments, free of the need for grinding public debate, are good at addressing.  But in new study examining one of the country's highest profile environmental problems, a team of Chinese and U.S.-based economists casts some doubt on that thesis.  The subject of the the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is Beijing's air quality, which changed markedly before and after the 2008 Olympics.  Beijing spent more than $10 billion to clean up its sometime spooky brown polluted air before the Olympics. According to the study, the government managed to improve air quality by 30% during the games, compared to year-earlier readings. But a year after the games, about 60% of those gains had evaporated.  What's one to make of this? Like many others, the authors of the NBER study -- Yuyu Chen and Guang Shi of Peking University, Ginger Zhe Jin of the University of Maryland and Naresh Kumar of the University of Iowa – give credit for the impressive improvement in air quality during the Olympics to China's authoritarian system.   Countries with such governments can make huge efforts to clear away problems when they are motivated to do so, they say.  The measures taken in what the authors describe as 'the largest natural experiment in air cleaning' in Olympic history were indeed huge: Coal, steel and chemical plants were shuttered, vehicle traffic was reduced and auto-emission standards were increased.  There has been some suspicion Beijing cooked the books by prohibiting researchers from taking pollution readings at the site of the games and releasing only an official 'daily air pollution index.'  The researchers tried to compensate for that by examining pollution readings taken by National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellites which crossed China twice a day. The NASA readings generally confirmed what the Chinese government was reporting."

Global Community

Using Google Earth to Monitor Threats to Archeological Sites

Global Heritage Network:  "Working with NASA and the University of Maryland, GHN (Global Heritage Network) has daily data feeds of fires threatening Mirador, a cultural and natural heritage site in Guatemala. Whenever a fire is detected near the basin, GHN receives an alert with the fire's location, which can be sent to local authorities. By tracking fires with daily MODIS images such as this one, GHN has mounted a campaign to preserve the forest. (Image: University of Maryland and GHF)."

Libya

Galston:  The Anti-Libya Intervention Crowd: No Case

Why the argument offered against Libyan military intervention is philosophically flawed
New Republic:  William Galston, professor of public policy, writes:  "On any impartial global index of leaders' veracity and trustworthiness, Qaddafi would rank near the bottom. But in matters of organized brutality, there's every reason to take him at his word. At the very least, there's a very real possibility of mass reprisals and killings that would dwarf the slaughter at Srebrenica. That brings us to the nub of the matter: Were we required to wait until the slaughter began in order to 'stop' it, or are we allowed to intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster that is probable but not absolutely certain? The example of Rwanda suggests that if outside parties wait until the murder begins, it may be too late to halt it before many thousands have died. I don't understand the basis for Walzer's conclusion that unlike Rwanda, the threat to innocent life in Libya is not 'extreme' enough to justify we what are doing.  All things considered, then, there is good reason why the impending fall of Benghazi moved President Obama to act. Bill Clinton has stated more than once that his failure to intervene in Rwanda was--morally and humanly speaking--the worst decision of his presidency. I agree. If I had been sitting where Obama was sitting last week, I would have acted as he did to prevent what could have been a similar stain on my administration. To be sure, there's a chance that this wouldn't have happened, even if we hadn't intervened. But would we have been morally justified in taking that chance?  Yes, there are costs and risks. But let me use a philosopher's example to clarify the issue. Suppose you're a skilled swimmer walking along a beach. You hear a cry for assistance and observe someone struggling in the water a hundred feet offshore. Although it's highly likely that you can bring the endangered swimmer safely to shore, there's a small chance that you can't, and a smaller but not negligible threat to your own safety. You also know that no one else can act with equal odds of success. Would it have been right to walk on by?  Since Kant, we have been familiar with the proposition that 'ought implies can.' But in some circumstances, the reverse also holds: 'can implies ought.' Our massive, ongoing investment in military capacity has a range of consequences for defense and diplomacy. It also has moral consequences. Because we can act in ways that others can't, we are not as free as they are to ignore threats that we have the power to abate.  Having said this, let me grant a point Walzer rightly makes: Humanitarian protection is one thing, regime change quite another. This is a distinction that Obama also makes. No doubt his ringing and (many believe) unwise declaration that Qaddafi must go has muddied the waters. But while it may be complicated to say that our military intervention is bounded by the requirements of civilian protection and that we will use non-military means to bring about Qaddafi's fall, it is not on its face incoherent. Let me grant, as well, that the endgame is murky at best. There's a non-trivial possibility that Qaddafi will be able to hang on to power in a substantial part of Libya. If so, we and our allies may have committed ourselves to protecting "Benghazistan" against retribution for the indefinite future. We've seen that movie before. Let's hope this one ends better."

Kull:  Americans Willing To Help Libya To A Point

NPR:  "President Obama has come under some criticism from members of Congress for not being more explicit about his goals or the exit strategy when it comes to the current bombing campaign in Libya. And, so far, public opinion of U.S. involvement has been tepid.  Public opinion surveys suggest that the American people support the U.S. military's role in creating a no-fly zone over Libya, but not by an overwhelming margin. About half of Americans approve, while about a third disapprove, according to various polls.  But the approval numbers begin to lift upward fast when pollsters provide additional information about the mission -- like the lack of ground troops, or the limited time frame Obama has stressed. A CBS News poll released Tuesday, for instance, found that 68 percent of Americans approve of the airstrikes when informed that their purpose is to protect civilians. 'When the goals are specified, you do get rather large support,' says Stephen Kull, who directs the University of Maryland's program on international policy attitudes. 
Military operations launched primarily for humanitarian purposes, such as the 1990s missions in Bosnia and Somalia, don't seem to enjoy the kind of near-universal support that Americans give at the outbreak of wars in which they feel the country has come under direct threat.  Public support is being held down by the fact that the public does not perceive vital national interests as being at stake, as was the case at the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, says Douglas Foyle, a government professor at Wesleyan University who has studied public opinion about wars."

