ATTENTION: Due to severe weather PENN Line trains may experience delays.  Heavy rain and poor visibility may reduce normal track speeds.

UMBC Recreation is seeking 1-3 Marketing Intern for the Fall 2018 semester.

Preferred Experience:
Print, web, social media, and/or visual marketing skills. 
Experience with appropriate software applications (such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere or similar video editing programs).
Interest in health and fitness.

Position Overview: Assist in marketing and promotion of all UMBC Recreation programs and services. Programs include: fitness and wellness, club sports, intramural sports, open recreation and physical education. Collaborate with Campus Recreation professionals and student employees to assist executing a marketing plan.

Responsibilities Include:

• Submit announcements to myUMBC, listservs and social media platforms.
• Maintain UMBC Recreation Event calendars.
• Assist with maintaining Social Media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
• Photograph and video events throughout the year, update and manage photo galleries online and within the department network drive.
• Seek avenues for increasing visibility of UMBC Recreation.
• Update and regularly monitor the department website including posting
• Blogs, Announcements, Building Hours, etc. to assure that information is current.
• Assisting with creating print publications for UMBC Recreation and events (such as posters, fliers, bulletin boards, social media posts, weekly/monthly updates).
• Distribute posters/fliers to campus outlets.
• Assist with updating the bulletin boards in the RAC.
• Attend special events throughout the year and assist with marketing and tabling (Game Room collaborations, annual races, wellness events)

This internship is unpaid. 120 hours. Some weekends and evenings may be necessary. Interested applicants should e-mail wohlstet@umbc.edu.

Ontology-Grounded Topic Modeling for Climate Science Research

In scientific disciplines where research findings have a strong impact on society, reducing the amount of time it takes to understand, synthesize and exploit the research is invaluable. Topic modeling is an effective technique for summarizing a collection of documents to find the main themes among them and to classify other documents that have a similar mixture of co-occurring words. We show how grounding a topic model with an ontology, extracted from a glossary of important domain phrases, improves the topics generated and makes them easier to understand. We apply and evaluate this method to the climate science domain. The result improves the topics generated and supports faster research understanding, discovery of social networks among researchers, and automatic ontology generation.

The post paper: Ontology-Grounded Topic Modeling for Climate Science Research appeared first on UMBC ebiquity.

GAs,

This morning you may have received an email from your departments regarding the Graduate Assistant's health insurance plan. The email communicated that the State of Maryland has not yet approved the insurance rates for Aetna Student Health for UMBC. The Graduate Assistant Advisory Council (GAAC) and Graduate Student Association (GSA) were not apprised of this issue prior to receiving that email. However, going forward we will be working with our administrative partners (The Graduate School and University Health Services)  to gain clarity about the situation and to better understand the implications for graduate assistants. 

We will distribute new information as we receive it. 

If you would like to communicate with the GAAC on this matter, please visit our website https://gsa.umbc.edu/contact-gaac/ and or email gaac@umbc.edu. 

Best, 

Rebecca Dowling

GAAC Co-Chairperson

2018 Maryland Cyber Challenge seeks student teams

The 2018 Maryland Cyber Challenge seeks teams willing to test a range of skills simulating real-word cyber scenarios. Teams will climb a ladder of challenges demonstrating an ability to work together, understand both simple and complex vulnerabilities, defensive operations and gamified offensive operations.

Registration is now open. An initial orientation session start the week of August 13 and qualification Round 1 will be September 8-9..

The finals will take place live at CyberMaryland 2018 in Baltimore on October 10. Prizes (TBA) will be presented LIVE by during a closing session at CyberMaryland.

Get more information and register here

The post 2018 Maryland Cyber Challenge registration opens for student teams appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

by Ian Anson,
Assistant Professor of Political Science, UMBC

White House special counsel Robert Mueller recently issued 12 indictments alleging that Russian intelligence agents sought to tilt the vote in Donald Trump’s favor by hacking prominent Democrats during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

The Trump-Russia investigation has exposed flaws in the American democratic system – so much so that, according to many pundits, people now doubt not just the legitimacy of the Trump administration but the very foundations of the country’s political institutions.

According to a July 2018 Brown University opinion poll, only 16 percent of Americans truly believe their vote matters. Just 4 percent think the government listens to their opinion.

News of Russia’s meddling may have inflamed anti-government sentiment, but skepticism about U.S. democracy is not a new phenomenon.

I am part of a team of scholars from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County that studies American popular support for democracy over time. Historic surveys reveal a deep, long-lasting and bipartisan dissatisfaction with the U.S. government that started over three decades ago.

Measuring trust in government

The gold standard in political opinion polling is the American National Election Study, jointly run by Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the National Sciences Foundation.

Every two years between 1948 and 2016, the survey has asked Americans a variety of questions about their experience with American democracy.

Two of the survey’s questions are particularly useful for measuring public support for democracy.

One asks participants if they believe “people like me don’t have any say in what the government does.” Another asks if they think “quite a few of the people running the government are crooked.”

To understand how satisfaction with the U.S. government has changed over the past 65 years, I examined the percentage of Republicans and Democrats in each election year since 1952 who agreed with those two statements.

Changing public perception of democracy

The results varied widely over time, rising and dropping as the public reacted to political scandals, national tragedies and presidential malfeasance.

