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Archive for June, 2010

Summer Tech

Monday, June 28th, 2010

If you reside in Ossining, New York, or a nearby community, we would like to know if you would be interested in participating in a Summer Tech educational program. We are considering offering an Introduction to Computer Science & Programming for middle school and high school students and a survey of Comparative Programming Languages with a seminar format for students at the university level. We might also run an Interactive Fiction Workshop using the Inform 7 authoring environment to teach you how to create your own text adventure games and simulations.

These programs may be offered online in our Educational Outreach Center or we might be able to find a space to meet in person.

We are also setting up a discussion forum for River Town Webmasters, Designers, and Developers.

In any case, if you are interested in any of these offerings, please drop a note to us at: info@ieuc.org

Posted in Education | No Comments »

IBM Programming Languages Day 2010

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

IBM Programming Languages Day

July 29, 2010, Hawthorne NY

The eleventh annual Programming Languages Day will be held at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center on Thursday, July 29, 2010. The day will be held in cooperation with the New Jersey and New England Programming Languages and Systems Seminars. The main goal of the event is to increase awareness of each other’s work, and to encourage interaction and collaboration.

The Programming Languages Day features a keynote presentation and approximately 8 regular presentations. Prof. Doug Lea, State University of New York at Oswego, will deliver the keynote presentation this year.

If you would like to present your work, please send a title and abstract to etorlak@us.ibm.com by June 23, 2010. Tutorials or joint presentations are welcomed. We also solicit input on topics or particular presentations that would be of interest to attendees.

Abstracts will be selected by a committee consisting of Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology; Joshua Guttman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Emina Torlak, IBM Research. Notification of accepted abstracts will be sent by approximately June 30, 2010.

You are welcome from 9AM onwards, and the keynote presentation will start at 10AM sharp. We expect the program to run until 4PM. The Programming Languages day will be held in room GN-F15 in the Hawthorne-1 building in Hawthorne, New York.

If you plan to attend the Programming Languages Day, please register by sending an e-mail with your name, affiliation, contact information, and dietary restrictions to etorlak@us.ibm.com so that we can plan for lunch and refreshments.

Important Dates:

Talk title and abstract deadline: June 23rd
Acceptance notification: June 30th
PL Day 2010: July 29th

Program committee:

Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology
Joshua Guttman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Emina Torlak, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Our Website Redesign Enters Live Public Beta!

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

It gives us great pleasure to report that with the start of Summer we are going live with a Public Beta of our latest website redesign. We have done some serious retooling of our infrastructure to simplify things and provide better hooks for future enhancements, like the versioning system that permits major revisions of our site to be accessed simultaneously as well the hooks we have in place to track version changes at the page level.

Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.

Posted in The Institute Log, Webmaster's Log | No Comments »

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Legal Notices — Revised June 1st, 2010

We apologize for having to plaster this legal boilerplate across the bottom of every one of our pages, but you really should read it through at least once since it concerns your legal rights if you are considering donating to us or citing our work. It may be updated from time to time so look for blog entries tagged with "Legal Notice" for timely updates on when things change and be sure to consult our Current Legal Notices for a comprehensive listing of everything you should know.

A number of State and Federal regulations require various legal disclaimers and at present there is no settled law permitting us to rely on a link to dedicated page of legal notices to discharge this burden.

Our major legal filings can be found in The IEUC Archives.

Since we have to go this far, we are also including some useful related information that isn't explicitly required by law, just to keep everything law related in one place. In any case, this footer is the same on every page so you don't need to scroll down to it again.

Privacy & Security

We are currently developing formal privacy & document retention/destruction policies. Until they have been officially adopted and indicate otherwise, assume that any contacts online or offline with The IEUC are matters of public record that might be shared, disclosed, or used in any manner for any purpose. This notice is effective with this release of our website and supersedes any prior statements regarding privacy with respect to any contacts with the Institute from June 1st, 2010 onward, until such time as a newer version of this policy supersedes it with respect to subsequent contacts from that point onward.

We hold no Personally Identifying Information in digital form on any residents of Massachusetts.

Third Parties hosting our website and email infrastructure, contracting with such provider(s), or (in the case of Google) providing us with website analytics, may have digital and/or physical access to records related to your visit or email to us over which we have no control and which must accordingly be excluded from any privacy guarantees we may directly offer.

In any case, we will release any material that we are compelled to disclose by force of law and we reserve the right to comply with any information requests made by government or law enforcement authorities.

201 CMR 17.00: M.G.L. c. 93H Exempt

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc., is not subject to Massachusetts's Data Privacy Law 201 CMR 17.00: STANDARDS FOR THE PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION OF RESIDENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH because it does not own or license personal information about any residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as defined in the statute. Any such information coming into our possession will be destroyed as quickly as practicable, so if you are a resident of Massachusetts we ask that you do not disclose any Personal Information to us.

