170 The Heroic Slave vs. Benito Cereno
Alexina Gillis
The Heroic Slave and Benito Cereno are two vastly different texts. While both bring attention to and shed light on the cruelties of slavery, the two stories are told in completely different ways. According to the reading it is stated that “Melville works through irony and indirection; Douglass, consistent with his commitment to abolitionism, works more directly in articulating his themes” (xxx-xxxi). In Benito Cereno, most of the text is focused on Babo, one of the slaves that helped in the slave revolt, and other enslaved peoples. This text seems to want to prove that those enslaved on the ship are intelligent, and can and will do anything to be free. They are depicted as a dangerous force that has the strength and smarts to overcome any challenge.
On the other hand, The Heroic Slave focuses more on Madison Washington, and immediately points out that he is a strong man, but one that is not intimidating in any way. The text is quick to let readers know that this man is not dangerous, and even caters to white readers by relating him back to a white savior, Hercules. Douglass says “His whole appearance, betokened Herculean strength; yet there was nothing savage or forbidding in his aspect. A child may play in his arms, or dance on his shoulders. A giant’s strength, but not a giant’s heart was in him. His broad mouth and nose spoke only of good nature and kindness” (part 1). The Heroic Slave is much more direct because Douglass outwardly tells the reader that Madison is a hero and not dangerous, and we follow him through the story as he saves different slave ships with the help of a white man. Douglass has an abolitionist theme, and I believe he wanted to make this outwardly obvious to the reader.
In Benito Cereno, there is kind of a negative connotation towards Babo wanting to be free from enslavement, almost as if the reader should be seeing him as dangerous or suspicious (when in reality, all Babo wanted to do was go home). Although these are both texts that relate back to abolitionism, they are represented in almost opposite ways. Granted, both are problematic. But one story we see an enslaved character who stands up and fights for his people and is a hero, while the other we see an enslaved character who revolts, but is supposedly very dangerous and a murderer. The issue with The Heroic Slave is the idea of a white savior being needed. While Madison is painted as the hero, the novel makes it obvious that he could not have succeeded if it weren’t for the white man helping him. And in Benito Cereno, the enslaved peoples that just wanted to escape are seen as dangerous and cruel.


3.12. The Sixth Amendment
Sixth Amendment Protections
The Sixth Amendment guarantees several protections to a criminal defendant in court, namely: the right to a speedy trial, the right to a public trial, the right to a jury trial, the right to have his or her trial in the district where the crime took place, the right to be told what charges have been filed, the right to confront witnesses at trial, the right to compel witnesses to testify at trial, and the right to assistance of counsel. This Amendment governs the federal court process, but because of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, these rights also apply to defendants in state criminal cases.
At the same time, we must consider that the text of the Sixth Amendment does not include the many limitations that are imposed upon these rights in practice, nor does it specify the meaning of a “speedy” trial. In fact, a “speedy” trial time frame may be different from state to state, and between state and federal court. Following the Speedy Trial Act of 1974, federal prosecutors essentially have 100 days to get to trial following the arrest of an individual on federal charges – 30 days after the arrest to secure an indictment, and then 70 days post-indictment to begin trial. (Interestingly, Congress has also passed legislation imposing a minimum time from arrest to trial – 30 days – so that defendants have adequate time to prepare.) The 100-day window imposed by the Speedy Trial Act, however, does not county delays that are imposed by the defendant (see more conditions by reading upon on Barker v. Wingo, linked below.)
The Speedy Trial Act does not apply to cases filed in state courts. In Pennsylvania, district attorneys have significantly more time to get to trial (but also, many more cases to prosecute). Individuals who are charged with a criminal offense in Pennsylvania must be brought to trial with 365 of their arrest; moreover, if the defendant is held in pre-trial custody, the speedy trial clock is shortened, to only 180 days. Of course, the vast majority of cases in both state and federal court are dealt with through plea bargaining, and thus never get to trial.
Landmark Case: Gideon v. Wainwright
In 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was arrested for petty larceny in Panama City, Florida, after an unknown witness reporting seeing him leave the Bay Harbor Pool Room early in the morning, carrying a bottle of wine, Coca-Cola, and change. Brought before a judge, Gideon stated that he could not afford a lawyer, but believed that the state was responsible for providing him with an attorney. In fact, Florida only extended indigent defense – a lawyer appointed and paid by the state – for individuals facing capital offenses. After conviction, Gideon appealed his case from prison, citing a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights – and the Supreme Court agreed. The Court’s decision in Gideon officially incorporated the Sixth Amendment to states, extending the right to indigent defense (a public or court-appointed defender) to anyone facing criminal charges that could be punished with six month, or more, incarceration.