Telhami:  Arab World Watching U.S.-Libya Action Closely

Success in Libya, i.e. Qaddafi's departure, is crucial if the U.S. wants to be seen in positive light in Arab world
CBS News:  "There's been some confusion and a lot of debate about U.S. goals in Libya, with some questioning whether we should even be there.  CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports that, after scores of cruise missile and bombing attacks, the President still calls the US mission in Libya humanitarian, with the goal of stopping Muammar Qaddafi from attacking his own people.  'Not only was he carrying out the murders of civilians, but he was threatening more,' Mr. Obama said.  The UN resolution was also about civilians, saying the mandate was to take 'all necessary measures to protect (Libyan) civilians.'  However the real goal in Libya is the downfall, death or departure of Muammar Qaddafi. It's what the Europeans, most Arab countries, and the President all say they want.  All of which means America is fighting in another Muslim country, but this time with the unusual support of most of the Arab world.  'The Arab public for the first time is open to American intervention,' said Shibley Telhami, a Mideast expert at the University of Maryland.  Telhami takes opinion polls in Arab countries. Because Gaddafi threatens and embarrasses most Arabs, Telhami calls this a one of kind moment for the President to build Arab good will.  Telhami says success in Libya -- seeing Qaddafi regime change -- is essentially important for Mr. Obama.  Regime change in Libya is also important to the protest marchers on every Arab street. After peaceful protests took down two dictators - first in Tunisia, then in Egypt -- Qaddafi changed tactics and made war on the crowds. Since then, shooting the protestors has been the rule.  Government crackdowns have killed at least seven protestors in Syria, 20 in Bahrain and some 40 demonstrators in Yemen. Many fear that if Qaddafi survives and clings to power, his way wins.  'What will happen is a lot of other governments may draw the same lessons (from) Qaddafi, which is (to) shoot the people,' Telhami said."

Saab:  Assad’s Speech Dashes Syria Hopes: Analysts

Agence France-Presse:  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad dashed the hopes of his people on Wednesday with a speech which failed to unveil the major reforms expected and left the country in a state of uncertainty, analysts said. Syrian human rights lawyer Haitham Maleh warned that protests and a tough crackdown would go on.  'He said nothing,' Maleh told AFP by telephone. 'We heard this speech before. They always say that they need to change and do something but in real fact, in practice nothing happened.'  Assad blamed conspirators for deadly unrest in Syria but declined to elaborate on promised reforms despite expectations he would lift a decades-old state of emergency.  'All the people were waiting to hear what he will say, what he will do... nothing' said Maleh, who says he spent eight years behind bars 'for nothing, for my speech' until his release under a presidential pardon earlier this month.  Maleh, 80, who has worked for London-based human right watchdog Amnesty International since 1989 and was involved in founding a Syrian rights group, was arrested on October 14, 2009 and questioned by a military tribunal over articles he had written.  Bilal Saab, an Arab affairs analyst at the University of Maryland, told AFP: 'Bashar’s speech was specifically designed to rescue his presidency and hold on to power. By dissolving his own cabinet and offering some concessions, he is distancing himself from the regime and projecting an image of a reformer who is at odds with his government and who is stuck and trying to break free.  'Yet the road ahead is still fraught with danger and it may be too little too late.'  Saab identified five major stumbling blocks to progress: the Sunni majority, the Muslim Brotherhood, senior leaders in his Baath party who could feel they had much to lose, some members of his own family who are opposed to change, and army commanders keen to retain their privileges.  'Faced with such political competition and potential threats, Basharâ’s only ally in this fight for survival is a segment of the Syrian population whose real size is hard to determine,' Saab added."

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Japan

Galloway:  Seawalls Offered Little Protection Against Tsunami's Crushing Waves

New York Times:  "In Kamaishi, 14-foot waves surmounted the seawall -- the world's largest, erected a few years ago in the city's harbor at a depth of 209 feet, a length of 1.2 miles and a cost of $1.5 billion -- and eventually submerged the city center.  'This is going to force us to rethink our strategy,' said Yoshiaki Kawata, a specialist on disaster management at Kansai University in Osaka and the director of a disaster prevention center in Kobe. 'This kind of hardware just isn't effective.'  Mr. Kawata said that antitsunami seawalls were 'costly public works projects' that Japan could no longer afford. 'The seawalls did reduce the force of the tsunami, but it was so big that it didn't translate into a reduction in damage,' he said, adding that resources would be better spent on increasing evacuation education and drills.  Gerald Galloway, a research professor of engineering at the University of Maryland, said one problem with physical defenses protecting vulnerable areas was that they could create a sense of complacency. 'There are challenges in telling people they are safe' when the risks remain, he said.  Whatever humans build, nature has a way of overcoming it. Mr. Galloway noted that New Orleans is getting a substantial upgrade of its hurricane protection system, but he said, 'If all the new levees were in and we had a Katrina times two, a lot of people are going to still get wet.' Similarly, he said, some of the floodwalls in Japan, which can be almost 40 feet high, but vary from place to place, were simply too low for the wave.  'If a little bit dribbles over the top, you get a little wet inside,' he said. 'If it's a massive amount, then you get buildings washed away.' "

Salawitch:  Computer Models Aid Japanese Nuclear Response

UMd. research team wants more data made public
Washington Post:   "As the Japanese nuclear crisis continues to unfold, the airborne spread of radioactive materials from the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station continues to be a key concern of Japanese and American officials. To help determine the path that any hazardous emissions are likely to take, scientists are employing specialized computer models, known as 'trajectory models,' which can take into account factors such as winds and temperatures aloft to determine how high a parcel of air is likely to climb, how far it may go, and where it may be within certain timeframes.  In the local area, a team from the University of Maryland at College Park has been providing publicly viewable trajectory model projections for emissions of radionucleides from the Fukushima facility, in an effort to address a need they say was created in part by the lack of information being put out by U.S. and Japanese authorities.  Using the HYSPLIT model developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, scientists at the University of Maryland at College Park have been able to provide evidence to back up recent statements by American officials playing down the public health risks to the West Coast from the radioactive plume emanating from the Fukushima facility. 'We had heard everyone saying this stuff is going to be too dilute to get to America, but we wanted to check ourselves,' said Ross J. Salawitch, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland, noting the importance of putting the information in the public domain. 'Basically we think this is quite benign for North America, and unless the situation on the ground changes dramatically there is no reason to change that.' According to Salawitch, one of the key factors determining the destination of any radioactivity from the Fukushima facility is the height to which the emissions are lofted. Since very little is publicly known about the precise quantities, loft heights, and other technical details about the emissions, he says there are significant uncertainties involved with his group’s plots, as well as those from other entities."

