Delve into the past with these projects, steeped in history

Artificial neural networks mimic human brains, but the technology has its roots in physics.

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- PS3503.L585F7 1957b

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Main Library- JQ3515.T33 2014

Location: Main Library- HV6433.I722D35 2015

Location: Main Library- BP130.4.K87 2002

Bridgetown (Barbados) - Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic)

[Finish line of The Amazing Race 36, Episode 9, at the Anfiteatro La Puntilla in Puerto Plata, with the Taino Bay cruise port in the background. Screenshot from CBS television broadcast.]

It's a sign of the times that The Amazing Race made its first visit to the Dominican Republic this season. The DR has had the fastest-growing economy in the Caribbean or Central America for the last twenty years, and is now the region's largest economy. A substantial part of that economic growth, and a deliberate target of the government's efforts to attract investment, has been tourism.

Until a decade ago, more money came into the DR through remittances from Dominicans living and working abroad, mainly in the USA, than from any other source. Since then, boosted by government policies to promote tourism development, revenues from international tourism to the DR have doubled, passing remittances as the country's largest source of foreign exchange.

The DR is the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola; Haiti is the the western third of the island. If the DR doesn't get as much notice abroad, that's partly because it's a relatively stable, middle-income country, not notable for poverty, wealth, or war. "If it bleeds, it leads", and the DR hasn't had the crises that have brought so much attention (although little understanding or empathy) to its closest neighbor.

To put the situation in perspective, per capita income in the DR is half what it is in Barbados, the last previous destination visited by The Amazing Race 36, but five times that of Haiti. A major issue in the DR is immigration from Haiti and ongoing discrimination in the DR against a racially stigmatized underclass of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry.

International tourism rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic much more quickly in the DR than in most other countries. There were more foreign visitors to the DR in 2022 than there had been in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. As they started travelling again after the worst of the pandemic, some visitors from the USA probably chose the DR as a destination closer and a shorter flight away than other places they might otherwise have gone.

Other visitors come to the DR -- especially to the area around Puerto Plata where this episode of The Amazing Race took place -- on a growing number of cruise ships. The main challenge for the racers took place at the Damajagua waterfalls, which are promoted primarily as a shore excursion for cruise ship passengers. I had hoped that the pandemic might kill off the cruise industry as we know it, or at least reduce demand for cruises enough that some cruise ships might be repurposed for transportation. I was wrong. Cruising is back with a vengeance.

Puerto Plata has only a tenth of the population of the country's capital city and main cargo port, Santo Domingo, but Puerto Plata is overwhelmingly and increasingly the dominant cruise ship port of call in the DR. There are two cruise ports in the Puerto Playa area, one purpose-built and operated exclusively for Carnival Cruise Lines at Amber Cove, and the Taino Bay Cruise Port in the center of the city that was visible in the background at the finish line of this episode of The Amazing Race 36.

Next week The Amazing Race 36 returns to the USA. For the season finale, two episodes have apparently been edited down to a total of an hour and a half of broadcast time to suit the demands of CBS television schedulers. Stay tuned!

Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic) - Philadelphia, PA (USA)

What you're not realizing is, if you want to go to another state, nobody's gonna' stop you. Like, you can get in the car, and you go!

[Juan, at the finish line of The Amazing Race 36 in Philadelphia, PA.]

En route to the finish line of The Amazing Race 36 in Philadelphia, Juan and his partner Shane mistakenly drove across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and back. Despite numerous historical allusions in this episode of the reality-TV travel show, the racers weren't supposed to reenact Washington's crossing of the Delaware: they were supposed to go to a famous Philly cheesesteak house. But they borrowed a bystander's phone and got directions to a similarly named Jersey pizza joint. Their third-place finish on the race was due not to getting lost, but to relying blindly on the first response to a Google search.

How is it, though, that it seems so natural to Juan, as perhaps to most of us, that we can cross state lines so easily, but it seems equally natural that we have to request and obtain permission (visas), show passports, and submit to inspection to cross international borders?

Should international travel everywhere be as easy as crossing between US states or between member states of the European Union?

Can we have borders without border controls, as these examples might suggest?

These are important questions for all travellers, but perhaps especially for those of us whose passports privilege us to cross many borders with only minor inconvenience and without having to worry too much, or too often, about whether or not the border guards or the authorities at the airport or seaport will permit us to enter, will detain us, or will turn us back.

Last week I attended a fascinating discussion on this subject with John Washington, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria and the author of The Case for Open Borders (Haymarket Books, 2024) at the wonderful Medicine for Nightmares bookstore in San Francisco, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

The conversation was even more thought-provoking than a mere summary of the book would suggest.

Washington's goal, as he describes it, is not so much to provide a comprehensive treatise on the rationale for open borders as to introduce and inject the idea -- today invoked most often as a bogey-man like "Communism" to be automatically dismissed -- into the realm of possibility and serious debate. Closed or controlled borders are not things that have always existed, that exist everywhere even today, or that should be taken for granted. The Case for Open Borders is only a starting point for the debate we need to have.

