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athleticperfection1 · 9 months
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Maryland Volleyball
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anthronewb · 4 months
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Anthropology is a reflection of the Prominant Political/social beliefs of the time
Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. Anthropologists study various cultures (past to present) to better understand them, and the data collected is used to develop anthropological theories. Despite claims of the research/findings being unbiased, factors such as the prominent political and social beliefs of the time influence the anthropologist's research (unintentionally or intentionally). Due to these factors, it is important to examine the prominent political and social beliefs of the time when reexamining anthropological theories.
When you create a timeline of anthropological theories alongside the political and social beliefs of the time, it's clear to see the influences.
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18th century
Anthropological theory
Unilineal Evolution: Presented the e idea that there was a sequence of stages that all cultures would go through (Long & Chakov, 2017). Those cultures may not necessarily go through the stages at the same time or pace but would go through the same developmental stages. This would be most popularly become known as the Three Age system. The categories being; THe Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Each indicative of the stage of development through technology
Physical Anthropology: “scientific” approach to study the development of different racial groups. Studies humans through their biological and physiological characteristics to study human development.
Cephalic index: calculations from the measurement taken of the skull. It measured the breadth and length of the skull, which would be then used for the classification of racial groups.
Samuel Morton, a physician furthered this research and linked cranial capacity with moral and intellectual endowments and assembled a cultural ranking scheme that placed large-brained Caucasoid at the pinnacle
 Anatomist and natural historian Johan Friedrich Blumenbach believed racial differences were due to adaptation to different environments
 Social and Political Beliefs of the time
Enlightenment period: The biggest influence on the formation of scientific development. There was a push away from the religious doctrine, in favor of a more science-based view of society.
There was also an increase in encounters with non-Europeans with the emergence of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.
These factors combined to develop an interest in the scientific notion of race
Despite the push away from religious doctrine, scientific thought was still developed based on religious knowledge.
E.g. the Bible story Adam & Eve
They were believed to be Caucasian, making Caucasians the ‘superior’ race, and thus anyone else was inferior.
The main takeaway is that Caucasians were the Superior Race (more specifically Germanic) and all other races delineate from them making them inferior.
These ideas of racial superiority/inferiority would be used to support racist ideologies. Nazis would use this to support their movement.
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1920’s-Boasian
Boasian Anthropology: A theory developed by Franz Boas, who is considered the “Father of American anthropology”
These consisted of Boas’s theories on culture and its development.
Cultural Relativism: We must make evaluations based on other cultures rules/beliefs and not our own. Using our own culture as a basis for analyzing other cultures results in biased research.
Boas would argue that “classificatory schemes of evolutionary theory dividing the world into “savage”  "barbarian," and "civilized" peoples were "artificial," their pretensions to universal, scientific validity marred by their grounding in Western values.
He would ignore the predominant theories in favor of conducting research.
 Social and Political Beliefs of the time
There wasn’t much change in political and social beliefs of the time, but much of the research was influenced by the cultures that were studied. The idea of cultural relativism was influenced by the cultures that boas studied, specifically his study of the Inuit people.
Boas would study under ethnologist Adolf Bastian, a person who believed in “psychic unity of mankind” (idea that all humans held the same intellectual capacity and all cultures were based on the same mental principles)
This would cause a shift in Boas’s approach to his study of the Inuit people.He wanted to understand Inuits as they understood themselves, rather than through his lens
Boas would influence anthropological theory into the mid-twentieth century as evidenced by his students like Zora Neale Hurston
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Mid-20th century to the Present 
There was a push for a more scientific-backed discipline. Processualism as it would later be classified as was first introduced by Lewis Binford. He believed that there was a certain way that anthropological research should be conducted. His main goal was to develop the
field into a “hard science” by using the scientific method. His focus was on the sub-category, archaeology and how the material evidence was identified.
Archaeological data would be classified into either Technomic (technology/tools, socio-technic (social/relation to social subsystems), and ideo-technic (ideological/ rationalizations in social system)
There was a push for reflection of traditional anthropological research- especially that of the study of race/racism.
Tody anthropological theory mostly focuses on the reflection of traditional anthropological theories
A launch of a public initiative titled, “Race: Are We So Different?” by the American Anthropological Association (AAA)”
 Social and Political Beliefs of the time
There was a rise in criticisms and challenging of early anthropological theories. This was due to the rise in the fight for equality by several groups (women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and Native Americans) with The Civil Rights movement being one of the largest movements. 
This was evident by the rise in more people of color entering the discipline.