Buchanan:  Scientists: Radiation in Japan Food Poses Low Risk

USA Today:   "Fred Mettler, a University of New Mexico radiologist who led a United Nations-sponsored team investigating the health effects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, said he didn't expect to see any detectable increase in cancer risk from consumption of radiation-contaminated foods in Japan, let alone in the USA.
Radioactive iodine gets into milk 12 hours after cows eat contaminated grass, Mettler said. More than two decades after the Chernobyl reactor explosion in Ukraine, Mettler said, the only detectable increases in cancer cases attributed to it are thyroid cancers. Those cancers have occurred in people who were children or teens at the time of the accident and drank milk from cows that ate grass in the thousands of square miles contaminated with radioactive iodine.  In Japan, it's not surprising that spinach is the main vegetable found contaminated, because it's an early spring crop whose large leaves can catch falling radiation, said Robert Buchanan, director of the Center for Food Safety and Security Systems at the University of Maryland.  Both Mettler and Buchanan noted that virtually all foods contain radioactivity collected from cosmic sources and bits of uranium in soil."

Hultman: Quake Another Big Obstacle for Nukes in U.S.

Maryland Daily Record:  "Maryland’s only nuclear power plant is fundamentally different from the endangered Fukushima plant in Japan, but what’s happening on the other side of the world could suppress the public’s appetite for more reactors here.  The Fukushima plant, damaged by a 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami on March 11, has six boiling water reactors. Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, located in Lusby on the southwest coast of the Chesapeake Bay, has two pressurized water reactors. Proposals to add a third reactor stalled in financial negotiations and a French company’s bid to take on the expansion now appears even less likely to come to fruition. 'Public opinion has changed in the last couple days,' Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot said.  Franchot said economics are still the biggest obstacle for proponents of a Calvert Cliffs expansion, but the situation in Japan would have a 'huge impact on the Nuclear Renaissance' across the country. ... Quakes and tsunamis are exceedingly unlikely around Calvert Cliffs. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there has never been an earthquake centered in the Washington, D.C., area in recorded history (though the area has felt mild effects from quakes centered elsewhere).  Nathan Hultman, a University of Maryland professor in the School of Public Policy who is an expert on atomic energy policy, said reactor containment units in the U.S. are built to withstand tremendous impacts -- even the force of a plane flying into them, a scenario that came up after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.  But Hultman said the cooling ponds where used nuclear rods are placed at most facilities are sometimes more vulnerable. Spent rods must be radioactively cooled for several years before they can enter 'dry cask' storage. Fires have broken out in some of the pools at the damaged Fukushima plant, sending high levels of radiation into the atmosphere. 'Even if someone did try to fly an airplane into a nuclear reactor … it’s likely not going to actually break the reactor and release radioactivity,' Hultman said. 'But if you fly the airplane into the pool of spent fuel, you can create essentially a dirty bomb, right, from just this activity and maybe even set the thing on fire.' "

Dickerson, Milton, Sapkota:  Public Health Risks from Radiation Leaking from Japanese Nuclear Plants

Asian News International:   "Scientists have said that as of now the airborne radiation from a meltdown at Japanese nuclear plants, poses no immediate risk to the continental United States.  Drawing on research from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, University of Maryland public health and atmospheric scientists said that for most Japanese, the long-term risk may lie in ingestion of milk, water or food, as well as direct exposure to contaminated soil.  'Radiation from Chernobyl was barely measurable in the mainland United States,' University of Maryland atmospheric scientist Russell Dickerson said. ... The Japanese government has advised people outside the immediate area of the contaminated nuclear plants to 'shelter in place'.  'The basic idea behind sheltering in place is that radiation is carried on particles coming from the fires and steam releases,' (says Donald Milton, director of the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and Amir Sapkota, a professor at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health). 'There is a fairly large body of data showing to what extent the indoor exposure to particles is less than outdoors. Particles in the size range that could be transported long distances penetrate houses to widely varying extents. If the windows are closed and there is no mechanical ventilation with outside air intake, if the windows and the rest of the house are new and very tight, the exposure could be significantly reduced. Older leaky houses would be less protective.  'Because much ground contamination comes from fallout in rain, the act of simply staying indoors would still provide significant protection from ground contamination, even if it only cut airborne exposure by half,' they stated."

Milton:  Elite Japanese Nuclear Workers Race to Stop Meltdown

Associated  Press:   "They risk explosions, fire and an invisible enemy -- radiation that could kill quickly or decades later -- as they race to avert disaster inside a dark, overheated nuclear plant.  The 180 emergency workers at Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi complex are emerging as public heroes in the wake of a disaster spawned by an earthquake and a tsunami.  Dubbed by some as modern-day samurai, the technicians were back at work late Wednesday after a surge of radiation forced them to leave their posts for hours.  'I don't know any other way to say it, but this is like suicide fighters in a war,' said Keiichi Nakagawa, associate professor of the Department of Radiology at the University of Tokyo Hospital.  Small teams of the still-anonymous emergency workers rush in and out for 10 to 15 minutes at a time to pump sea water into the plant's overheated reactors, monitor them and clear debris from explosions. Any longer would make their exposure to radioactivity too great. They also struggle with broken equipment and a lack of electricity.  Even at normal times, workers wear coveralls, full-face masks with filters, helmets and double-layer gloves when they enter areas with a possibility of radiation exposure. Some of them carry oxygen tanks so they don't have to inhale any radioactive particles into their lungs. ... 'The thing I've been concerned about right now are the workers. They are at a tremendous risk,' said Don Milton, a doctor who specializes in occupational health and directs the Maryland Institute of Applied Environmental Health at the University of Maryland.  Milton noted reports that some workers have already shown signs of acute radiation sickness. That would be even worse than it sounds because 'the sooner it comes on after exposure, the worse it is.' "

