USITCC Regional Competition
The Department of Information Technology and Cyber Security in the College of Business is proud to host the U. S. Information Technology Collegiate Conference (USITCC) Regional Competition on October 26-28. The event is open to students majoring in business or computer science.
USITCC is quickly becoming the nation's top IT competition, networking and career-building event. In one single weekend, student attendees can prove their technology skills in a variety of IT competitions, meet with industry professionals and connect with IT employers providing internships (实习工作) and/or full-time positions.
Competitions & Schedule
Date | Time | Competitions |
Thursday, October 26 | 7-10 p.m. | Security |
7-10 p.m. | Systems Analysis and Design | |
Friday, October 27 | 8-1l a.m. | Application Development |
12-3 p.m. | Office Solutions | |
Saturday, October 28 | 4-7 p.m. | Database |
8-10 a.m. | Security Final Round |
Accommodation Information
Kentwood Hall, 701 E. St. Louis St., Springfield, MO 65806 is a historic six-story building. Kentwood offers private rooms, two-person rooms, super doubles, and three-person rooms.
Each room is carpeted and offers a bathroom and height-adjustable beds. All rooms have Wi-Fi and a mid-sized refrigerator. All rooms are smoke-free. Basic bedding will include sheets, a light blanket, and towels.
Entry Fee
The early bird rate is $35 / person before September 30, and the price will increase to $45 / person after that date.
David Chipperfield, the British designer known for his minimalist and inclusive spaces, has won the Pritzker Prize, often called "the Nobel Prize of architecture". With this honor, he joins the company of groundbreaking designers such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Oscar Niemeyer.
Chipperfield has distinguished his works by creating sharp, minimalist socially conscious buildings. The Pritzker committee wrote, "His architectural language balances consistency with the fundamental design principles and flexibility towards the local cultures ... The work of David Chipperfield harmonizes European classicism, the complex nature of Britain and even the delicateness of Japan."
In 1997, Chipperfield's firm was chosen to renovate Berlin's Neues Museum, which was a mess long after being damaged by World War I. Chipperfield approached the project in honor of the building's history. For more than a decade, he searched through stones and bricks from the original structure for pieces to use, some of which had bullet(子弹) holes in them.
The architect has applied the same belief to his recent works, including the expansion of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he renovated galleries, created a new auditorium(礼堂) and built a concrete bridge to connect its original buildings.
"While some architects may use the attention that comes with the Pritzker Prize to go big and advance their commercial ambitions, Chipperfield's win is unlikely to result in steel-and-glass supertall skyscrapers," writes Bloomberg's Kriston Capps.
Instead, Chipperfield says he will work harder to create architecture that has a specific mission. "I regard this award as an encouragement, continuing to direct my attention not only to the substance of architecture and its meaning but also to the contribution that we can make as architects to address the existing challenges of climate change and social inequality," he says in a statement. He adds, "We must rise to these challenges and help inspire the next generation to shoulder this responsibility with vision and courage."
Read a few news headlines and you'll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the isolation of individual last speakers, and the wider cultural loss for humanity. These stories often mention how people try to protect such languages. However, they tend to focus less on how such efforts actually help speakers of endangered languages. Such efforts sometimes help, sometimes harm, and sometimes do both.
Encouraging someone to keep speaking a declining minority language could certainly boost his or her sense of identity. But when a bigger language is adopted somewhere, it doesn't remove everything that came before. Often, intense contact between big and small languages leads to a new mixture - for example, Sheng in Kenya and Tsotsitaal in South Africa. In other cases, such language contact results in a new localized dialect. As linguist Peter Trudgill argues, this can also hold a highly local identity.
Sure enough, enabling a people to use their traditional language can make them feel better about themselves. But is it really helping them? Simply adding your ancestral language as a new school subject isn't very helpful if your school is falling down, or you're not eating well. To think anything much can be solved just by performing CPR (心肺复苏) in a minority language is to ignore how complicated human society is and how many different simultaneous (同时的) needs we have.