Gideon v. Wainwright also has a podcast! Listen here.
Read up on more landmark cases concerning the Sixth Amendment here: Barker v. Wingo; Strunk v. United States


80 “The New Negro”
Just as cultural limits loosened across the nation, the 1920s represented a period of serious self-reflection among African Americans, most especially those in northern ghettos. New York City was a popular destination of American blacks during the Great Migration. The city’s black population grew 257%, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 by 1930 (the white population grew only 20%). Moreover, by 1930, some 98,620 foreign-born blacks had migrated to the U.S. Nearly half made their home in Manhattan’s Harlem district.
Harlem originally lay between Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue and 130th Street to 145th Street. By 1930, the district had expanded to 155th Street and was home to 164,000 mostly African Americans. Continuous relocation to “the greatest Negro City in the world” exacerbated problems with crime, health, housing, and unemployment. Nevertheless, it importantly brought together a mass of black people energized by the population’s World War I military service, the urban environment, and for many, ideas of Pan-Africanism or Garveyism. Out of the area’s cultural ferment emerged the Harlem Renaissance, or what was then termed “New Negro Movement.” While this stirring in self-consciousness and racial pride was not confined to Harlem, this district was truly as James Weldon Johnson described: “The Culture Capital.” The Harlem Renaissance became a key component in African Americans’ long history of cultural and intellectual achievements.
Alain Locke did not coin “New Negro”, but he did much to popularize it. In the 1925 The New Negro, Locke proclaimed that the generation of subservience was no more—“we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” Bringing together writings by men and women, young and old, black and white, Locke produced an anthology that was of African Americans rather than simply about them. The book joined many others. Popular Harlem Renaissance writers published some twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, and countless short stories between 1922 and 1935. Alongside the well-known Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, women writers like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston published nearly one-third of these novels. While themes varied, the literature frequently explored and countered pervading stereotypes and forms of American racial prejudice.
The Harlem Renaissance was manifested in theatre, art, and music. For the first time, Broadway presented black actors in serious roles. The 1924 production, Dixie to Broadway, was the first all-black show with mainstream showings. In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased black cultural heritage as well as captured the population’s current experience. In music, jazz rocketed in popularity. Eager to hear “real jazz,” whites journeyed to Harlem’s Cotton Club and Smalls.  Unfortunately, while headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to entertain at Harlem’s venues, the surrounding black community was usually excluded. Furthermore, black performers were often restricted from restroom use and relegated to service door entry. As the Renaissance faded to a close, several Harlem Renaissance artists went on to produce important works indicating that this movement was but one component in African American’s long history of cultural and intellectual achievements.
The explosion of African American self-expression found multiple outlets in politics. In the 1910s and 20s, perhaps no one so attracted disaffected black activists as Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer who arrived in New York City in 1916. Within just a few years of his arrival, he built the largest black nationalist organization in the world, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Inspired by Pan-Africanism and Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial education, and critical of what he saw as DuBois’s elitist strategies in service of black elites, Garvey sought to promote racial pride, encourage black economic independence, and root out racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora.
Headquartered in Harlem, the UNIA published a newspaper, Negro World, and organized elaborate parades in which members, “Garveyites,” dressed in ornate, militaristic regalia and marched down city streets. The organization criticized the slow pace of the judicial focus of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as this organization’s acceptance of memberships and funds from whites. “For the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone,” Garvey opined, “will be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched, burned, jim-crowed, and segregated.” In 1919, the UNIA announced plans to develop a shipping company called the Black Star Line as part of a plan that pushed for blacks to reject the political system and to “return to Africa” instead.” Most of the investments came in the form of shares purchased by UNIA members, many of whom heard Garvey give rousing speeches across the country about the importance of establishing commercial ventures between African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans.
