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Are you or someone you know looking for a roommate? There are two rooms available in a 4 bedroom 3.5 bathroom house is Jessup Maryland. Rent would be $650 a month before utilities. We are looking to sign the lease within the next two weeks. If interested please email gittens1@umbc.edu.

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When Jill Engel-Cox Ph.D. ’04, marine-estuarine environmental sciences, started the Smog Blog in 2003, it served as “kind of an online lab notebook,” she says. In the early 2000s, there were plenty of sources of air quality data, “but no one was putting these disparate data sources all together on a daily basis.” Enter the Smog Blog.

As Engel-Cox developed the site, she and advisor Ray Hoff, now-emeritus professor of physics at UMBC, expanded it to include other students. “The Smog Blog turned into a great way for students to learn how to analyze satellite and other air quality data quickly, as well as how to write scientific information clearly for a wide audience,” Engel-Cox says.

But the Smog Blog was destined for bigger things. “It took on a life of its own,” says Ruben Delgado, assistant research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. From comments on the site, “we discovered we had a wide variety of readers,” says Engel-Cox, “including atmospheric scientists, state environmental regulators, and even an amateur astronomer who used the Smog Blog to better predict clear skies.”

Four years ago, Delgado realized the Smog Blog had more than five million total hits per year. Now it gets 16,000 unique hits per month. Many visitors, such as weather agencies or citizens sensitive to air pollution, visit several times per day.

A team of students posts to the Smog Blog six days per week to keep readers updated. Now it’s a self-perpetuating venture: as students graduate, they train the next cohort of Smog Bloggers how to interpret data from satellites and explain it in layman’s terms on the blog.

Delgado has received external offers to buy the Smog Blog, but he’s not interested in commercializing it. He says it’s “by students, for students,” and should stay that way. Even as a university project, however, there are many possibilities for the Smog Blog’s future, including growth through collaborations. The blog even emerged in a discussion with Robert Marshall ‘88, founder and CEO of Earth Networks, on compelling uses for weather data following Marshall’s keynote at a UMBC research conference on climate issues.

Next on the horizon for the Smog Blog is a new home: a freshly designed website expected to launch by the end of the summer. Students will also be working over the summer to develop a Smog Blog mobile app.

In the meantime, as spring pollen, summer wildfires, winter inversions, and other air quality issues continue, the blog expects traffic to keep rising as it serves up critical information to a diverse audience, all while supporting the research and education of UMBC students.

Hillary debt-forgiveness plan blasted because it would help too many white people

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton unveiled a new plan Tuesday that would provide student loan assistance, and potentially full forgiveness, to college graduates who try to start their own business. But almost immediately after being announced, critics on the left decried Clinton’s plan, arguing that it will be too beneficial to white male graduates.

Under a plan Clinton laid out Tuesday during a campaign stop in Denver, student borrowers who provide proof they’ve started a new business can have the interest on their student loans deferred for up to three years while they work to build their business. If borrowers start up their business in an economically distressed area, they’ll also be eligible to have up to $17,500 in loans forgiven after five years. Clinton’s plan says her administration would consider expanding this loan forgiveness to early employees of new businesses as well.

Clinton said her plan was intended to encourage innovation in the U.S. economy.

“It can be a lot harder [for entrepreneurs] if you’re juggling student loan payments, and that can cut into … what kind of risk you think you can take,” she said.

Some tech figures have already praised Clinton’s plan, with millionaire tech investor Brad Feld calling it “excellent and substantive.”

But not everybody is so happy. Bruce Wright, a reporter for the International Business Times, warned Tuesday afternoon that Clinton’s plan has a big flaw: It would help too many white people.

“[Clinton’s] plan to single out budding innovators for a break does little to address the needs of many black and Latino college students who are struggling to deal with what has become a crisis of paying off funds borrowed for college education,” Wright says in his piece. “The makeup of America’s entrepreneurs … lopsidedly skews white and male, two demographics that historically haven’t exactly been hurting for money when it comes to college.”

Ben Norton at Salon harped on a similar theme, blasting Clinton’s plan because “entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly from rich families, and are heavily white and male.” He also bashed the plan on the unusual grounds that people who start companies tend to employ people.

“Entrepreneurs employ people; business owners have people who work under them,” Norton says. “Clinton’s policy will help ease the student loans of these workers’ bosses, while employees are crushed under the enormous weight of their student debt.”

Wright and Norton weren’t the only people to criticize Clinton’s plan for being too generous to rich white people. Several people on Twitter slammed Clinton for the same reason.