Processualism as a whole was mostly influenced by the academic community and trying to make it into a scientific discipline. A byproduct of this was ignoring the racist ideologies of past anthropological theories
There was a continued push for reflection and change in the academic community following the Civil Rights Movement.
Anthropology not influenced by society?-Counter
With the use of science, there was this idea that it created an unbiased way of interpreting information, and the outside factor was irrelevant. While it is true that science can be objective, scientists aren’t. Scientists choose what they study and can interpret data in different ways. Due to this, science will only ever offer a glimpse of objectivity. Physical anthropology used a scientific justification with the use of the cephalic index and the systems created based on the data collected for racial classifications. It is important to recognize that just because something claims a scientific basis, doesn’t make it so.
What does it mean when there is anthropological theories developed counte the predominant anthropological theory? Anthropologist like Gordon V. Childe was heavily influenced by Marxist theories. He developed/presented his theories during a time in which Marxism was heavily criticized. While he was still able to publish his works, it was much harder and prevented him for being recognized for his contributions to the field. 
Just because there are examples of anthropologists developing theories counter to the prominent political and social beliefs of the time, it doesn’t mean that there can't be a relationship between the two. Rarely in life do you see everybody agree on a single thing. Take “4 out of 5 dentists recommend (blank) toothpaste” for example. The overall opinion of the toothpaste doesn’t change if one disagrees. In the case of anthropological thought/theory, anthropologists remained influenced by political/social beliefs.
While these are good reasons to dispute my claims, there isn’t enough data to support this claim.
Conclusion
The evidence supports the idea of the inter-connected relationship between prominent social/political beliefs and anthropological thought/theory. From the foundation of early anthropological theories in the eighteenth century to the present, anthropology has been formed and reformed by the ideological movements of its time. Creating a lens through which anthropologists can view and interpret cultures, reflecting the wider societal mindset, and forming a dynamic relationship between Academic research and the cultures it seeks to understand
Much of early anthropological thought/theory was rooted in the personal biases of the anthropologists conducting research. They would use religion and “science” (what we would call today pseudoscience) as justification for their beliefs. Franz Boas would become one of the first anthropologists to question this idea as his research found that the earlier thought/theory didn’t reflect his findings. This would later be called Boasian anthropology (named after its creator). This would be the driving belief into the 1960s, where anthropology would then focus on the criticism of early anthropological thought/theory and processualism which was influenced by the many movements pushing for equality. More anthropologists of color and more research on black culture were conducted. Today we still reflect on and criticize early modes of anthropological thought with the continued push for equality.
In conclusion, some may try and argue that there is a distinction between predominant social/political beliefs and anthropological thought/theory, its relationship is undeniable. To study anthropology is not to view it statically but dynamically. It is important to recognize that anthropology isn’t just a story about a culture it studies, but also about the anthropologist’s narrative and how it is influenced by society.
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ncaapeaches · 19 days
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victoria.gatz on Instagram
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sssseren · 3 months
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So excited to announce the launch of my project [unhurried] {witness}!
A curation of digital memories, this piece was created under my mentor, Marisa Parham, during the 2022-2023 Scholar-Artist Residency Program of the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative at the University of Maryland (UMD).
[unhurried] {witness} was conceived during lockdown to explore Black play as a form of healing and collective witness of Black American culture, and was envisioned as MySpace meets Tumblr meets your Grandma’s house; ASMR for the soul; community memory exercise; interfacing intimacy; an archive of play; and, ultimately, an ephemeral object of cultural witness. 
✨slow play as ritual/alchemization of emotions + analog experiences in a digital space✨
More inspirations included:
-web 1.0 
-Covid play 
-inside/outside 
-adulthood/childhood 
-play/work 
To experience and explore the project, click here: https://unhurried-witness.aadhum.org.
Designed to be interactive, a series of questions on your memories of the digital experience can be found here and here. All answers will be recorded anonymously and displayed in the guestbook here.
Statement from the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Initiative at University of Maryland on the project:
Welcome [unhurried] {witness}!
Seren Sensei’s #BlackDH project creates a “a digital exploration and a visual representation of analog games such as card games, dice, dominoes, paper crafts, and rhyming hand games/hand motions, as healing cultural process among Black Americans.”
✨ You can learn more about [unhurried] {witness} at https://aadhum-news.umd.edu/unhurried-witness/
✨ You can visit the site at https://unhurried-witness.aadhum.org
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Experiment demonstrates continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air
Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have demonstrated a continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air.
The most common optical fibers are strands of glass that tightly confine light over long distances. However, these fibers are not well-suited for guiding extremely high-power laser beams due to glass damage and scattering of laser energy out of the fiber. Additionally, the need for a physical support structure means that glass fiber must be laid down long in advance of light signal transmission or collection.
