Category: Professional Notes

Sally Scott, director of disability resources, was an invited panelist on the topic of “The Future of Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities” at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, June 14.

The  Joint Annual Meeting (JAM) Conference is held each year for principle investigators of grant projects within the NSF Division of Human Resource Development.  Along with co-presenters Dr. Jane Theirfield-Brown of the University of Connecticut and Scott Lissner of Ohio State University, the panel provided commentary on emerging issues and recommendations for future research in the area of STEM education and postsecondary students with disabilities.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Jangwoon “Leo” Lee had his article “A Stochastic Galerkin Method for Stochastic Control Problems” published in the journal Communications in Computational Physics.

On Friday, June 8, Will Mackintosh, visiting assistant professor of history and American studies, presented a paper entitled “The Loomis Gang and the Funhouse Mirror of Nineteenth-Century Economic Modernity” at the “Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America” conference in Philadelphia, Pa.

The conference was jointly hosted by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and was organized in conjunction with a special exhibit at the Library Company on the topic of illegitimate and semi-legitimate economies in American history.

The 2012 Web Conference was held at Penn State University on Monday, June 11 and Tuesday, June 12, with presenters including digital product leader Luke Wroblewski, the author of “Mobile First,” and Ethan Marcotte, the designer who coined the term “Responsive Web Design” while he was helping to create the Boston Globe website.

On the second day of the conference, Curtiss Grymala, university webmaster at UMW, presented five hours of material in the “On the Edge Coding” track of the conference.

To start, Grymala led a workshop exploring the WordPress Coding Standards and answering questions from peers about how their code should be formatted and presented when developing for WordPress. After lunch, Grymala returned to lead another two-hour workshop explaining how to develop a WordPress plugin.

This workshop took attendees through the process of creating and implementing new features on a WordPress site using the tools available within the system.

Finally, Grymala presented a brief look at the unique WordPress implementation used at UMW. During this presentation, he explained how WordPress Multi-Network works, how it relates to a standard implementation of WordPress, how it can be implemented, the pros and cons of using a multi-network system and the lessons that have been learned while working on the system at the university. Late last month, Grymala gave the same presentation at the virtual (online) WPSummit conference. In both instances, the entire presentation garnered quite a bit of attention and interaction from the audience.

The slides from all three of Grymala’s presentations are available online.

Daniel Preston, editor of the Papers of James Monroe, was a guest at the monthly meeting the Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge on Friday, June 8.  The Grand Master presented Preston with a certificate of appreciation for the books on Monroe that he donated to the Lodge’s library.