Modarres:  Calvert Cliffs Neighbors Able to Take Some Comfort

Washington Post:  "There are no views of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant from any of the major roads that run through Lusby. Its two reactors sit in a wooded area along the Chesapeake Bay. The entrance is marked by a modest sign. But for those who live within its 10-mile evacuation zone, the plant makes its presence known in other ways.  There are siren towers and free supplies of potassium iodide pills at the health department. There is the feeling of unease on the part of drivers sitting in traffic on the two-lane Thomas Johnson Bridge — the main evacuation route for towns south of the plant. And then there are crises at other nuclear power plants such as the one at the Fukushima Daiichi facility in Japan triggered by last Friday’s massive earthquake and tsunami.  Many residents take comfort in knowing that Solomons Island doesn’t sit on a faultline the size of the San Andreas, and the Chesapeake Bay has more Atlantic sturgeon than it does tsunamis. 'The circumstances are completely different here. What’s more likely are hurricanes and tornadoes,' said Susan Shaw (R-Huntingtown), president of the Calvert Board of County Commissioners. ... The Calvert Cliffs plant, by contrast, has pressurized water reactors, in which the water that circulates around the reactor’s core is kept under pressure so that it stays in liquid form. The liquid, which is radioactive, is then pumped through a series of tiny tubes. More water circulates around the tiny tubes and turns into steam used to generate electricity. The difference in design, however, doesn’t necessarily make one safer than the other, experts said. The reactor at Three Mile Island near Middletown, Pa., which resulted in a partial-core meltdown, was a pressurized water reactor.  'They have different vulnerabilities to different events,' said Mohammad Modarres, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Maryland."

Campus News

Maryland IT Official Leads Successful Network �Refresh'
Tripti Sinha says renewed infrastructure puts UMD years ahead of other schools as tech needs change
eCampus News: "When the first University of Maryland (UMD) students came to campus with web-accessible phones, Tripti Sinha knew it wasn't a fad. The university network needed an upgrade, and quickly. So Sinha, the research university's director of networking and telecommunications services, along with a team of the campus's IT experts, set out on a five-year 'network refresh' that would do more than just let students and faculty use the internet on their smart phones. Two statistics jumped out to IT decision makers like Sinha when the project was in its planning stages: 70 percent of the university network's equipment was considered obsolete, and 80 percent of campus buildings lacked the wiring to support up-to-date network speeds. The network refresh also aimed to bring UMD in line with state and federal security mandates, Sinha said. The university's new network will have firewall service for every campus department, wired network authentication, and equipment mandated in the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 federal law that allows law enforcement to more easily conduct electronic surveillance. The massive campus-wide upgrade, which will involve more than 270 buildings, was launched in 2008, Sinha said. The $61-million undertaking will be completed by 2014. Sinha said that while it was clear that laptops would become commonplace among college students, it was the proliferation of smart phones that led to a boom in the number of internet-accessible devices on campus."

Rankings
America's Best College Sports Town: The East Region

MTV: Four schools are selected: Maryland, Penn State, North Carolina and West Virginia
Population: 24,657
University of Maryland enrollment: 37,641
Top 25 finishes in football and basketball since 2000: 10 (2002 basketball national champions)
Awesome alums: Larry David, Jim Henson, Len Bias, Sergey Brin
"College Park, Maryland, is unique because it's a college town well within the confines of a large metropolitan area (Washington, D.C.) Maybe it's that big city attitude that has made the student sections at Terrapin games among the bluntest and the most aggressive in the nation. Until being banned by both the football and basketball programs, the favored chant of Terp fans had simply been to loudly repeat 'you suck' as Gary Glitter's 'Rock n Roll Part 2' played (we said they were aggressive, not creative). Another slightly more enlightened tradition that Terp fans adore is reading the newspaper -- feigning disinterest -- as members of the opposing team are introduced. This practice used to be followed by the fans tossing their newspapers at said player, but that ended when a water bottle struck the face of Duke star Carlos Boozer's mother during the paper rain. Terrapin fans have also been known to take to the streets of College Park and riot whether their team wins or loses a big game. Jeremy Gold, who runs the blog Turtle Soup insists this 'tradition' gets overblown by the media. Gold also passed along the legend of the three iron turtle sculptures dispersed throughout campus. Students rub these turtles for luck before taking exams, and student-athletes do the same before games. Legend has it, the turtles will fly away if any Maryland student graduates a virgin. The sculptures still remain, which is something any randy high school senior considering Maryland should take into account."

U.S. News Ranks Best Graduate Schools

With the release of U.S. New's graduate schools, Maryland has an cumulative total of 73 Top 25 programs and 32 Top 10 programs.
(Only Business, Education and Engineering are ranked this year; the cumulative totals are not greatly altered.)

Education's Counseling/Personnel Services continues to maintain its No. 1 position. 
Other top programs:  Smith School's information systems is No. 5; Educational Psychology No.7;
Special Education No. 9; Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering No. 9.

The graduate rankings.
nr= not ranked this year

Business 2012 2011 Robert H. Smith School of Business 45 45      Accounting nr nr      Entrepreneurship 20 26      Executive MBA nr nr      Finance nr 25      Information Systems 5 6      International nr nr      Management nr nr      Marketing 20 23      Nonprofit nr nr      Part-Time MBA 17 15      Production/Operations 23 nr      Supply Chain/Logistics 13 15 Education 2012 2011 College of Education 23 25      Administration & Supervision 16 16      Counseling/Personnel Services 1 1      Curriculum and Instruction 15 19      Education Policy 13 13      Educational Psychology 7 6      Elementary Teacher Education 13 14      Higher Ed Administration 10 10      Secondary Teacher Education 14 22      Special Education 9 11      Vocational/Technical nr nr Engineering 2012 2011 A. James Clark School of Engineering 22 22      Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical 9 9      Biological/Agricultural 26 nr      Biomedical/Bioengineering 37 35      Chemical 41 41      Civil 27 27      Computer 17 na      Electrical/Electronic/Communications 14 14      Environmental/Environmental Health nr nr      Industrial/Manufacturing nr nr      Materials 31 31      Mechanical 21 21      Nuclear nr nr

The Other March Madness: Bicycle Friendly Universities Named

Maryland is among 20 U.S. universities cited for being bike friendly.  Only three schools in the East are ranked:  UMD, Cornell and Emory.
Biking Bis:  "While college coaches are awaiting the bracket results for the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament, bicycle program coordinators at 32 universities have been waiting for news about their own bids for recognition.  The League of American Bicyclists announced the results this week for its inaugural 20 awards in the Bicycle Friendly Universities program.  Stanford University in Palo Alto led the list with a platinum designation, followed by two universities with gold -- UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara.  Nine others received silver level awards and eight received bronze awards (listed below). Nine of the 20 are in Pacific coast states."