I was particular pleased that Washington mentioned, both in his book and in his presentation, several other books and authors that have influenced my thinking and that I think deserve more attention. So rather than restate Washington's argument (open borders would be good for almost everyone, and are a realistic possibility which can and should be adopted without delay), which you can read for yourself, let me highlight some key topics related to travel across borders, and some of these sources of additional insight.

In his talk, Washington acknowledged How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas as a source of quantitative data about migration, even though de Haas criticizes some of the specific arguments Washington makes for open borders. You don't have to agree with all of de Haas's conclusions to value his marshalling of migration data and his interpretations of what it says about who crosses borders and why.

We think of borders as being between states (i.e. countries, not all of which are "nation states"). But that hasn't always been the case. Until recently, "states" were the exception, not the rule. Borders and walls -- the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall at the northern border of the Roman Empire, and so forth -- were what separated the territory of "civilized" states and peoples from the stateless territories inhabited by nomads, shifting agriculturists, hunter-gatherers, and other "barbarians". The Art of Not Being Governed, by the political theoretican and anthropologist James C. Scott, is a detailed historical case study of how the borders between states (mostly in the easily controlled flatlands) and stateless regions (mostly in the hills) have shaped the movements of people.

Why is the fundamental right of movement lagging, even backsliding, throughout the world? Why do states decry and prosecute impingements on the right to free speech, the free press, or the right to freedom from government oppression... and yet so enthusiastically impinge on the right to free movement? Is the right to free movement somehow different from the right to free speech, or the right to liberty? Why is the fundamental right to leave your country enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but not the right to enter another country? In a world (almost) completely carved into nation states, the right to leave is only half a right without the right to enter.

[John Washington, The Case for Open Borders, p. 182.]

As Washington notes, international human rights law distinguished between right to leave any country and the right to enter "your own" country (but not to enter any other country). Who is allowed to cross which borders thus depends on which country or countries is/are defined to be "your own". Citizenship is typically defined by birth: where you were born ("jus soli", right of the soil) and/or who your parent were ("jus sanguinis", right of blood). But should we take either or both of these principles of citizenship for granted?

Jacqueline Stevens, in Reproducing the State, presents a feminist critique of the idea of "birthright" citizenship, especially as the basis for distinctions between who does, and who does not, have certain rights. If some people have more rights, especially rights of place, and some have fewer, depending on who their parents are or where they were born, doesn't that amount to -- as Stevens and Washington both name it -- apartheid?

Mahmood Mamdani, in Neither Settler nor Native, argues that the very idea of the "nation-state" defined by citizenship is a settler-colonial invention that reifies discriminatory distinctions. And in States Without Nations, Stevens envisions a world without birthright citizenship or citizenship-based border controls.

That's not the world we live in today, though. On the ways in which borders are becoming less and less open, Washington cites Todd Miller's Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World. For a global perspective on this issue, I would add David Scott FitzGerald's Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers -- and, of course, my own writing for the Identity Project.

Control of cross-border movement based on who we are depends on documents (passports) and/or biometric databases that identify who we are and link us with attributes that form the basis for deciding which borders we can and can't cross. Washington cites John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport as one version of the history of passports and travel documents. Another is provided by Mark B. Salter in Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations.

Finally, to Washington's moving stories about life and death in the USA-Mexico borderlands, I would add Sally Hayden's tour de force of witness from another border region, My Fourth Tine, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route. Trigger warning: This is both the easiest and, in other ways, the hardest of the books on this list. But it's also the one I most strongly recommend.

On another note, there was an unfortunate omission earlier in this episode of The Amazing Race 36. The racers were sent to the Arch Street Meeting House, but nothing was said to explain this building or its historical significance to viewers of The Amazing Race. I'll be generous to the TV producers and assume that this context was left on the cutting-floor when what had been planned and filmed as the final two hour-long episodes of The Amazing Race 36 were edited down to a single ninety-minutes episode to suit the CBS-TV broadcast schedule. It's too bad that TV viewers missed out on that lesson, though, because Quakers have had an influence -- not just in the founding of Pennsylvania, but in the structure of American society at large -- far out of proportion to their small numbers and extending far beyond the membership of the Religious Society of Friends, but often overlooked in history texts and classes.

Quakers have had key roles in every period of American history, especially in times of social struggle and social change: in the abolitionist movement of the 1860s, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Bayard Rustin, a queer African-American Quaker who had been imprisoned for resisting the draft during World War II, was a key tactical and strategic advisor to the Rev. M. L. King, Jr., and one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington), and in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and subsequent campaigns of nonviolent direct action that have used consensus-based structures of organizing derived from Quaker decision-making and articulated and taught by, among others, George Lakey.

You can't fully understand American history without some understanding of Quaker thought and action. If you go to Independence Hall to see the Liberty Bell, it's worth a small detour to check out the modest exhibits at the Arch Street Meeting House on the next block.