Garvey’s detractors disparaged these public displays and poorly managed business ventures, and they criticized Garvey for peddling empty gestures in place of measures that addressed the material concerns of African Americans. NAACP leaders depicted Garvey’s plan as one that simply said, “Give up! Surrender! The struggle is useless.” Enflamed by his aggressive attacks on other black activists and his radical ideas of racial independence, many African American and Afro-Caribbean leaders worked with government officials and launched the “Garvey Must Go” campaign, which culminated in his 1922 indictment and 1925 imprisonment and subsequent deportation for “using the mails for fraudulent purposes.” The UNIA never recovered its popularity or financial support, even after Garvey’s pardon in 1927, but his movement made a lasting impact on black consciousness in the United States and abroad. He inspired the likes of Malcolm X, whose parents were Garveyites, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Garvey’s message, perhaps best captured by his rallying cry, “Up, you mighty race,” resonated with African Americans who found in Garveyism a dignity not granted them in their everyday lives. In that sense, it was all too typical of the Harlem Renaissance.


Module 8: Integrating & Optimizing the NP Role in LTC Practice
196 8.1.1 Facilitating Successful NP Integration in LTC Practice
Where do you fit? Review the pyramid[1] to determine where you feel you currently are.
Psychological health and safety definitions:
- Psychological health is a form of well-being that allows individuals to think, feel, and behave in a manner that enables them to perform effectively in their work environments, personal lives, and in society at large[2]
- Psychological safety is a condition in which people are free from threats of harm to their psychological health[3]
- Psychological health and safety (PH&S) is embedded in the way people interact with one another as well as the way working conditions and management practices are structured within the workplace[4]
Psychological safety is not[5]:
- Conflict avoidance
- Ensuring ideas are always recognized and rewarded
- Permission to reduce work expectations
- An open forum for complaints
- Oversharing of information


Libraries and Learning
This Is Why We Can Have Nice Things
(A talk given at a symposium, Libraries in the Context of Capitalism, held at METRO New York, February 1, 2018.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about how what libraries do every day runs completely counter to the belief systems underpinning late capitalism, so I’m really looking forward to the conversations we’ll have over the next two days about where we are in our communities, how we teach, how we can avoid reproducing capitalism, what John Kenneth Galbraith told us, how we can change publishing and critique our academic rewards system, how our labor is undervalued, how to organize, and finally, how to hope.
What I’ll talk about this afternoon is the radical possibility of libraries and the ways in which the values we’ve developed over the decades could guide resistance to capitalist assumptions and agitate for change in our broader information landscape. I want to look back at how American libraries, especially public libraries, became an everyday fixture of communities, how our values evolved, and what we thought the future would hold – seeing how libraries have continually interacted with, adopted, and at the same time resisted capitalism.
In so many ways our libraries have been captured by capitalism despite our lofty values, ideals shrouded in the “vocational awe” that Fobazi Ettarh recently wrote about, which prevents us being uncritical of our profession and its operations because it’s untouchably idealistic. There’s a gap between what we do and what we claim to do because we constantly make concessions, exchanging ideals for other perceived needs. For example, we might agree to “demonstrate our value” in terms that violate the privacy we purport to defend because we fear what might happen if we aren’t valued. We want to teach critical information literacy but so often acquiesce to training students to be students rather than free human beings because being liberated has less practical value and because we worry our students will be kicked out if they don’t know the ropes. We aren’t reflective enough about the concessions we make, and we may not even notice we’re making them.
But what interests me more than what we do wrong is that libraries ought not to be allowed to exist at all. The very idea of a library runs counter to all of the principles underpinning our dominant understanding of human society. In the capitalist view, humans are individual entities motivated by self-interest and the market is not just the best mechanism for social regulation but is actually synonymous with “liberty” because it gives us freedom to want things (though not freedom from want). An entity like Google can organize the world’s information – of course! It’s a business. It produces wealth. Shareholders are rewarded. It doesn’t need any further justification. But libraries? How can we justify taking tax dollars to create spaces where freeloaders can spend time without having to pay for the privilege? What excuse do we have for organizing the collective sharing of intellectual property? How is that even legal? Yet, here we are. We may feel underfunded, underappreciated, under threat. But unlike most social institutions these days, we’re not under constant attack for simply existing.