Platinum
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Gold
University of California-Davis
UC Santa Barbara

Silver
California State Long Beach
Colorado State University, Boulder
Portland State University, Portland, OR
University of Arizona, Tucson
UC Irvine
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
University of Washington, Seattle
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Bronze
Boise State University, Idaho
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Emory University, Atlanta
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Michigan State University, East Lansing
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
UC Los Angeles
University of Maryland, College Park

Campus Issues

Senate to Take Up Tuition Break for Undocumented Students

Legislation would start students at community college
Baltimore Sun: "The state Senate is poised this week to take up a controversial plan to offer discounted tuition at Maryland's public colleges and universities to students who are in the country illegally. The legislation, which cleared the Senate education committee last week, would allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at any of Maryland's public community colleges. After completing two years of study, they could transfer to a four-year institution and continue to pay the in-state rate. Passage of the measure would likely make Maryland one of the few states in the country to grant new privileges to its undocumented residents. Many states are moving in the opposite direction, looking for ways to tighten immigration controls. ... After the failure last year of a bill that would have allowed in-state tuition to four-year institutions, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said the scaled-back approach of offering the discount initially for community colleges could aid passage in the upper chamber. Such schools have open enrollment, so undocumented students wouldn't displace U.S. citizens. After earning an associate's degree or completing 60 credits, a student could apply for transfer to a four-year institution. 'It shows that the students are serious,' said Sen. Paul G. Pinsky, who is leading the floor debate for the bill. 'They are willing to take the steps to do the groundwork.' Ramirez said undocumented students in other states largely attend community colleges. The bill would save qualifying students from $4,000 to $6,000 a year at community college, according to a legislative analysis. For those who go on to a four-year institution, the savings would increase. In-state tuition at the University of Maryland, College Park this year is $8,655; nonresidents pay $25,795. The Rev. Paul W. Johnson, who helped develop the community college proposal, said he 'knows the sense of dejection' faced by successful high school graduates who can't afford nonresident tuition at the University of Maryland."

Engaged Students

Want A Job? You Ought To Be A Tech Geek

NPR: Morning Edition: "If you can develop software applications for mobile devices, you're sitting pretty. Because this skill is relatively new -- and changing all the time -- it can be hard for companies to find people with the hot new talent that is suddenly indispensable. Because of the labor shortage, companies do some pretty incredible acrobatics to attract good talent. That means it's a good time to be a graduating senior with a degree in computer science. University of Maryland student Ederlyn Lacson interned at Microsoft last summer. At the end of the summer, she says, the tech giant had a private showing of Cirque du Solei - for the interns. The company served 'light snacks. And by light snacks, it was shrimp cocktail -- the unending stream of shrimp cocktail,' she recalls. Needless to say, Lacson took a job with Microsoft. Her classmates got the same treatment. Ray Douglas will be working at the University of Maryland's research lab next year. The school offered him a salary in the $50,000 range. He just happened to mention to his boss the offers he had gotten from other firms -- which were starting in the $70,000 and $80,000 range. 'And he said, "OK, we'll beat that," ' Douglas said, peeking out from under his shaggy hair. 'I was just asking him! I didn't think he was going to do it!' "

Vibrant State

Smart Help Wanted, But Is It Available?

Employers, trade groups and state working to meet future work-force needs
Business Gazette: "New jobs in Maryland requiring post-secondary education and training will grow by 213,000 through 2018, according to the report. That's nearly double the 107,000 jobs that will be available for high school graduates and dropouts that year. Many companies, such as Patriot Technologies in Frederick, already are facing hiring challenges. Finding qualified candidates is proving difficult, said Bruce Tucker, president of the cybersecurity company that has both federal and commercial clients worldwide. 'We're getting candidates but they don't have the [information technology] background,' Tucker said. Patriot has begun using headhunters to find new hires and has advocated trying to steer students to the cybersecurity industry. The University of Maryland, College Park, 'seems to stick out because they have a good IT program,' Tucker said. James Madison and George Mason universities in Virginia also each 'have pretty robust cybersecurity programs.' 'Everything is going on the Internet and the nature of that is causing security problems,' Tucker said, and the demand for cybersecurity workers only will grow as cloud-based software becomes more dominant."

Colwell: Climate Change Could Bring Cholera Back, Scientists Say

California Watch: "Scientists are speculating that climate change could re-introduce cholera to North America. The theory goes that if climate change brings on extreme rainstorms � like those in Southern California last fall, or in Milwaukee last July � water treatment plants could be overwhelmed. And it was the advent of water purification in the 19th century that wiped out the disease in North America. 'Perhaps if we have a breakdown in sewage treatment plants with severe weather patterns, (this could) then bring us to a risk of cholera, which we haven't had for over a hundred years,' Rita Colwell, a public health professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, said at a Canadian Water Network meeting in Ottawa this week, as reported by CBC News. Other scientists agreed, but some wondered whether the threat was not more immediate. 'Drinking water -- providing it safely, is a complex knowledge-based business and it's getting more complicated all the time,' said Steve Hrudey, a University of Albert public health engineer, told CBC News. 'If you're in a community of 100, it's unlikely that you're a full-time water operator. You're probably responsible for snow removal and garbage removal and a few other things. What's the likelihood that you're going to be able to give the kind of attention to drinking water safety that it deserves?' "

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Releases Report Proving Public Media Boosts Early Literacy in Children

