Certification of Librarians: An Unproven Demand

This paper examines whether certification of librarians is necessary to ensure high quality service. The paper explains the purpose of professional certification and provides a synopsis of the history of national librarian certification initiatives in the U.S. A literature review evaluates arguments supporting and opposing certification. Arguments in favor of certification are unconvincing and reveal certification supporters’ professional insecurities, failure to consider the certification bureaucracy that would be created, and lack of evidence to support their claims. Given these findings, the paper concludes that librarian certification is unnecessary. Library professionals are encouraged to take other proactive steps to expand their role, importance, and impact in the 21st century

Health Care Capitalism and the Precarious Right to Bodily Autonomy in the United States since the Rights Revolutions

In May 1990, in the first case of its kind, the National Gay Rights Advocates (NGRA) secured a California court judgment prohibiting an insurance company from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Great Republic Insurance Company had been using a supplemental questionnaire to screen out “occupations that do not require physical exertion … such as florists, interior decorators, and fashion designers,” as well as to use applicants’ marital status, “living arrangements,” and medical history to assess the likely risk of their exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) when denying health care coverage.1 That same year, Moblization for Youth (MFY) Legal Services in New York filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of women living with HIV who had been denied access to Social Security benefits because the government did not recognize their HIV-related conditions as qualifying for state health care coverage under the Medicaid program.2 In one sense, the cases were starkly different: one sought to protect the privately insured from discriminatory scrutiny on the basis of their sexuality while the other attempted to bring a protected class of people into public view to make a claim to health care. Yet both reveal an important truth about the concept of rights in an American context. The structure of the U.S. health care system, one based on private insurance for most and a threadbare, convoluted system of categorical assistance and public insurance for children, the disabled, and the elderly, has shaped Americans’ experience of their own sexuality and bodily autonomy in ways arguably unique to the United States. The public/private hybrid in health care has dramatically curtailed the capacity of those outside the heteronormative family structure to realize their demands for full equality in the wake of the rights revolutions. Efforts to secure a right to sexual or gender identity have foundered on the rocks of the health care system when faced, for example, with a public health crisis like HIV or a lack of health insurance plans willing to fund gender-affirming health care

Networked Head-Mounted Displays for Animated Notation and Audio-Scores with SmartVox

International audienceThe combination of graphic/animated scores, acoustic signals (audio-scores) and Head-Mounted Display (HMD) technology offers promising potentials in the context of distributed notation, for live performances and concerts involving voices, instruments and electronics. After an explanation of what SmartVox is technically, and how it is used by composers and performers, this paper explains why this form of technology-aided performance might help musicians for (spectral) tuning and synchronization with an electronic tape. Then, from an exploration of the concepts of distributed notation and networked music performances, it proposes solutions (in conjunction with INScore, BabelScores and the Decibel Score Player) seeking for the expansion of distributed notation practice to a wider community. It finally presents findings relative to the use of SmartVox with HMDs.La combinaison de partitions graphiques/animées, de signaux acoustiques (partitions audio) et de technologie d'affichage "head-mounted display" (HMD) offre des perspectives prometteuses dans le contexte de la notation distribuée, pour des performances et concerts avec voix et instrumentistes équipés de smartphones. Après avoir expliqué ce qu'est techniquement SmartVox, et cet outil est utilisé par les compositeurs et les interprètes, cet article explique pourquoi cette forme de performance assistée pourrait aider les musiciens à s'accorder (spectralement) et à se synchroniser avec une bande électronique. Puis, à partir d’une exploration des concepts de notation distribuée et de performances musicales en réseau, il propose des solutions (conjointement avec INScore, BabelScores et le Decibel Score Player) visant à étendre la pratique de la notation distribuée à une communauté plus large. Il présente enfin des résultats relatifs à l’utilisation de SmartVox avec des casques HMD