One of the paradoxes of libraries is that they are well liked across all ages, classes, and political affiliations. In part, that’s because we are disguised as traditional and orderly community establishments that threaten nobody and uphold local values – all of them, across the board, even when they are in conflict. Unlike our public schools, libraries haven’t been forced to compete against one another for resources, haven’t been resegregated, and haven’t been handed over to the private sector to be managed properly. (Though cities could outsource their library operations to LSSI, a for-profit corporation, very few have done so. Of over 9,000 public library systems in the country, only 19 are outsourced to LSSI – and this is after claiming to be the future, for two decades.) Unlike our universities, libraries haven’t been widely criticized for elitism and indoctrination, nor have they been forced to fund themselves by requiring users to take on debt for expensive entrance fees. There is no other social institution that has so thoroughly escaped the tendency, cultivated since before the Reagan presidency, to believe government is the problem and private enterprise is the solution. There is no other community site other than, perhaps, city parks where the right and the left, the old and the young, the wealthy and the homeless can feel “this is mine. I belong here.” Libraries are generally seen as a good thing if not a harmless anachronism, but in spite of their benign image they embody a mission that by today’s standards is radical.
At their best, librarians encourage public funding for resources held in common. They advocate for unlimited access for all to advance knowledge and the common good. They create programs to address community issues and needs. They provide lifelong learning opportunities and encourage a democracy of thought and culture. They help students learn how to find information and recognize propaganda while encouraging them to find their own voices as citizens who have the power to shape the world. And librarians, at least in the public arena, strive to ensure that all of these things are available to every single member of their community, regardless of age, income, gender, ethnicity, ability, or social standing.
These values, bundled up in a traditional and seemingly unthreatening package, present a powerful antidote to the market fundamentalism that has thoroughly infiltrated tech culture, the information industries, our political discourse, and the public sphere in recent decades. Though lord knows libraries have never been immune from systems of social injustice or the influence of market-based economic philosophies, their very existence reminds us that, as a society, we have the capacity and the will to establish community-owned platforms for the public good rather than for profit, that it’s possible to nurture civic conversations that can open the borders between polarized groups, that knowledge is best treated as a common good rather than corporate property, and that sharing need not be paid for by revealing every detail of your personal life to data miners. Another world is possible. In fact, there’s a model of it just down the street.
This should be impossible. We live in a world increasingly marked by precarious employment, disproportionate power held by monopolies, wealth concentrated at the top, and relationships within our communities unraveling as our nation becomes more diverse. In short, it’s an era remarkably similar to the decades during which American public libraries first took root and began to spread, eventually becoming a common feature of most communities.
There are so many parallels. During the Gilded Age, large corporations owned by the super-rich had gained the power to shape society and fundamentally change the lives of ordinary people. New communication technologies, industrial processes, and data-driven management methods combined to draw workers into deskilled jobs. Laborers who once could take pride in their trade lost the sense of agency as they became cogs in a Tayloristic machine that treated workers as interchangeable parts. There were more consumer goods on the market but prosperity was an illusion for the majority. Mass layoffs were common. Workers who organized were violently rebuffed by state actors and business interests working in concert. Large companies grew even larger through mergers and industry consolidation. The state engaged in wars supported by false and hyped media reports. Panics driven by dubious global financial dealings and bank failures were followed by years of economic depression. The gap between rich and poor grew, with unprecedented levels of wealth concentrated among a tiny percentage of the population.
The changes weren’t all economic. Gender roles were being redefined as women began to live and work independently. A wave of immigration changed national demographics. Native-born whites felt threatened, prompting a nativist backlash. Immigrants weren’t the only victims of white rage. During this era, the hard-won rights of emancipated African Americans were systematically rolled back through voter suppression, widespread acts of terror, and the enactment of a punitive legal system. Indigenous people faced broken treaties, seized land, military suppression, and forced assimilation.
It all sounds very familiar. But it was out of this froth of conflict and division that the idea of the American public library, a publicly-supported cultural institution that would be free to all members of the community, emerged to become an uncontroversial staple of community life. How did that happen? And how did we come by our core values?
In the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of providing libraries to the public was embraced by wealthy men, the Bill Gates of their day, who used their philanthropy to stamp their good works with a particular world view, one that included those contradictions we still experience. The library was to be Free to All and dedicated to the Advancement of Learning – our core values of access to information and lifelong learning have deep roots – but that civilizing mission was intended to enhance the workforce, mold new Americans to a common culture and to ensure public order. Large urban public library buildings carried ambiguous messages : ordinary people were as deserving as anyone to have sumptuous surroundings, but they had to accept the library’s civilizing mission, which at first included limited opening hours, closed stacks, and highly curated reading materials designed to foster a singular American identity.