For Less Than Half a Penny, Ready To Learn Programming and Content Helps More Than Five Million Children a Day Improve Their Reading Skills
Associated Press, CPB press release:  "The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today the release of a research report, Findings from Ready To Learn: 2005-2010 (http://www.cpb.org/rtl/FindingsFromReadyToLearn2005-2010.pdf), developed with cooperation from PBS and the U.S. Department of Education, which reaffirms the important role that public media plays in educating children ages 2-8.  Research on Ready To Learn, an innovative initiative funded by Congress and the U.S. Department of Education, provides definitive new evidence that shows children from disadvantaged families who interact with public media make remarkable gains in mastering the fundamentals of early literacy -- letter recognition, letter sounds, and vocabulary and word meaning. In some cases, growth on targeted skills is so significant that children are able to successfully narrow or close the achievement gap with their middle-class peers.  The high-quality literacy programs and content that public media developed through Ready To Learn reach more than five million children a day at cost of less than half a penny per child -- significantly less than most other early literacy initiatives. ... The CPB and PBS Ready To Learn grant funded a highly qualified team of educational researchers, made up of leading scholars at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, the Education Development Center, SRI International, and the American Institutes for Research, to conduct studies on Ready To Learn content, materials, resources and community engagement strategies. .. The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded CPB and PBS another five-year Ready To Learn grant in 2010 to focus on math concepts, continue early literacy projects and develop innovative new teaching tools, including multi-media classroom tools, augmented reality games and transmedia gaming suites."

Leafsnap:  Smithsonian Uses Social Media to Expand Its Mission

New York Times:  "The Smithsonian Institution is shaking off its image as 'the nation’s attic' brimming with arcane treasures and using Web and mobile projects to enlist the public in delving into its collections, expanding its research and, sometimes, just adding interesting postscripts to history. ... A recently introduced Smithsonian digital endeavor to discover what environmental factors most influence the size of wildlife populations relies on a broad network of volunteers, rather than specialists. In late February, its Museum of the Natural History introduced 'Smithsonian Wild,', with links on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. It can 'can only be accomplished using citizen scientists -- not unlike the annual bird counts -- only this is for mammals, which are mostly nocturnal,' said Robert Costello, the museum’s outreach program manager.  The site brings together 202,000 wildlife photos from various Smithsonian and other research projects where motion-sensitive cameras were installed to capture close-range images of elusive species like the jaguar.  This gives the public 'a better sense not only of the diversity of wildlife, but also of the diversity of the Smithsonian’s wildlife research,' said Mr. Costello.  On the heels of that project, the Smithsonian began broadening its mobile offerings with a free new app, called Leafsnap, to identify tree species by their leaves. Smartphone apps typically help users to navigate their visit — the Smithsonian has them for its popular National Air and Space Museum as well as the Postal and Natural History -- and to complement specific exhibitions.  Leafsnap is the first of a series of electronic field guides that researchers from the Smithsonian, Columbia University and the University of Maryland have developed to help identify species from photographs. The Web site field guide currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington and will expand to include trees across the continental United States.  The app can also be used to map tree diversity and location by sending global positioning data back to scientists. Other apps to raise awareness of biodiversity will be introduced in the future."

Smith School: The Social Enterprise:  Making a Buck and Doing Good

Baltimore Sun:  "The social enterprise movement isn't limited to nonprofits.  Business schools including the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, which created the Center for Social Value Creation two years ago, are teaching how to develop business solutions to social and environmental ills. And a state law passed last year allows the formation of 'benefit corporations' that take the 'dual bottom-line' approach of making money and helping people and the environment.  Such corporations pay taxes and have shareholders but are shielded from shareholder lawsuits if they share profits or make donations to improve the welfare of employees or suppliers, or promote causes. About 50 benefit corporations have been formed in Maryland since the law took effect in October, according to the state Department of Assessments and Taxation.  'It's more than a trend,' said Amy Kincaid, principal with Change Matters, a social enterprise consulting firm in Takoma Park. 'It's beginning to be more of a way of doing business.'  International, local projects blending nonprofit and profit models. ... At the University of Maryland, the Center of Social Value Creation now sees many students coming from the nonprofit sector to get an MBA, and then return to the field. Melissa Carrier, the center's executive director, said the program has worked with 80 nonprofits -- one-quarter of whom have sought to incorporate some type of for-profit model.  'This is a massive trend that's happening,' Carrier said."

Linebaugh:  Worth Saving

Two out of 11 structures included in 2011 Endangered Maryland list are in St. Mary's
Capital News Service:  "The list includes a waterfront cemetery on the Eastern Shore, a modernist 1958 office building in Silver Spring and a school in Baltimore that was built in 1930 to house a non-denominational school for poor children.  They are said to be historically significant sites that are eroding or crumbling or in critical need of renovation.  The 2011 Endangered Maryland list also includes two structures closer to home — the Dee of St. Mary's, the skipjack owned by the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab in St. George Island, and the Bean barn, a circa 1917 tobacco barn owned by the Historic St. Mary's City Commission in St. Mary's City, once owned by the Bean family. ... Inclusion on the Endangered Maryland list includes no financial assistance. Twenty-two sites or structures were nominated for this year's list.  Those who nominate a site often hope that the increased exposure will benefit fundraising efforts.  'We use it primarily as an awareness-raising tool,' said Jessica Feldt, the education and outreach director for Preservation Maryland. 'It's the opportunity to get the word out about the site.'  ... The Endangered Maryland selection committee has been chaired by Donald Linebaugh, an associate professor and director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Maryland, in the five years since the Endangered Maryland list began. It also includes representatives from the Archaeological Society of Maryland, Southern Maryland Heritage Area, Maryland Historical Trust and other organizations in the state."