Hillary forgiving student loan debt of tech entrepreneurs and such is her forgiving white student loan debt.

— Teddy Graham Cracker (@HausofDom) June 28, 2016

HRC's dumb plan to forgive student loans for entrepreneurs would disproportionately benefit white men who already have access to capital.

— Julien Devereux (@jndevereux) June 28, 2016

The #DemPlatform doesn't include #free college but Hillary Clinton wants to forgive student loans for rich kids. https://t.co/JiB01eRJZk

— Melissa Byrne (@mcbyrne) June 28, 2016

US: We need tuition free education
HILLARY: hm, what if we deferred loans to rich people so they can innovate poor neighborhoods with apps?

— Chris Person (@Papapishu) June 28, 2016

Notably, despite all the criticism brought against Clinton, entrepreneurs are actually not exceptionally white. According to data from the Kauffman Foundation, only 59 percent of entrepreneurs are white, less than their overall population percentage of about 62 percent. Some 22 percent are Hispanic (substantially above their population share of about 17 percent), 9 percent are black, and 7 percent are Asian.

Men are more common among entrepreneurs, but are not utterly dominant, representing about 63 percent of entrepreneurs. More than a quarter of new businesses are founded by immigrants."

When Jill Engel-Cox Ph.D. ’04, marine-estuarine environmental sciences, started the Smog Blog in 2003, it served as “kind of an online lab notebook,” she says. In the early 2000s, there were plenty of sources of air quality data, “but no one was putting these disparate data sources all together on a daily basis.” Enter the Smog Blog.

As Engel-Cox developed the site, she and advisor Ray Hoff, now-emeritus professor of physics at UMBC, expanded it to include other students. “The Smog Blog turned into a great way for students to learn how to analyze satellite and other air quality data quickly, as well as how to write scientific information clearly for a wide audience,” Engel-Cox says.

But the Smog Blog was destined for bigger things. “It took on a life of its own,” says Ruben Delgado, assistant research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. From comments on the site, “we discovered we had a wide variety of readers,” says Engel-Cox, “including atmospheric scientists, state environmental regulators, and even an amateur astronomer who used the Smog Blog to better predict clear skies.”

Four years ago, Delgado realized the Smog Blog had more than five million total hits per year. Now it gets 16,000 unique hits per month. Many visitors, such as weather agencies or citizens sensitive to air pollution, visit several times per day.

A team of students posts to the Smog Blog six days per week to keep readers updated. Now it’s a self-perpetuating venture: as students graduate, they train the next cohort of Smog Bloggers how to interpret data from satellites and explain it in layman’s terms on the blog.

Delgado has received external offers to buy the Smog Blog, but he’s not interested in commercializing it. He says it’s “by students, for students,” and should stay that way. Even as a university project, however, there are many possibilities for the Smog Blog’s future, including growth through collaborations. The blog even emerged in a discussion with Robert Marshall ‘88, founder and CEO of Earth Networks, on compelling uses for weather data following Marshall’s keynote at a UMBC research conference on climate issues.

Next on the horizon for the Smog Blog is a new home: a freshly designed website expected to launch by the end of the summer. Students will also be working over the summer to develop a Smog Blog mobile app.

In the meantime, as spring pollen, summer wildfires, winter inversions, and other air quality issues continue, the blog expects traffic to keep rising as it serves up critical information to a diverse audience, all while supporting the research and education of UMBC students.

Images: Sourced from the Smog Blog website. These highlight how different instruments observed smoke from the spring 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada traveling across the Great Lakes region.

The Walters Art Museum seeks a dynamic and energetic individual to work in its retail operation as a part time Lead Sales Assistant/Third Key to provide a high level of customer service to the Museum Store visitors and assuring the daily operation of the Museum Store in management’s absence. Reporting to the Manager of Retail Operations, the individual will have responsibility for:

Many people fail to realize the cultural diversity of groups indigenous to the Americas.

This summer, examine the issues of representation and identity in contemporary North American Indian communities, including the role of anthropological interpretation and its impact on the perceptions of Native America.

Drawing on contemporary ethnographic studies, ANTH 326 – American Indian Cultures emphasizes the economic and political adaptations made by Indigenous people through the early 21st century in response to social change and challenges to social justice.

ANTH 326 is a 6-week course offered in Summer Session II. It fulfills the Culture or Social Sciences GEP, and is part of the Culture & Social Justice course offerings. To enroll in this course, you must complete SOCY 101 or ANTH 211 with a “C” or higher.

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