Here’s a tutorial on layer blending and creating textures. There’s so much you can do with blending modes, and this is a basic tutorial of how to utilize those features. Did you find this helpful? or did you already know about layer blending?

The news of the terrible earthquake and Tsunami in Japan has turned the world’s focus away from the tragic events in Libya.

While Colonel Qaddafi  continues his bloody onslaught against the popular uprising, there have been loud cries for the West to intervene in the civil war. The cartoon above illustrates the dilemma faced by the US in this conflict.

Do you think America should step in and aid the rebels? (cartoon by KAL)

“Ace of Cakes” star baker Jeffrey “Duff” Goldman ’97, history, is expanding his brand to include a line of cake-inspired Blue Bunny ice cream flavors, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Read the full story in the Baltimore Sun.

Contact:
Chelsea Haddaway
Communications Manager
(410)-455-6380
chaddaway@umbc.edu

Anna Shields, director of the Honors College and associate professor of Chinese, has been elected the President of the T’ang Studies Society. The society is dedicated to furthering research and education about China during the T’ang dynasty. Shields is a researcher of T’ang China.

The society has about 120 members. Shields has served as an elected executive board member and co-organized the society’s 25th anniversary conference in 2009, which attracted scholars from around the world. Shields is the first woman to serve as president, and was the youngest female scholar to be published in their journal.

Shields has also been named the East Asia section editor for the Journal of the American Oriental Society. The journal is divided into four regions - Asia, Ancient and Near East, Southern and Inner Asia, and Islam – and examines the literature, religion, and philosophy of each.

“As a literary scholar, I’m also interested in religion and philology,” Shields said. She has previously published an article and book reviews in the journal.

Shields will be officially installed into both roles at the annual conference of the American Oriental Society this week in Chicago. The T’ang Studies Society is not affiliated with the American Oriental Society.

Microsoft Research and Bing are jointly hosting the Speller Challenge. The goal is to build the best service that could propose alternative spellings for search queries submitted to Bing. Entries must be submitted for the challenge in the form of a REST-based web service, and they will be judged based on their expected F1 score against a test set sampled from real Bing queries.

For development purposes, they are making available a TREC evaluation dataset through their Web-NGram service.  Refer to this page for detailed evaluation measures and REST service specs.

Time to start implementing!

English alumna Loris Nebbia ’95 has published her first novel, Solomon’s Puzzle. A modern-day take of an age-old Bible tale, an excerpt of the 700-page book won the Maryland Writers’ Association’s 2010 prize for short fiction. (Nebbia also earned a master’s degree from UMBC in 1999.)

In an interview with the Annapolis Capital newspaper, Nebbia said writing a novel was a “dream come true.”

Learn more about Nebbia and Solomon’s Puzzle here.

Twitter reports that its users are sent an average of 140M tweets a day last month. That adds up to a billion a week, in round numbers. Another impressive statistic their post cites is that last month saw an average of 460K new Twitter accounts per day. Both numbers are very impressive.

Liz Gannes comments on the fact that Twitter does not report on the total number of users it has or how many of these are active. The number of users is thought to be over 200M, but I recall data that is now over a year old estimating that 40% of the users have made no tweets and 80% have made fewer that 10 tweets. Maybe the bulk of those 460K new users a day are signing up to follow @charliesheen.