The Gilded Age figure most frequently associated with American public libraries is Andrew Carnegie. Between 1887 and 1917, about half of the public libraries built in the United States were partially funded by his philanthropy. Like today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Carnegie believed his fortune was entirely the result of his work ethic and superior intelligence. In “The Gospel of Wealth” he argued the superiority of the self-made mega-rich endowed them uniquely with the capacity to make wise decisions for the deserving poor. (Sound familiar?)
Carnegie rejected the grandeur of palatial public buildings as excessive and indulgent, focusing much of philanthropy on utilitarian branch libraries in urban neighborhoods and small towns where the closest thing to elites were middle-class businessmen. (Though he intended these libraries to be free to all, he made exceptions in the south, where African Americans were not permitted to use the libraries their taxes paid for, though he funded a small handful of “colored branches.”) His project was designed to operate on an industrial scale, establishing libraries throughout the country using a common set of designs, standards and processes. This business focus aligned with our early library “thought leaders.” In 1897 John Cotton Dana argued libraries should reject fashioning themselves as a temple, a cathedral, or a “mortuary pile” but rather should be modeled on “the workshop, the factory, the office building.” (He also described a book vending machine – probably in jest.) In 1901 Melvil Dewey suggested that as cheap as books had become, within 25 years academic libraries would encourage students to “cut up books freely for notes and scraps.” I’ve often thought we are too quick to make our library websites look and act like shopping platforms, but I didn’t realize this urge to commodify information for individual use went so far back. Then again, the ALA’s original motto sounds like a prospectus for outsourcing: “the best reading for the greatest number at the least cost” – adopted in 1892 and (curiously) reinstated in 1988 during the twilight of the Reagan administration.
Carnegie’s grants overlapped with a progressive impulse to bring opportunities to poor and working class citizens. These disparate motivations fueled the founding of libraries that provided access to books and to reading rooms and to a variety of social and cultural programs, including English lessons for immigrants, folk dancing classes, art exhibits, public lectures, and children’s programming – often prefaced by lessons in “hygiene” requiring kids to wash their hands before touching the books. Ever since we’ve seen libraries try to accommodate two conflicting goals: providing utilitarian value (preparing a workforce or enabling an individual’s personal growth) and a sense of social responsibility (addressing civic issues, creating a welcoming community space for all). These aren’t always in conflict, but they can be if we don’t pay attention.
Though Carnegie is given credit for the growth of public libraries it was women who really made it happen. Women’s clubs eventually were responsible for starting as many as three-quarters of the nation’s public libraries. They could get away with it because socially progressive work was aligned with the Victorian notion that men and women inhabited different spheres appropriate for their sexes. Commerce, politics, and waging war were the domain of men; women’s work was with the family and in the home. As “new women” – women with college degrees and ambitions – began to have careers, their domestic sphere of influence expanded, but only so far. Jobs that involved promoting culture, social welfare, and the care of children – education, nursing, social work, and librarianship -offered women the chance to do paid work in public venues that didn’t violate the boundaries of the male sphere but gave women meaningful roles in shaping society, sometimes in subversive ways.
Public libraries developed their values in parallel to the Settlement Movement, also led by women, shifting from cultural uplift to becoming neighborhood-based social centers. This was also a function of the WPA library programs during the Great Depression, which employed over 14,000 people, built over 200 libraries, and funded programs such as the packhorse librarians who took books into the Kentucky mountains where there were no libraries.Intellectual freedom was not a publicly-voiced value in the early decades. In fact librarians often thought their job was to guide readers, which meant censoring reading that was not “improving.” Many public libraries kept dangerous books in a special area called “the inferno” or “purgatory.” I briefly worked at a public library in Kentucky and remember finding an old shelf list card that listed a book’s location as “in the closet.” Library directors bragged about discouraging the reading of fiction. That changed as the people made clear they wanted a greater democracy of reading tastes represented in their libraries. Perhaps that prepared the ALA to adopt the Library Bill of Rights in 1939. It’s worth remembering that the U.S. was not uniformly opposed to fascism in the 1930s, which shouldn’t be surprising since our racist laws inspired Nazism. In that context, this statement supporting access to a wide variety of viewpoints and opposing censorship was a step forward. The Freedom to Read statement affirmed this stance in 1952 during Joe McCarthy’s anti-communism campaign. Though we look back on this period with shame, McCarthy was a pretty popular figure – in 1954 a Gallup poll found half of Americans had a favorable opinion of him – so this wasn’t necessarily an easy position to take.