Howard Milchberg and his group in UMD's Departments of Physics and Electrical & Computer Engineering and Institute for Research in Electronics & Applied Physics have demonstrated an optical guiding method that beats both limitations, using auxiliary ultrashort laser pulses to sculpt fiber optic waveguides in the air itself.
These short pulses form a ring of high-intensity light structures called "filaments," which heat the air molecules to form an extended ring of low-density heated air surrounding a central undisturbed region; this is exactly the refractive index structure of an optical fiber. With air itself as the fiber, very high average powers can potentially be guided. And for collection of remote optical signals for detecting pollutants and radioactive sources, for example, the air waveguide can be arbitrarily "unspooled" and directed at the speed of light in any direction.
Read more.
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broadcastarchive-umd · 8 months
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Visit the Maryland Room in Hornbake Library to explore a new exhibit by our colleagues, highlighting new acquisitions to the rare book collection! On display are several artist books recently added. These works address:
gun control, Safety Is Not Promised (2018);
American politics, Babel (2016);
LGTBQ rights, How We Got Them Printed: A Sampling Of Lesbian Press History (2022);
repatriation of museum artifacts, Still Not Free (2021), and more.
The exhibit also features works by local printers, including Lauren Emeritz at the Abstract Orange Press, who designed and printed Corita Rules! (2022) and Hope (2021).
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electronicsquid · 9 months
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Running an obstacle course at the University of Maryland
(Myron Davis. 1942)
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galaxybraindesign · 1 year
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The Goatman famously resides in Prince George's County, Maryland (Go Terps) and is a 7-foot, goat-human hybrid that terrorizes local teens in cars. The Maryland Goatman used to be a scientist who worked in the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, which is a stately-looking USDA compound. He sort of lost his shit while experimenting on goats, and accidentally mad-scientist-ed himself into the Goatman when an experiment went awry. He found himself an axe somewhere and started wandering back roads, attacking cars with an axe. Described in the same way since the days of the satyr, the first recorded Goatman sighting was in 520 BCE in Ancient Greece, making him one of the most enduring cryptids in the world — no word on whether all of them were regular dudes being punished for their hubris.
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Day 7/100 days of productivity | Sun 25 Feb, 2024
I had a nice Sunday!
Snuck onto the University of Maryland campus to look around and assess the campus vibes in case I go there for grad school, strangely it was very devoid of students (is it midterm season maybe?) but the brownstone buildings were pretty. Today I’ll rate the campus 6/10, but maybe if I go back on a school day, the campus might seem more vibrant? (There’s a farm on campus, with real live horses????)
I’ve been thinking about getting into book annotating for a while, so I finally did, I kind of binge read The Secret History this weekend and am now re-reading to annotate it and do a literary analysis for the first time since high school, I haven’t thought about symbolism and themes in so long
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proxy303 · 8 months
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An actual particle accelerator at University of Maryland.
This looks like something straight out of sci fi.
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Not that long ago, most Republicans were content to declare the U.S. as a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values. Then the Judeo somehow got lost along the way, as the party became more comfortable with anti-Semitism in its ranks. Now the party is moving toward a full-on embrace of theocracy, with candidates like Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (R) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) proudly calling themselves Christian nationalists.
In that belief, Mastriano and Greene apparently have the support of the majority of the rank and file. A new University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll finds that 61% of Republicans would happily declare the U.S. a Christian nation, even though nearly as many recognize that such a move would violate the U.S. Constitution.
The support breaks along predictable lines. The older the Republican, the more likely the support. More than 70% of the Silent Generation and Boomers would declare the U.S. a Christian nation. That dwindles to just over half of Gen Z Republicans.
There are even Democrats who believe in calling the U.S. a Christian nation: a paltry 17%. Whether they believe in the same principle of nationalism that animates the GOP or just think it sounds nice is unclear.
The Republicans’ affinity for Christian nationalism is tightly related to white grievance politics. The poll surveyed more than 2,000 people. Of those, whites who believe white people faced more discrimination are more likely to call for a Christian America. Nearly 60% of those surveyed who said white people have been discriminated against a lot more than other groups in the past five years want to call the U.S. a Christian nation. Only 38% of those who don’t believe that agree.
The poll also underscores a new reality. Christian nationalism is more about politics than religion.
The fact of the matter is that there are far more people identifying themselves as evangelicals than people who actually practice their faith. About two-thirds of Protestant Republicans who attend church only once a year identify as evangelicals. Theology actually has almost nothing to do with a lot of evangelical belief. Evangelicals aren’t going to battle over questions of transubstantiation. It’s about culture war and politics.