Science & Technology

Subrahmanian:  Social Science: Web of War
Nature:  Can computational social science help to prevent or win wars? The Pentagon is betting millions of dollars on the hope that it will.
Cloudy, with an 80% chance of war
"One often-cited inspiration for the current modelling work is an episode in 2003, when coalition forces in Iraq were searching in vain for deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. With conventional methods leading nowhere, a group of US Army intelligence analysts decided to aggregate the available information about Saddam's social network using a link diagram to depict relationships. As they factored in key variables such as trust, the analysts began to realize that the most-wanted government officials — those pictured on the 'personality identification playing cards' that had been widely distributed among US troops — were not necessarily the people whom Saddam trusted most, and were thus not likely to know where he was hiding. Instead, the diagram led the analysts to focus their attention on trusted lower-level associates — including one key bodyguard, whose information led the trackers to the dictator's underground hideaway on a farm near Tikrit.  Today's simulations are similar in concept, but with one crucial difference: the Army analysts' diagram was static, constructed by hand and analysed manually. Now the goal is to do all that with algorithms, using computers to integrate vast amounts of data from different sources, and then to keep the results up to date as the data evolve. ... The same types of model can be used to predict how a terrorist ideology might catch on in the local population and propagate from person to person like a spreading virus. Carley's system can factor in cultural variables, using records of the opinions and attitudes that tend to prevail among specific ethnic groups. The goal, she says, is to produce an effective strategy for stopping the epidemic of radicalization or for destabilizing the terrorist networks by identifying key individuals and groups to be targeted with diplomatic negotiation or military action.  Another example is the Spatial Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine (SCARE) developed by Venkatramanan Subrahmanian, a computer scientist and co-director of the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics at the University of Maryland in College Park. Subrahmanian says that SCARE was able to predict the locations of arms caches in Baghdad to within half a mile, using a combination of open-source data on past roadside bomb explosions and constraints based on distance (terrorists didn't want to carry their explosives very far for fear of getting caught) and culture (most of the attacks that they tracked came from Shiite groups with ties to Iran, so the caches were probably not in Sunni neighbourhoods). Subrahmanian says that he has given copies of the program to the military, and 'they're clearly trying it out'.... Even among researchers working on models with Pentagon funding, there is concern that such enthusiasm may be premature. It seems, for example, that neither computer models nor human analysts were able to precisely predict this year's uprisings in the Middle East.  When it comes to prediction, 'I would say the weather guys are far ahead of where we are', says Subrahmanian, who notes that meteorologists are frequently accused of being wrong as much as they are right. 'And that might give you some relative understanding of where the science is.' "

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Society & Culture

Dougherty:  Depressed Moms' Parenting Style Linked to Toddler Stress

Live Science:   "Preschoolers whose parents are depressed get stressed out more easily than kids with healthy parents, but only if their mothers have a negative parenting style, according to a new study.  The research, set to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, measured the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in kids' saliva after mildly stressful experiences, such as interacting with a stranger. The researchers found that cortisol spikes were more extreme in kids whose parents had a history of depression and also exhibited a critical, easily frustrated parenting style.  It's actually quite hopeful, because if we focus on the parenting, we could really intervene early and help parents with chronic depression when they have kids,' study author Lea Dougherty, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. Earlier studies have found that people with depression often have abnormal cortisol spikes in response to stress, suggesting that problems with the body's stress-regulation system are a risk factor for — or at least a hallmark of — depression. Several studies have found these abnormal reactions in very young babies of depressed mothers, which could mean the system is disrupted either in utero or very early in life.  But it's difficult to tease out the early influences on the body's stress hormone system. Genetics are likely partially to blame, Dougherty and her colleagues wrote. The changes could come about because of biochemical influences in the womb or because of the way depressed moms interact with their babies. Most likely, it's a combination of all of these factors.  To find out whether parenting style matters, the researchers recruited 160 3- and 4-year-olds and their parents. Half of the children were boys and half were girls, and most were white and middle class."

Milkie:  Study: Negative Classroom Environment Adversely Affects Children's Mental Health

American Sociological Association:  "Children in classrooms with inadequate material resources and children whose teachers feel they are not respected by colleagues exhibit more mental health problems than students in classrooms without these issues, finds a new study in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.  'Sociologists and other researchers spend a lot of time looking at work environments and how they are linked to the mental health of adults, but we pay less attention to the relationship between kids' well-being and their "work" environments—namely their schools and more specifically their classrooms,' said Melissa A. Milkie, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, who led the study. 'Our research shows that the classroom environment really matters when it comes to children's mental health.'  According to Milkie, who co-authored the study, 'Classroom Learning Environments and the Mental Health of First Grade Children," with Catharine H. Warner, a sociology PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, policymakers typically measure school quality and teacher effectiveness in terms of academic outcomes such as test scores. But, Milkie said, their study demonstrates that schools and teachers also impact children's mental health, making it a barometer that deserves more attention.  'I think parents care a lot about their children's mental health—their emotional and behavioral well being—but we as a society don't tend to focus on that as an important educational outcome nearly as much as we talk about and think about academic outcomes,' said Milkie.  The study relies on a nationally representative sample of approximately 10,700 first graders, whose parents and teachers were interviewed."

Smith Poll: Small Businesses to Add 3.8M Jobs in 2011

Baltimore Business Journals:  "Small businesses plan to add 3.8 million jobs nationwide this year, according to a poll conducted by the University of Maryland, College Park’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC.  But businesses still rated current conditions a C-minus in the Small Business Success Index, a drop from a year earlier. The index has been compiled five times since December 2008.  Of about 500 small-business owners surveyed by telephone, 28 percent said they expect to hire two full-time employees this year. Sixty-nine percent plan to hold staffing levels constant.  But just as many businesses planning to hire are classified as “failing” under the index, an increase compared to the 19 percent of failing businesses two years ago.   But still, take some optimism -- for the first time in those two years, more business owners think the economy is improving than think it’s worsening, at 35 percent compared to 19 percent."

Dezsö:  Do Daughters Help Ease Gender Pay Gap?

Wall Street Journal:  "We’ve discussed the persistent wage gap between male and female employees  a number of times on this blog. But in an interesting new study, researchers have found that wage differences within a company decrease when something seemingly unrelated to the workplace occurs: when male CEOs have daughters.  Three economists studied the salaries of some 734,200 Danish workers at 6,230 firms, from 1995 through 2006. The data set also included information on CEOs, including the sexes and birth dates of their kids. (More details on the study can be found in this WSJ piece and on our fellow blog, Ideas Market.)  The researchers found that when male CEOs had daughters, the wage gap closed by 0.5 percentage points, on average, at their firms in the same calendar year, and if a CEO’s first born happened to be a daughter, the wage gap closed by nearly 3 percentage points. (Overall, Denmark has a gender wage gap of 21.5%, unadjusted for hours worked or rank.)  The birth of a son, however, had no effect on the wage gap. And the researchers found no changes in the relative wages of women and men when female CEOs had children.  The professors who performed the study — David Ross of Columbia Business School, Michael Dahl of Aalborg University in Denmark and Cristian Dezsö of the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business -- proposed that having a daughter could make male CEOs more sensitive to gender issues. 'Our results suggest that the first daughter "flips a switch" in the mind of a male CEO, causing him to attend more to equity in gender-related wage policies,' the authors write.  The researchers also found that this 'daughter effect' was strongest at firms with 50 or fewer employees, which could be because chiefs of smaller firms are typically more directly involved in individual pay decisions than CEOs of much larger firms."