In Québec, Canada, just under 75% of residents have French as their native language, but the percentage has fallen over the past five years. In 2022, the Québec Legislature passed Bill 96, which requires people to only use French for official speech and writing. This is an example of the prioritization of language, yet it's unclear whether the law will actually improve Québec residents' lives, or even help preserve French in Québec.
So promoting endangered languages can be a positive force, but we shouldn't assume that's universally true. It is especially difficult for a language expert to say so. Perhaps we should focus less on languages themselves, and pay more attention to the lives of the people who speak them.
In America, the "Big Dig", a highway project that resulted in a mess of traffic in the centre of Boston for years, came in five times over its initial budget. Even the Germans get huge projects wrong. Conception to operation of Berlin Brandenburg Airport has taken 30 years, with seven missed opening dates. The airport ended up costing $8.2 billion. However, the original estimate was about $2.7 billion.
Huge projects like Berlin Brandenburg Airport are the subject of an amusing new book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Mr. Flyvbjerg sets up a database of over 16, 000 projects and data analysis reveals that only 8.5% of the projects meet their initial estimates on cost and time, and 0.5% of them achieve what they set out to do on cost, time and benefits.
Over-optimistic time and cost estimates originate from both psychological and political perceptions: the reliance on intuition (直觉) rather than data, and a problem that Mr. Flyvbjerg calls "strategic misrepresentation". This is when budgets are intentionally reduced in order to get things going. And once the projects are under way, they will not be stopped, because money spent on them will thus be wasted.
Mr. Flyvbjerg speaks highly of Pixar's methodical approach to developing and testing films in great detail before they go into production. He also tells the story of how Frank Gehry's well-developed architectural models helped ensure the success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Narrowing down the producing window of a project before it is actually carried out reduces the probability of unexpected events.
Big customized projects are particularly likely to run into trouble. However, the more a project can be divided into standardized processes, the better its prospects are. Projects run into problems for specific reasons as well as general ones: Britain's trouble is not something that China has to worry about, for instance. But the iron law is that if you plan strictly and standardize where possible, you are less likely to dig yourself into a hole.
Our relationship with pets has changed greatly in recent decades. A recent survey found that 69% of Australian households have at least one pet.
While owning a pet is linked to numerous mental and physical health benefits, our pets can also carry infectious diseases that can sometimes be passed on to us. For most people, the risk is low. But some people, like those with weakened immune systems, are at greater risk of getting sick. .
Infectious diseases that move from animals to humans are called zoonotic diseases (动物传染病). More than 70 pathogens (病原体) of companion animals are known to be transmissible to people. But often there may be no visible signs of sickness, making it easier for you to catch it, because you don't suspect your pet of carrying pathogens.
Close contact with animals, some behaviors in particular, increases the risk of zoonotic diseases. Surveys conducted in the Netherlands showed that half of pet owners allowed their pets to lick their faces, and 18% permitted dogs to share their beds. Research has also linked occasional zoonotic infections in pet owners to kissing pets. For example, in Japan, a woman developed a serious infectious illness after regularly kissing her dog's face.
These include washing hands thoroughly after interacting with pets, handling their bedding and toys, and cleaning their waste. It's also essential to avoid allowing pets to lick faces or open wounds. Moreover, it is advisable to keep pets out of the kitchen, especially cats that may access food preparation surfaces.
A.Pet ownership is at an all-time high.
B.Sometimes, a pet with a zoonotic pathogen may look sick.
C.Dogs and cats are significant sources of zoonotic infections.
D.But it's not just dogs and cats that can spread diseases to humans.
E.To minimize the risk of getting sick, several good practices should be adopted.
F.Additionally, 45% of cat owners allowed their cats to jump onto kitchen sinks.
G.So it's important to know the threats and take necessary action to prevent infections.
