Political science professor Thomas F. Schaller’s latest Baltimore Sun column responds to the claim that “President Obama won re-election because Americans want ‘free stuff’.” He argues that “contrary to what talk-show conservatives imply, many government programs skew toward middle-class and upper-income Americans” and usage of federal benefit programs is near universal, rather than tied to political affiliation.

Schaller writes, “according to political scientists Suzanne Mettler and John Sides, 96 percent of Americans have benefited from at least one (and typically more) of just 21 federal programs, ranging from student loans to the mortgage interest deduction, from the employer health care exemption to Medicare. Most of the remaining 4 percent are too young yet to have benefited but will. We’re all beneficiaries.”

Schaller also commented for a Washington Post story recapping the election in Maryland and Gov. O’Malley’s prominent role in the passage of ballot measures on same-sex marriage rights, gambling and education for undocumented immigrants. “It was almost as though he was standing for a second reelection,” Schaller told the Post. “To a certain degree, his administration was on the ballot.”

In the wake of Maryland’s vote for Question 4, UMBC professors T.H. Gindling (economics) and Marvin Mandell (public policy) recently discussed their study, “Private and Government Fiscal Costs and Benefits of the Maryland Dream Act” on NBC Washington news. Their interview highlights the net positive economic impact that each incoming class of undocumented students would have, due to factors such as decreased incarceration rates (and thus lower incarceration costs) for college versus high school graduates.

Donald F. Norris, professor and chairman of UMBC’s Department of Public Policy, commented on Maryland’s passage of both Question 6 (approving same-sex marriage rights) and Question 7 (approving gambling expansion). Of Question 7 he remarked, “Frankly, I’m surprised that it passed statewide,” suggesting that voters might have been swayed by the promise of using increased gambling revenues to boost education funding.

Laura Hussey, assistant professor of political science, told Patch that Gov. O’Malley’s vocal leadership style might have encouraged voters to turn out for the issues he supports. “It’s only recently that we’ve seen Democratic leaders take strong stances on issues like the Dream Act,” Hussey said. “Eventually, some of their voters are going to follow behind them.”

Associate Professor of Visual Arts Timothy Nohe is one of ten artists selected to show work in the upcoming exhibition Nature in The Dark presented by the Center for Creative Arts in Melbourne, Australia. Nohe’s piece, At The Wall of the Anthropocene, is an animation set to an original film score, and will be available for view online beginning at the close of the exhibition’s screenings (which take place through December 23).

Nature in the Dark presents a rare intersection of scientific study and artistic practice; animals were “caught on camera” as part of a collection project, and the data was used by both artists and conservationists to very different ends. Nature in the Dark invited ten artists to respond, and presents their creative adaptations, remixes and interventions of the scientific footage of bush animals at night.

Nature in the Dark opens this Wednesday, November 21. Find more information about the exhibition and Tim’s contribution on the Center for Creative Art’s website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The entre conversation can be heard here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(11/19/12)

November 19 at 10:00 am, ITE 325B

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

Thesis Committee:

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

Nothing warms our hearts quite like witnessing the impact of alumni philanthropy among our students. We see it everywhere — in the classrooms, on our stages, among our volunteer organizations — and yesterday, we watched our students pull off the ultimate THANK YOU for the donors who help make their UMBC experience possible.

In honor of National Philanthropy Day, students spent their free hour yesterday writing thank-you letters to alumni. Some of them even drew pictures of True Grit inside (our students are so creative)! We’re so grateful they’re grateful!

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

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

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

The following is an excerpt from The Baltimore Sun obituary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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