Duggan:  The Elephant in the Waiting-Room

Politicians are ignoring a big, dysfunctional programme
The Economist:  "Congress created DI in 1956. Since then physical labour has become less common, while medical technology has advanced. One might have thought that DI rolls would shrink, but the opposite has occurred. Even compared with the Social Security Administration’s other costly programme for the disabled, DI is huge. Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which gives help to the very poor, doled out $43 billion to adults and children in 2010, up 124% since 1990. DI gave $110 billion to disabled workers, up almost 420%. The reasons for this are debated. States have an incentive to keep their welfare rolls low, so they may be pushing workers towards the federally funded SSI and DI programmes, argues Nancy Shor of the National Organisation of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives, a lawyers’ group. But unlike SSI, DI is not a substitute for welfare; DI requires beneficiaries to have worked for five of the past ten years.  Ageing would seem another obvious explanation, as those aged 50-64 account for almost 60% of DI awards. But the rolls grew quickly even when the share of 50- to 64-year-olds was steady, according to David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mark Duggan of the University of Maryland. Obesity does not seem to be the main cause either. Beneficiaries claiming problems such as diabetes and heart disease comprised a sliver of the awards in 2009.  A more likely culprit is the programme’s structure. Messrs Autor and Duggan show that DI awards have become more attractive to those struggling in the labour market. Those awards, meanwhile, have become more accessible. In 1984 Congress made it easier for DI applicants to claim mental illness and musculoskeletal disorders such as back pain—both inherently subjective ailments. In 2009 these two conditions accounted for 22% and 31% of DI awards, respectively, about double their share in 1981. Even if an applicant does not meet DI’s basic medical requirements, he may eventually win payments for other reasons. DI’s rules, for example, allow an older worker unlikely to retrain to get benefits instead. Persistent applicants can seek the help of lawyers. Of those who appeal their case to a judge, almost 90% are successful."

Gimpel:  The New Black Migration: Home is Where the Job Is

WNYC Radio, New York City:  "The migratory trend is interesting because it touches several uncomfortable notes in the American conversation about race: Gentrification and reactionary white guilt; blacks returning to a region that was once extremely hostile to them; an economic squeeze that may disproportionately affect some races more than others, forcing movement. That's why it's tempting to focus on the African American population's migration. It feels like there's a big story about race here.  But according to several sociology and demographic experts, the 2010 census is more about class and money than anything else.  'The places they're leaving are mostly areas of higher unemployment or areas where they think there's going to be less opportunity in the future,' said John Logan, a professor of Sociology at Brown University. 'It's not to the South, blanket; it's to particular attractive places based on employment prospects.'  James Gimpel, a professor of Government at the University of Maryland, agreed. 'This is all about employment and job growth,' he said. 'Labor markets, even in the recession, southern states have been faring better than North, East and Midwest. That's also true of state governments. Black populations are no different than white populations or anyone else. They can see that employment prospects are going to be better in one location than another.'  That's not to say this trend is all about jobs, jobs, jobs. Familial considerations are certainly in play, as it's likely that black populations in the North have ties to populations in the South, from where many migrated after the Reconstruction. In that sense, Professor Gimpel said, the South represents a more comfortable move than long-distance transplants usually face."

Swagel: Despite Many Critics, Proposals for a 'Repatriation' Tax Holiday Gain Support

National Journal:  "As politicians dither over a sluggish economy, proposals to give corporations a tax 'holiday' on hundreds of billions in overseas corporate profits are suddenly back into fashion. On the face of it, it seems like a good idea: The economy is still tepid and unemployment is high. Why not induce American multinationals—from Apple and Microsoft to Google and Cisco—to bring home the vast profits they have been racking up for years in foreign countries?  The U.S. government wouldn't miss the tax money, supporters say, because the companies weren't going to pay it anyway. Investment here would grow and jobs would be created. Everybody would win. WIN America, a corporate coalition that includes many of the the country's brightest business stars, is pushing for the holiday. Cisco CEO John Chambers and Oracle CEO Safra Catz, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in October, predicted that the move would create up to two million jobs and called the idea 'the trillion-dollar elephant in the room.'  And in the last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., added his support as well.  There's just one problem: veteran tax policy experts, Republican and Democratic alike, say it's a bad idea. ... Critics say a holiday would be akin to rewarding companies that have already tried to dodge taxes by shifting profits overseas. Granting another 'holiday' so soon after the last one, they say, may encourage companies to stash more money overseas.  Philip Swagel, a former assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy in the George W. Bush administration, said the holiday was a gimmick rather than a policy.  'Global competitiveness [in the tax code] will boost U.S. job creation, but one-off is not the way to do tax policy,' said Swagel, now a professor at the University of Maryland. 'Think about what’s good policy and do that, don’t just do this one-off.' "

Kettl:  Wis. Slashing of Collective-Bargaining Rights Jars Federal Unions

Washington Post:  "Like a bad vibe spreading across the land, the decision to severely slash public-employee collective-bargaining rights in Wisconsin is sending a jolt through federal unions in Washington. 'Are we next?' Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, asked in a video posted on his organization’s Web site. He warned that the action of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and Republicans in the state’s legislature is a threat to all public employees, including those at the federal level.  He’s not alone in that assessment.  Donald F. Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said by e-mail that 'state-level battles are lining up as an express heading straight to DC. We’re going to be seeing these issues framed for the feds in the not-too-distant future. In a nutshell: the domestic discretionary cuts won’t get us far, almost no one wants to tackle entitlements (where the real cash is), so federal employees represent a huge target with the (arguable) potential for big savings.  'Strap yourself in,' he added. 'This is going to be a very wild ride.' "