I grew up in a small North Dakota town. Dad was a farmer, so we kids were taught 1 to drive farm vehicles. I started driving the tractor(拖拉机) at age 15.
One summer day, Dad asked me to back his truck up. 2 , I backed it into a tree, damaging the truck. I was 3 because I wasn't sure how Dad would react. Luckily, Dad wasn't 4 , and moved the truck himself.
As a teenager, I usually worked part-time on Uncle Jim's farm in my 5 time. One day, I drove the tractor to get gas from the farmyard fuel tank, which was 6 on a big metal shelf 12 feet high. I 7 the shelf, bending one of the vehicle's wooden bars. I stopped the vehicle anxiously and got off. I 8 Uncle Jim would help me. To my 9 , he said, "Get back up on that tractor and you can do it." And I did! During harvest, Jim had me do farming chores with that tractor, which made my confidence 10 greatly.
The "can do" 11 Uncle Jim had toward me carried me through 12 times in life. Whenever I encountered difficulties, the 13 on the summer day on the farm came flooding back to my mind and my spirit wasn't 14 ! It just goes to show what a huge impact can be created by small gestures of 15 in a person.
After walking for nearly 10 kilometers by China's Huangshan Mountain, and just as he was the edge of giving up, Phil Lecomte caught sight of a beautiful village. This moment took place 15 years ago, the Frenchman traveled to Huangshan Mountain for the first time. He has since traveled to China almost yearly.
In 2012, Lecomte became a tour guide and his trip to China turned into a long-term stay. Unlike other guides, he (rare) takes his guests - mostly foreigners - to the often visited (attraction). Instead, he often hikes or rides a motorcycle with his friends, away from noisy cities, to search for (hide) scenery scattered(分散的) around Huangshan Mountain.
Lecomte (enjoy) time spent hiking with his Chinese and foreign friends. They sing and play the guitar by clear streams, chat with locals picking tea, fall asleep to the sounds of frogs and insects.
Now, he also shares the beautiful moments he captures on his camera on Chinese social media, like images of an old man (sit) in a chair reading a book against the sunset, or children running around ancient village waving colorful fish lanterns. Lecomte (take) more than 118,000 photos in China to date.
We were driving across the big state of Texas on our way to California. Suddenly, our car coughed and then stopped.
"Are we out of gas?" Mom asked. Dad nodded. Cotton fields lined both sides of the lonely highway as far as the eye could see. We hadn't seen a car for a very long time, and we had passed the last town an hour before. "Don't worry," Dad said. "Someone will be along soon." But he didn't sound very sure about that. He got out and put the car's hood(引擎盖) up, saying, "This will let them know we're in trouble."
After an hour, we saw dust in the distance. A car was fast approaching going in the same direction as ours. Pleased, Dad jumped to his feet, waving his arms wildly. He smiled as the car got closer, yet the car just sounded its horn(喇叭) and rushed off. We were so upset and I felt scared. Dusk was approaching and we had been sitting for a couple of hours. Then we heard a small noise in the distance.
It sounded like men singing at the top of their lungs. It got louder, and soon we saw a worn-out old truck driving slowly down the highway toward us. The whole truck seemed to float along surrounded by songs sung in Spanish.
"Get in the car immediately," Mom instructed me nervously. "Al, you'd better get in here, too. We can't be too careful out here in the middle of nowhere." Dad just stood by the car door, full of tension.
The wooden-sided truck came to a stop right beside him. Mom and I held our breath. Would they hold us up? What would happen to us? We could be at their mercy. From their look, we knew they were farmers who often labored in the fields all day under the hot Texas sun.
"Habla Español?" the driver stopped and called out his window at Dad. "What? I know little Spanish," Dad shouted back, shaking his head. He wondered how to convey the message that we needed a ride to a gas station.
注意：
1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Then Dad gestured and used some easy English words.
The container soon got full, but how could we return to where our car stopped?