In that sense, Christian nationalism is the perfect vehicle for the would-be authoritarians in the GOP. It cloaks the thirst for naked power in a crucifix. For years, the right has insisted that the separation of Church and State was a lie promulgated by godless leftists. (It was a belief expressed by Thomas Jefferson, whose opinion the right has spent years trying to explain away.) It created a fiction that the Founders were divinely inspired believers but many were more informed by the Enlightenment than by Christianity.
The myth is an important part of how people justify the politics. It’s the backdrop that gives them permission for their actions. If the U.S. is a Christian nation, then defending it from those you consider non-Christian forces – like LGBTQ people – is entirely permissible, even if those people are themselves people of faith.
Needless to say, the new poll gladdens the hearts of extremists.
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But let’s not get confused. The urge to call the U.S. a Christian nation has nothing to do with Christianity. It has everything to do with feeling threatened by a changing society and an unwillingness to be accommodate those changes.
Instead of trying to show the rest of the country why their beliefs are worth following by example, Christian nationalists simply want to impose them on everyone else. For them the Golden Rule is only three words long: Do unto others.
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xtruss · 8 months
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A bulldozer works to maintain Chicago's underground. More frequent and intense storms pose danger to aging infrastructure like these tunnels. Photograph By Keith Ladzinski, National Geographic Image Collection
Here’s What Worries Engineers The Most About U.S. Infrastructure
Water and sewer systems built in the mid-19th century weren't meant to handle the demands of modern cities, and many bridges and levees have aged well past their intended lifespan.
— By Alissa Greenberg | July 17, 2023
Christine Kirchhoff’s family were preparing to move into a new house when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. Then the massive storm dumped 50 inches of rain on the area in just a few days, leaving two nearby reservoirs so full that their operators were forced to open the floodgates. Kirchhoff’s family had to be evacuated by boat. Both their original and new houses were inundated.
As an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, Kirchhoff spent a lot of time thinking about water even before it swallowed her family’s livelihood. She is part of the legion of professionals behind the complex, often invisible systems that support American life: dams, roads, the electric grid, and much more.
For the last 25 years, the American Society of Civil Engineers has been sounding the alarm on the state of that infrastructure across the country. In their most recent assessment, for example, transit scored a D- and hazardous waste a D+. It’s an expensive problem to ignore. The ASCE estimates current infrastructure conditions cost the average family $3,300 a year. “Everyone is paying whether they know it or not,” Kirchhoff says.
Train derailments, highway and bridge collapses, and dam failures have become increasingly common. But which areas are civil engineers most concerned could cause imminent catastrophe, and what can we do about it? Kirchhoff and other infrastructure experts weigh in.
Water Contamination Crises are Already Here
The engineers we talked to agreed: our water systems are in trouble. Both those that protect us from water as a hazard (stormwater, dams, levees, bridges) and those that help us manage water as a resource (drinking water, wastewater, inland waterways) are in grim shape.
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Streets were flooded after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. Photograph By Ilana Pancih-Linsmam, The New York Times/Redux
The United States’ 2.2-million-mile drinking water and 800,000-mile sewer system was developed in part in response to the widespread waterborne diseases of the mid nineteenth century, Kirchhoff says. Maintenance has lagged woefully behind since then; some older areas, including some cities in the northeast, still use century-old wooden pipes. And many more of our pipes nationwide are still made of lead.
A water system designed for yesterday’s climate and to filter yesterday’s contaminants is especially problematic in a world of increasing demand, fiercer and more frequent storms, and “forever” chemicals. The result: boil orders, water main breaks, and sewer overflow, plus 15 percent of our water treatment plants working at or over capacity. These issues, combined with the toxicity of lead pipes, lead to water crises like the one that continues to plague Flint, Michigan.
Amlan Mukherjee, the director of sustainability focusing on infrastructure at WAP Sustainability Consulting, recommends focusing on these pipes—swapping lead for PVC or other materials and fixing the leaks that spill some 6 billion gallons of treated water a day—as one high priority fix.
Our coastline is also dotted with facilities storing hazardous oil and other chemical waste cocooned in donut-shaped earthen structures, adds Bilal Ayyub, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park—structures that, he notes, could be made of concrete. Because of soil’s vulnerabilities, he worries that dramatic rainfall or a storm surge could destroy these structures, resulting in a release of toxic chemicals “bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill by orders of magnitude.”
His worst-case scenario has already happened at least once, when floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey ate through the earthen container at the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, releasing noxious waste into a nearby river.
