Fueling and delinking from energy coloniality in Puerto Rico

In September 2017, Hurricane María rattled Puerto Rico and its Caribbean neighbors. To study this US colony’s post-hurricane crises, long-time histories and present experiences with what I call ‘energy coloniality’ and ‘energy privilege’ must be foregrounded. This approach allows for an understanding of this unnatural disaster as just one of countless systemic colonial and neoliberal entwined cruelties, driven by disaster capitalism. Informed by fieldwork and years of ‘e-advocacy,’ I critique four rhetorical problems that shape everyday and extraordinary emergencies in Puerto Rico. While I focus on this archipelago, hegemonic emergency discourses are widespread and linked to what I term the ‘emergency manager effect.’ This shock doctrine outcome is constituted by neoliberal and colonial governance and discourses, whereby undemocratically appointed overseers manage local places and peoples, who are perceived as anachronistic and incapable of solving problems independently. Delinking from these exploitative strategies and systems requires intervening in the entanglements of energy coloniality, energy privilege, and neoliberalism, as reckless extractivism continues to disproportionately target frontline communities.     

在创新变革中实现图书馆的自我超越——IFLA 2011年会各专题内容解读

2011年在波多黎各举行的国际图联（IFLA）大会,以“图书馆的自我超越”为主题,通过各分会场,交流和研讨当前国际图书馆界所关注的一些重要问题。作为参会代表,作者从16个方面介绍大会交流的主要成果,以期推动我国图书馆学理论研究与实践创新。     

Masonry mortars in the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro,San Juan,Puerto Rico: a method for categorization

Abstract

This paper describes the study made of mortars used in the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, combining examination of materials in situ and in the laboratory with a study of archival documents, a relatively simple system of categories was devised. Mortars were grouped into three categories based on overall color and composition: red/beige, white, and brick-dust. The information gleaned in this study served as a basis for a condition assessment and will be used for developing replacement mortars.     

Plans for census 2000

This article generally describes the decade-long intensive effort to mobilize stakeholders, staff, and resources for planning and executing Census 2000. As with previous censuses, the goals of this effort are to achieve greater accuracy and cost containment while inviting the widest public participation in census history. This account emphasizes the research, design, development, and operational testing required to count each person in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the island areas of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. It also discusses the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning the use of sampling for Congressional apportionment.     

West Side Story Read From Below: Young Puerto Rican Women's Cultural Readings

Critics have hailed West Side Story as both a masterpiece and a caricature of Puerto Rican culture. However, the perspectives of everyday Puerto Ricans are largely missing from the discourse. Therefore, this audience reception study approaches a group of young Puerto Rican women as cultural readers to learn their interpretations of West Side Story as a reflection of their standpoint and the film's current cultural relevance. The participants rejected Natalie Wood's Maria for being “insufficiently” Puerto Rican, while identifying with the “America” scene because it reflected their own gendered tensions. Their readings acknowledged the caricatures, yet validated West Side Story as a cultural text with modern-day relevance, though less so than with previous generations of Puerto Ricans.     

Working at Play: Informal Science Education on Museum Playgrounds

Abstract This article discusses the importance of play in informal science education and the growth of science playgrounds as an international trend among museums to create safe, challenging outdoor environments that use play to explore the foundations of science. Play is characterized by intrinsic motivation, active engagement, attention to means rather than ends, non‐literal behavior, and freedom from external rules, a means for acquiring information about and experiencing the environment. Successful exhibitions for children and families share these qualities and outdoor exhibitions encourage a degree of exploration and full‐body experience often not possible nor appropriate inside a museum. Two case studies are provided as evidence of the importance of play in the interpretation and design of science playgrounds. The first, Science Playground at the New York Hall of Science (opened 1997), uses an interpretive strategy in which evaluation and remediation are continually incorporated into the educational process. Experimental workshops were conducted to observe children's intuitive uses of the physics‐based exhibits, uninhibited by any authoritative explanations. From this evaluation, the institution elected not to produce interpretive signage at each unit, but rather to develop a guide for visitors and one for educators that outline the exhibition's basic physics principles and encourage visitors to experiment and make connection to their own experiences. The second case study, Exploration Park at Prisma, Zona Exploratoria de Puerto Rico in San Juan (opening 2002), outlines ten design criteria used to develop the playground. These include bringing together a diverse team to respond to institutional and audience needs, ages, interests, and cultural backgrounds; creating a specific sense of place, making use of the local environment and taking advantage of natural elements including water, soil, wind, and sun. Practical considerations of safety, materials, and prototyping are also addressed. The article concludes with the idea of play as essential not only in child development, but also in development of successful outdoor science exhibitions.     