CROCHET: Checkpoint and Rollback via Lightweight Heap Traversal on Stock JVMs

Checkpoint/rollback (CR) mechanisms create snapshots of the state of a running application, allowing it to later be restored to that checkpointed snapshot. Support for checkpoint/rollback enables many program analyses and software engineering techniques, including test generation, fault tolerance, and speculative execution. Fully automatic CR support is built into some modern operating systems. However, such systems perform checkpoints at the coarse granularity of whole pages of virtual memory, which imposes relatively high overhead to incrementally capture the changing state of a process, and makes it difficult for applications to checkpoint only some logical portions of their state. CR systems implemented at the application level and with a finer granularity typically require complex developer support to identify: (1) where checkpoints can take place, and (2) which program state needs to be copied. A popular compromise is to implement CR support in managed runtime environments, e.g. the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but this typically requires specialized, non-standard runtime environments, limiting portability and adoption of this approach. In this paper, we present a novel approach for Checkpoint ROllbaCk via lightweight HEap Traversal (Crochet), which enables fully automatic fine-grained lightweight checkpoints within unmodified commodity JVMs (specifically Oracle\u27s HotSpot and OpenJDK). Leveraging key insights about the internal design common to modern JVMs, Crochet works entirely through bytecode rewriting and standard debug APIs, utilizing special proxy objects to perform a lazy heap traversal that starts at the root references and traverses the heap as objects are accessed, copying or restoring state as needed and removing each proxy immediately after it is used. We evaluated Crochet on the DaCapo benchmark suite, finding it to have very low runtime overhead in steady state (ranging from no overhead to 1.29x slowdown), and that it often outperforms a state-of-the-art system-level checkpoint tool when creating large checkpoints

Long Term Evolution of Magnetic Turbulence in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks: Electron-Positron Plasmas

We study the long term evolution of magnetic fields generated by a collisionless relativistic $e^+e^-$ shock which is initially unmagnetized. Our 2D particle-in-cell numerical simulations show that downstream of such a Weibel-mediated shock, particle distributions are close to isotropic, relativistic Maxwellians, and the magnetic turbulence is highly intermittent spatially, with the non-propagating magnetic fields forming relatively isolated regions with transverse dimension $\sim 10-20$ skin depths. These structures decay in amplitude, with little sign of downstream merging. The fields start with magnetic energy density $\sim (0.1-0.2)$ of the upstream kinetic energy within the shock transition, but rapid downstream decay drives the fields to much smaller values, below $10^{-3}$ of equipartition after $10^3$ skin depths. In an attempt to construct a theory that follows field decay to these smaller values, we explore the hypothesis that the observed damping is a variant of Landau damping in an unmagnetized plasma. The model is based on the small value of the downstream magnetic energy density, which suggests that particle orbits are only weakly perturbed from straight line motion, if the turbulence is homogeneous. Using linear kinetic theory applied to electromagnetic fields in an isotropic, relativistic Maxwellian plasma, we find a simple analytic form for the damping rates, $\gamma_k$, in two and three dimensions for small amplitude, subluminous electromagnetic fields. We find that magnetic energy does damp due to phase mixing of current carrying particles as $(\omega_p t)^{-q}$ with $q \sim 1$. (abridged)Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted to ApJ; Downsampled version for arXiv. Full resolution figures available at http://astro.berkeley.edu/~pchang/full_res_weibel.pd

The secret life of sculpture: notes from Giovanni Mariacher's fototeca at Padua

Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011.Giovanni Mariacher, the esteemed museum director and professor of art history, left his collection of photographs to the Civic Museums of Padua at his death. My survey of this archive last summer underlined the breadth of his expertise and the extent of his scholarship, which spanned all aspects of the arts of the Veneto. Even when the visitor doesn't find what he had hoped to, the photo archive can provide new perspectives on familiar objects and issues, offering as it does a look through the lens--or through the shoebox--of another. While I did not find the trove of photographs of unpublished sculpture from Veneto private collections that I might have hoped for, the photographs of sculpture that I did find, mostly of familiar objects in the museums of Venice and Padua, provided new insight to issues of condition, attribution, and display. The paper will outline some fresh starts suggested by photographs of sculpture in the Mariacher archive, and reexamine the scholar's writings on sculpture in light of his collection of images.Research for this paper supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation summer photo archives research grants, 2010. Conference supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the NYU Humanities Initiative, the IFA Visual Resources Collections, and Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, Visual Resources Collection