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION —16 CFR Part 255 Disclosures

The following disclaimer is required under the FTC's Guidelines Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising via Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45):

§ 255.0 Purpose and definitions. Our site may contain "badges" and/or links to some of the software used in its development. We are not "endorsing" them for use by any other individual or organization.

§ 255.1 General considerations. All comments with respect to products/services mentioned on our pages represent the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of each page's respective author and are factually truthful to the best of his or her knowledge and have not be solicited with any financial renumeration.

255.2 Consumer endorsements. The vast majority of items mentioned here, particularly our many literature references, are items we have individually purchased for collection in our personal libraries making us actual consumers of the technical literature (the same applies to the software items mentioned although, most of them are free open source projects). Any polls or surveys on our site are totally unscientific unless presented as being otherwise. No claims have been validated by any objective measure.

§ 255.3 Expert Endorsements. The Institute is composed of many volunteers with extremely high levels of individual technological expertise, however, our volunteers are generally not typical End Users so their experiences with and reactions to any technologies mentioned here will not necessarily bear any resemblance to those of a typical consumer or purchaser. Thus no pointers to items characterized as being useful to them or of general utility should be taken as expert endorsements for your use of them.

§ 255.4 Endorsements by organizations. Likewise, as an organization we have not undertaken to formally pool the expertise of our officers, directors, staff, and volunteers to ground any pointers to external work in a scientific vetting process. Accordingly you are on notice that anything mentioned in these pages is not being endorsed for purchase by our organization and that it is instead being pointed out by the author of the page(s) on which it is mentioned for informational purposes only.

§ 255.5 Disclosure of material connections. All Officers and Directors of The IEUC are required to disclose any direct conflicts of interest with those of The IEUC, however we have not undertaken a complete forensic accounting audit of all of all of their investments, nor of those of all volunteers contributing to our website, making it impossible for use to determine whether they might indirectly benefit from positions taken by the organization or from any attendent publicity generated by mention of any product, program, publication, standard, project, group, or individual mentioned in on our website. You should accordingly assume that anything mentioned or linked to from our pages may have been received for free in the mail, at a trade show, or as part of a beta testing program and that the page author may be a friend or colleague of the item's author/developer or a spouse/significant other thereof. Eastgate System's Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein was one of the programs used in generating our site. Mark was one of our Found Directors and now serves on our Volunteer Advisory Board. Our webmaster is a Beta Tester for Tinderbox and purchases an annual update license with his own funds. We also make use a number of free Google services. Any conferences or events discussed herein may been trade shows, lab tours, or academic/industry "open house" events with free food, t-shirts, or other minor swag intended to garner corporate publicity or have been attended with directly or indirectly vendor-sponsored free "Expo Only" passes, complimentary passes, or discounted "academic" rates (which are often sponsored by an academic unit and its corporate patrons). Some books cited may have been review copies or trade show give aways by their authors, publishers, or unrelated vendors or free books given to us by friends or as discarded items & book sale leftovers by public libraries.

Final Thoughts. The above should be painfully obvious common sense, but 16 CFR Part 255 is so broadly written and vaguely defined that we couldn't risk anything short of our best legalese to protect ourselves. Always remember that it is incumbent on the reader to investigate any potential purchases or service usages on his or her own and to asume that items mentioned may have come into the possession of potential reviewers here free of charge or have been brought to our attention in attempt to garner testimonials (which in most cases they are fully worthy of on their substantive merits since we wouldn't waste the space and risk our credibility by telling you about them if they weren't any good).

Green Advertising Disclaimer

Our web hosting provider has been promoting its efforts to power its server farms with renewable energy. Since we have no ability to independently validate these claims, we explicitly disclaim any endorsement of its Green advertising campaign. This is not to suggest that we have any cause to doubt the validity of those efforts, merely to insure that we can not be held liable under Federal or State Law in the unlikely event that those claims might not stand up to objective scientific scrutiny.

Section 508 Exempt

Section 508 is a regulatory framework aimed at mandating how web site authors should address accessibility concerns in the production of web sites funded directly or indirectly by the US Government.

No direct or indirect federal, state, or local government funds were used in support of the development of this page, nor was its development undertaken as a project for any such entity.

Therefore, this page is not subject to Section 508 or any related rule making.

The Institute Online

Forging The Future 2/7/12 — 5:08 UTC

Archive for June, 2010

Summer Tech

IBM Programming Languages Day 2010

Our Website Redesign Enters Live Public Beta!

Our Weblog :

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Blogroll

Meta

Legal Notices — Revised June 1st, 2010

Privacy & Security

201 CMR 17.00: M.G.L. c. 93H Exempt

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION —16 CFR Part 255 Disclosures

Green Advertising Disclaimer

Section 508 Exempt

Advice for Disabled Visitors

Federal Tax Status

State Law Charitable Solicitation Registration Disclosure Statements

Exemptions :

Withdrawals :

Other States :

Nondiscrimination Policy

License Terms — Conditions Under Which You May Copy This Page

Trademarks

Web Standards Compliance