In the 1950s, after the U.S. emerged triumphant from World War II, Americans were fairly sanguine about government. In 1956, just 28 percent of people felt they had no say in government. In 1958, only a quarter of Americans saw public corruption as a major problem.

These numbers reflect a remarkable faith in U.S. democracy considering that black Americans and women – both of whom were included in the biannual survey – were still mostly excluded from politics.

Despite the gains of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement that would mark the next decade, the 1970s were so turbulent that they gave rise to an era of political alienation.

By 1974, reacting to the Vietnam War, Watergate and President Gerald Ford’s pardon of a disgraced Richard Nixon, around 41 percent of respondents agreed that they had “no say” in government decision-making.

Almost half – 48 percent – thought crooks were running the government.

Displeasure with American democracy continued to rise for the next three decades, reaching an all-time high under President Bill Clinton.

His administration started with a flurry of scandals. There was 1992’s “Travelgate,” when the White House fired its travel planners for mismanaging funds, followed by the Whitewater investigation into Hillary Clinton’s real estate dealings.

The American public was appalled. In 1994, 50 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans thought that government officials were mostly corrupt.

These events predated President Bill Clinton’s 1998 affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, which actually appears to have reduced antipathy towards the president.

Americans rally around the flag

Optimism in U.S. democracy resurged to pre-Watergate levels, if only briefly, after the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks.

In 2002, only 26 percent of Americans said they had no voice in government. Just 28 percent thought public corruption was widespread.

This uncritical support for government after a national disaster – often referred to as the “rally around the flag” effect – wouldn’t last long.

Soon, George W. Bush would justify invading Iraq by fraudulently claiming President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. By 2008, as Bush’s second term ended, just over half of all Americans were once again convinced of widespread government corruption.

Skepticism about American democracy continued to rise throughout the early Obama years, following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which raised concerns about money in politics, and the crisis surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Democratic discontent is bipartisan

One might be tempted to assume that the response to this litany of scandals has been partisan – that people react negatively only to the opposing party’s malfeasance.

But distrusting the government is not actually a particularly partisan issue, surveys show. In recent years, Democrats and Republicans have often differed little on their faith in government.

In the waning days of the Bush administration, 51 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans expressed concern that their voices were not being heard.

Under President Barack Obama, 69 percent of Republicans thought that most government officials were “crooked.” So did 59 percent of Democrats.

Democrats are somewhat more likely to feel that government is rife with graft and special interests when a Republican is in the White House, and vice versa.

But over the past six decades, Republicans and Democrats have been quite closely aligned in their views of American democracy – at least on these two measures.

Trump and democratic dissatisfaction

The American National Election Study won’t come out again until 2020.

We do not yet know how the Trump White House will impact public support for government.

The Trump administration is already swimming in scandals. In addition to the Russia problem, it has weathered Scott Pruitt’s resignation as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s extravagant taste in furniture and alleged Trump family violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

But the lessons of the past 66 years suggest that highly visible scandals do lead public dissatisfaction with government to rise.

The Watergate era triggered record growth in Americans’ collective dissatisfaction with government.

That record could still be broken.

* * * * * *

Ian Anson, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Header image: Historically, the high-water mark for American dissatisfaction with government was the 1970s — the era of Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate.
AP Photo/John Duricka

Robot Governance – Institutions and Issues

Dr. Aaron Mannes, ISHPI Information Technologies

10:30-11:30 Tuesday, 24 July 2018, ITE 346

Inexpensive sensors and information storage and processing have enabled the large-scale production of robots: autonomous systems capable of acting on the world. These systems represent an enormous technological and economic opportunity that will change society in countless and unpredictable ways. They will also bring new policy challenges. This presentation examines the missions the government will need to undertake to address the challenges raised by this new technology, identifies critical gaps the government faces in carrying out these missions, and discusses institutional options to address these gaps.

Dr. Aaron Mannes is the Senior Policy Advisor at ISHPI Information Technologies, where he supports the Apex Data Analytics Engine (DA-E) at the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. In supporting DA-E, Dr. Mannes collaborates on big data projects that support the Homeland Security Enterprise and researches technology policy. He started at DHS as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy Fellow in September 2015. From 2004 to 2015, Dr. Mannes was a researcher at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) where he was the subject matter expert on terrorism and international affairs collaborating with a team of inter-disciplinary scientists to build computational tools to support decision-makers facing 21st century security and development problems. Dr. Mannes earned his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy in 2014. His dissertation topic was the evolving national security role of the vice president.

Dr. Mannes is the author or co-author of four books on terrorism and has written scores of articles, papers, and book chapters on an array of topics including Middle East affairs, terrorism, technology, and other international security issues for popular and scholarly publications including Politico, Policy Review, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Journal of International Security Affairs, The Huffington Post, The National Interest, The Jerusalem Post, and The Guardian.

This research was conducted with the support of the Apex Data Analytics Engine in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T). In no way should anything stated in this seminar be construed as representing the official position of DHS S&T or any other component of DHS. Opinions and findings expressed in this seminar, as well as any errors and omissions, are the responsibility of the presenter alone.

The post talk: Robot Governance – Institutions and Issues, 10:30 Tue 7/24, ITR346 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.