Colonial archives and the arts of governance

Anthropologists engaged in post-colonial studies are increasingly adopting an historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain more an extractive than an ethnographic one. Documents are thus still invoked piecemeal to confirm the colonial invention of certain practices or to underscore cultural claims, silent. Yet such mining of thecontent of government commissions, reports, and other archival sources rarely pays attention to their peculiar placement andform. Scholars need to move from archive-assource to archive-as-subject. This article, using document production in the Dutch East Indies as an illustration, argues that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography. This requires a sustained engagement with archives as cultural agents of “fact” production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.     

“Now We Can Talk”

This paper explores debate within Puerto Rico's journalistic community regarding the journalistic role of La Comay, a full-sized puppet host of the popular information and entertainment show SuperXclusivo, which faced a boycott in late 2012 and cancelation in early 2013. Calls to boycott and shutter the daily TV show came from the island's LGBT advocates because of comments made by La Comay that they considered homophobic. This analysis of 58 texts from four of Puerto Rico's island-wide news outlets provides an opportunity to examine how a region's dominant cultural archetype—that of the motherly and controversial comadre, after which La Comay is named—appeared in boundary work conducted by local journalists as they determined whether La Comay should have been awarded journalistic status. This paper is not meant to be yet another examination of satirical journalism as much as it is a chance to explore the appearance of a region's culture in the construction or maintenance of its journalistic community.     

基于改进蚁群聚类的热点主题发现算法研究*

针对热点主题发现是在聚类算法的基础上实现的特点,将改进后的蚁群聚类算法引入到该研究中,同时提出类别关注度（CAD）的概念,以此来判定类别的热门程度并区分出热门类别和冷门类别,在此基础上抽取热点主题集。实验结果表明改进后的蚁群聚类算法对热点主题的发现有一定的效果,对其他仿生优化聚类算法的引入有借鉴意义。     

Paradoxes of Press Freedom in Colonial West Africa

This article describes the shifts and contradictions in British approaches to the control of print media in colonial West Africa between the 1920s and 1940s. Well before the Colonial Office's post-war interventions to create an ‘enlightened and educated’ West African citizenry through mass education, decades of independent newspaper production in the region helped to shape independent and critical readerships. For the British, however, an upsurge in African nationalist journalism in the mid-1930s coincided with a perceived Communist infiltration of ‘British West Africa’ to make censorship and surveillance more palatable than before to colonial officials in London, in spite of the new emphasis on public relations.     

A Colonial Affair: Heinemann Educational Books and the African Market

This article attempts to provide historical explanations for the role which Heinemann Educational Books (henceforth HEB) played in the emergence of an African literature in English. Whereas the reluctance of British companies to publish for Africa was in a large measure determined, albeit indirectly, by contemporary colonial policies and interests, the open, wholehearted encouragement of African writings in the 1960s and 1970s suggests a radical shift in the attitudes of British publishers. This shift arguably occurred at a time when the entire publishing industry in England witnessed a profound readjustment following the war years. Yet, more importantly, the full-scale ‘decolonization’ process in Africa, as in the rest of the empire, forced British publishers, such as HEB, to adopt new strategies to keep their businesses going in Africa. This article seeks to shed light on Alan Hill as the architect of HEB and his publishing projects in the African continent.     

高校图书馆应关怀"弱势学生群体"

文章分析了我国高校"弱势学生群体"的特点,并针对这些特点指出了新时期高校图书馆应承担从物质与生活、精神与心理以及文化等方面对弱势学生群体进行关怀的新使命.     

Unveiling the Colours of Cellulose Nitrate Black and White Film-based Negatives in Colonial Photography