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - N6604.M37 G67 2015

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - ND623.H3 A4 2015

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - N6549.M34 A4 2016

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - N6604.M37 C33 2015

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - N7153.T33 A4 2016

Location: Electronic Resource- 

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Inside sales representative for high tech in Herzliya Pituach

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for prospecting and identifying new business
• Working closely with Field Sales Executives
• Qualify opportunities by understanding customer needs, budgets and decision making
• Meeting sales targets established by the company.

• 2-5 years experience in a sales organization with at least one year of high volume calling
• Outbound sales experience
• English mother tongue (preferable British/ Irish accent)
• Skilled in Outlook and Internet research tools

Responsibilities

• Provide client support and technical issue resolution via E-Mail, phone and other electronic medium.
• Moderating the company's customer support forum
• Updating self-help documents so customers/employees can try to fix problems themselves
• Logging and keeping records of customer/employee queries
• Identify and correct or advise, on operational issues in client website or company systems.
• Working with customers/partners to identify service problems and advising on the solution
• Analyzing service information to spot common trends and underlying problems

• 3 years as a technical customer support representative/engineer
• Ability to build a web 2.0 support practice from the ground up (self help capabilities, forums etc.)
• Experience with website hosting/security/performance and DNS management
• Excellent communication (oral and written), interpersonal, organizational, and presentation skills.
• Fluent spoken and written English
• Self motivated, detail-oriented and organized.

• Experience working at a SaaS company preferably a B2C or B2B (SMB – small customers)
• Provided "Web2.0 technical support" (over mail, chat, phone with automated and advanced customer support tools)
• The ability to write very good documentation in English(FAQ, How to's, technical notes)
• Experience with a 24*7 lean support operations (using external answering services or off-shored resources)

The Houston Chronicle reports that celebrity gossip site PerezHilton.com has battled ISP takedown over claimed copyright infringement. The problem is, site-owner Mario Lavanderia is already disputing those claims in federal court, where a judge refused to grant an injunction. Instead, as the judicial process properly works, Lavanderia must be proven a likely infringer before his speech is silenced.

The DMCA, however, offers copyright claimants an easy route around the niceties of judicial process -- make it too much of a nuisance for an ISP to deal with an accused infringer as a client, and get his site removed. And this underscores the precarious nature of our reliance on private infrastructure. Even though the DMCA insulates ISPs from liability once they've received counter-notification, copyright claimants can still shower them with complaints, and ISPs are still free to bow to risk aversion and refuse to do business with challenging customers -- including those who challenge powerful copyright interests.

Los Angeles photo agency X17 Inc. sued Lavandeira in federal court last year, asking for $7.6 million in damages. The suit claimed Hilton used 51 photographs without permission, payment or credit, including images of a pregnant Katie Holmes, Kevin Federline pumping gas and Britney Spears.

A federal judge denied the company's motion for an injunction against the site, although the lawsuit continues, as does another filed on behalf of several other photo agencies. A lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming the site posted a stolen photo of Jennifer Aniston from the film "The Break-Up" is also pending.

X17 co-owner Brandy Navarre said the company has sent more than a dozen notices to the Australian Web hosting company Crucial Paradigm in the past two weeks, demanding that copies of copyrighted photos on the Perezhilton.com site be removed. "They quickly realized it wasn't worth taking on this liability just to host this one client who was a repeat infringer," Navarre said Thursday.

Tuesday, Crucial Paradigm sent a strongly worded letter to the company that represents Lavandeira, saying it had received numerous complaints of copyright violations and warning that one more complaint would result in the site being taken offline.

"Please note that with any other provider this would have been done a long time ago, and moving your site to another provider will not solve this issue," the letter read. "Continued abuse is leaving us more liable each day, which we can't afford."

PerezHilton.com appears to have found a new host in short order, but other critics with fewer resources often find themselves chilled well short of any judicial decision on the merits of their defenses.

Location: Electronic Resource- 

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Location: Main Library- Shelved Alphabetically

Location: Main Library- PK6393.T33N39 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6393.I84P37 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6393.L67S58 2015

Location: Main Library- PK6393.L3Z37 2015

Location: Main Library- PK6550.T35 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6415.2.H37 2014

Location: Main Library- GR290.Z8 2015

Location: Main Library- DS269.P3N35 2015

Location: Main Library- DS274.T33 2015

Location: Main Library- PK6420.S8I84 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6561.B323Z48 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6447.A3R36 2014

Location: Main Library- DS354.6.H3M34 2015

Location: Main Library- PK6562.24.A93B33 2015

Location: Main Library- DS259.2.F37 2015

Location: Main Library- PK6562.2.A93A61 2014

Location: Main Library- DS356.J38 2015

Location: Main Library- HV6250.4.W65N78 2011

Location: Main Library- PK6406.B375 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6561.K43N87 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6561.I37G43 2014

Location: Main Library- PK6562.12.A75A61 2014