Physical Collapse is Happening Now
Meanwhile, the number of high-hazard-potential dams in the United States now tops 15,000. Many were built during or before the WWII era and have been widely neglected since then. And when it comes to bridges, “there are cautionary tales all over,” says Maria Lehman, president of ASCE and vice chair of the Biden Administration’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council. “Every county in the country has a list of bridges that, if they had money, they would replace tomorrow.”
Our 617,000 bridges include not just those spanning mighty rivers but also every highway overpass and minor link across a stream—and close to one tenth of them are significantly compromised. “If you have to think in terms of catastrophe, we’re already there,” Mukherjee says. In 2007, the collapse of an I-35W bridge in Minnesota killed 13 people and injured 145. More recently, a six-lane bridge over the Mississippi was closed for three months in 2021, disrupting interstate travel and shipping because an inspector missed a significant crack. Americans drive 178 million trips on structurally deficient bridges each day.
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Every day, millions of Americans travel across bridges and overpasses, like the Marquette Interchange in Milwaukee, that may be structurally deficient. Photograph By Keith Ladzinski, National Geographic Image Collection
Yet the US spends only 1.5-2.5 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, proportionately less than half of what the European Union spends, Lehman says. This long-term lack of funding has run out the clock on many solutions. Many of our bridges were built to last 30-50 years, but nearly half are at least half a century old. The average age of our levees is also 50; our dams average 57.
Now, extreme weather is intensifying just as structures fail. We’ve already seen consequences in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, when collapsing levees inundated 80 percent of New Orleans, killing hundreds, or in the failure of an under-inspected dam in Edenville, Michigan, which flooded the region and destroyed thousands of homes in 2020. The trend is set to continue: after Superstorm Sandy engulfed New York City transit, Ayyub helped study similar risks in Washington, D.C and Shanghai. His models showed widespread flooding that could swamp D.C. metro stations and in severe cases even reach “the backyard of the White House.”
The Future of U.S. Infrastructure
Mukherjee is optimistic about the use of new technology to solve some of these issues, though adoption has been slow. Drones can provide human inspectors with up-close views of areas they can’t reach themselves and reduce chance of human error; a drone on an unrelated project captured footage of the Mississippi bridge crack two years before its discovery.
Ayyub has also worked with North American freight railroads to find weak links using computer modeling, combing through thousands of stations to “identify exactly which point if it fails will have the biggest impact,” he says. Why not do the same with our power grid and waterways?
One piece of good news: in 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $1.2 trillion over five years for the ailing systems that help American society run, the largest federal investment in US history. It was a major victory. “Every president for the last eight presidents said we should spend a lot of money—like a trillion dollars—on infrastructure, and none of them delivered,” Lehman says.
Unless it is renewed regularly, though, this funding will barely stop the bleeding. And meanwhile, across the country, families like Kirchhoff’s (who after a difficult year were able to rebuild both the destroyed houses) struggle to recover from a relentless march of disasters, many of them preventable. It’s time for the US to learn the lessons drawn from of a century of neglect, Lehman argues, and begin maintaining the systems that makes so much of American life possible while they’re still in working condition.
“If you have a leak in your roof, you go up there, find it, replace the shingles, put on a little tar” she says. “If you let it go, it’s not going to be a little fix: it’s going to be a replacement.”
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ncaapeaches · 5 days
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sophia.leblanc on Instagram
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sssseren · 2 years
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Incredibly excited and honored to be one of the Scholar-Artist Residents for the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative at University of Maryland (UMD)! To learn more about the digital project I will be working on throughout this residency period, titled {unhurried} [witness], click here. To learn more about all of the resident scholars, click here. To learn more about the AADHum program, click here. {unhurried} [witness] will explore Black American play as a form of healing and collective cultural witness through interactive text and audiovisual elements. Can’t wait to get started! 
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University of Maryland researchers aiming to combat rising global temperatures have developed a new "cooling glass" that can turn down the heat indoors without electricity by drawing on the cold depths of space. The new technology, a microporous glass coating described in a paper published in the journal Science, can lower the temperature of the material beneath it by 3.5 degrees Celsius at noon, and has the potential to reduce a mid-rise apartment building's yearly carbon emissions by 10%, according to the research team led by Distinguished University Professor Liangbing Hu in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The coating works in two ways: First, it reflects up to 99% of solar radiation to stop buildings from absorbing heat. More intriguingly, it emits heat in the form of longwave infrared radiation into the icy universe, where the temperature is generally around -270 degrees Celsius, or just a few degrees above absolute zero.
Read more.
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Have you ever wondered what archive stacks look like and how much material there is?  Then take a look behind the scenes at our special collections space featuring just some of 1 of our 4 floors!
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