ABSTRACT

Aiming at contributing to the preservation of black and white (B&W) film-based negatives held by Portuguese archives, four photographic collections from the first half of the twentieth century were selected for study. During the macro assessment of the collections the preservation condition and hues found in photographic negatives from the Elmano Cunha e Costa (ECC) were noticed, distinguishing this collection from the remaining ones. Additional attention was given considering that the ECC collection was formed in a colonial context in the 1930s, while the others were formed on the Portugal mainland. The ECC collection results from an ethnographic survey of Angolan tribes recorded with B&W film-based negatives. In this collection, sets of negatives with pink, lemon yellow, greenish, orange brownish, and red brownish hues were found. To identify the origin of such hues, the image layer was analysed by microscale energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (μ EDXRF) and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX). Additionally, to assess the base decay and its effect on the formation of hues, the plastic supports were characterized by Fourier transform infrared microscopy (μ FTIR). To complement the assessment of the film-base decay, pH was measured by using combined microelectrodes. The identification of mercury, iodine, chromium, and iron by μ EDXRF allowed correlation of the hues found in the negatives with chemical corrective treatments performed to improve the image quality. SEM-EDX confirmed those results and proved that the elements found were in the photographic emulsion layer. The results obtained are relevant since the hues identified may now be used as markers to indicate the technical work performed on colonial photography. Additionally, the visual and molecular assessment of the negatives’ supports (good to fair condition) allow proposing that the original storage conditions may have had a beneficial contribution to their present condition.     

Interlib在信息资源共建共享中的应用

论文介绍了在网络集群大环境下一种基于Web的图书馆集成化业务管理系统——Interlib。分析阐述了Interlib在图书馆馆藏建设的理论和实践发生变革时对图书馆信息资源共享建设的实现,并介绍了Interlib集群管理系统整套解决方案。     

When Everything Else Fails: Radio Journalism During Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT

In an era of over-reliance on online media technologies in disasters, this research examines the journalistic functions played by Puerto Rican AM radio workers during Hurricane Maria. Throughout the emergency there was total loss of electricity and communications, nonetheless local radio continued operations. This study is one of a few that explore journalistic practices during a disaster in the context of a Spanish-language media system. Through a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with radio workers, we found that in spite of having preparedness plans, the magnitude of the disaster led to improvization and the embracing of alternative journalistic roles. One of the main barriers was the inadequate technology for this particular context. Radio workers were also victims of the disaster and faced challenges in both their journalistic and first responder roles.     

A hybrid partitioning algorithm based on natural mechanisms of decision making

New technologies are proposed for the solution of the partition problem using mathematical methods, including the principles of natural mechanisms for decision making. The partition problem is represented as an adaptive system based on the integration of evolutionary and ant colony approaches to finding solutions. The structures of decision-making procedures are described, as well as ways of leaving down pheromone trails and pheromone evaporation. The obtained results were better than those from the existing algorithms.     

The Manipulation of Images of Women in Translation in Early Twentieth Century Hong Kong Chinese Newspapers

The early twentieth century witnessed both the thriving of Chinese newspapers in the British colony Hong Kong and the boom of Chinese translation of foreign literature. This article, through the translated literature in Chinese newspapers, explores the interaction among print media, Chinese women, and translation in the early twentieth century Hong Kong. It argues that many factors contributed to the prevailing ideology concerning women in the British colony, including the skewed sex ratio, Confucianism as the hegemonic ideology, and the conspiracy between elite Chinese and the colonial rulers, and thus that the manipulation of images of women in Chinese translations was ideologically motivated. Such pervasive ideology characteristic of Hong Kong at that given moment in history undoubtedly created pressures on the translators, which were exacerbated by the difference in the construction of the images of women in the English original and its Chinese translated counterparts.     

激活网络学术论坛的学术讨论功能研究

论文分析了中文网络学术论坛讨论功能发挥的现状、存在的不足及其原因,从培养高水平的研讨群体、精心设计论题、利用网络技术的筛选功能、对讨论进行引导、肯定主要参与者的学术贡献等方面提出了激活论坛讨论功能的设想。     

基于蚁群算法与K-means算法相结合的Web用户聚类

Web用户聚类是指用聚类算法产生用户会话的聚类,是电子商务中的一个重要问题.该问题的难度在于有成千上万的会话需要聚类,而且每个会话都可描述为一个高维向量.此外,该问题就聚类的数目而言具有指数的复杂性,是一个NP-难的问题.本文提出一种新的聚类方法,该方法将蚁群算法与K-means算法相结合对用户会话进行优化聚类.实验结果表明,与K-means算法相比,该方法在Web导航推荐的应用中具有更好的性能.     

图书馆如何对农民工子女实施知识援助

针对我国目前处于严重物质及知识贫困状态的农民工子女这一弱势群体,论文论述了图书馆对农民工子女实施知识援助应采取切实可行的策略,应以先进的制度建设为保障,实施有的放矢的服务,真正实现知识援助的长效化与实效化.