And it wasn’t an obvious stance given the findings of a massive study commissioned by the ALA to study the purpose and effectiveness of public libraries. Led by social scientists, the Public Library Inquiry asked “How effective is the public library in cultivating intelligent loyalty to the basic conceptions and ideals of the democratic way of life?” It concluded it was failing. Not enough people used the library, and they weren’t the right people reading the right books. The authors recommended libraries double down on their educational mission and remain technically free to all while concentrating on providing useful information to opinion leaders and do more to support business. If that was the future of libraries, the people weren’t having it, and neither in the long run were librarians.
In the 1960s libraries fared well with new federal funding. Editorial Research Reports profiled the growth of libraries, opening with “The library, that once quiet refuge of children, old folks, and a small band of scholars, has become as busy as the local supermarket.” But funding soon tapered off. The election of Ronald Reagan announced the importance of private enterprise over public services. Libraries experimented with charging for services , but the ALA resisted. In 1993, the association adopted a statement on economic barriers to information access, saying libraries should “resist the temptation to impose user fees to alleviate financial pressures, at long-term cost to institutional integrity and public confidence in libraries.”
In the late 1990s many librarians were certain our patrons were abandoning libraries because Barnes & Nobles was so much nicer. This drove a wave of “merchandizing” libraries which led to some good things – more attention to comfortable seating, inviting book displays, and accepting that people could drink coffee in a library – but also led to public librarians calling patrons “customers” which alters the relationship of the library to the public it serves.
The rise of technology as the millennium approached caused a second wave of panic – what if people got information without our help? – which prompted the adoption of a statement titled “Libraries: an American Value.” It affirmed he importance of libraries for democracy in a digital age and encouraged libraries to serve the whole community in all of its diversity. A few years later, after the 9/11 attacks, the association passed a resolution opposing the suppression of access to government information and “the misuse of governmental power to intimidate, suppress, coerce, or compel speech.” This, of course, was the moment when the FBI complained of “hysterical librarians” leading the charge against a burgeoning surveillance state. We fall short on privacy in many ways, but we know better, and we’re at least talking about these conflicts when few information professionals are.
Let’s switch over to the rise of tech culture at this point, because things were in play that would lead to “Google” becoming a verb and “share” would take on a new meaning altogether. What has happened makes a case that library values are more needed than ever – and not just in libraries.
We can see the roots of tech culture in the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in which John Perry Barlow argued that governments, which are by definition tyrannical, have no jurisdiction over cyberspace, which arose sui generis, without public investment. Here is the idealized notion of the internet as a place of freedom and equality and a libertarian faith that people will get along so long as there are no rules.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity . . . We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
We all know how that’s turned out. Right from the start, freedom on the internet has been defined as “freedom to,” not “freedom from” and while it’s not stated, there’s a sense that everyone has the same opportunities, that meritocracy actually exists. Barlow also didn’t anticipate the evolution of the internet into a shopping and streaming platform with surveillance hardwired in.
Remember the hype around Web 2.0? This rebooted version of the web would give everyone a chance to participate in a vibrant, democratic conversation enabled by sites that had sharing and social capabilities baked in. The hacker ethic Barlow approved of – an ethic of making and sharing things in a decentralized, open online society – was folded into a world view in which capitalism, freed of government regulation and outdated management practices, would allow a new meritocracy of young (mostly white, mostly male) entrepreneurs to radically change society because they could. This hubris is how Ben Huh, who made a fortune turning I Can Haz Cheezburger into a media empire can launch himself into the work of creating new cities from scratch because, well, who needs expertise when you turned LOLCats into money? It’s a twenty-first century version of Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.” Not only is wealth a sign of superiority, it gives the anointed few the opportunity to make decisions for the rest of us. What we call the “tech industry” is really just entrepreneurs with buckets of venture capital using the advantages they have to dominate markets by casualizing labor and evading regulations, standards, and social norms.
Where things get especially spooky is in the rise of surveillance capitalism. The development of “big data” means information can be gathered in real time, in enormous amounts, with fine granularity, and processed quickly, enabling things we never dreamed of before we have a chance to say “no.” We went, innocently enough, into Web 2.0 without realizing what was happening at the back end. Paying for a free platform with a few ads seemed a fair tradeoff. Nobody mentioned we were enabling lifelong, ubiquitous datamining. This developed in step with state surveillance. Even immediately after 9/11, people rejected a government program to combine data sources for its “total information awareness” program as too invasive, too Big Brother. That surveillance became strangely more acceptable or at least inevitable after Facebook launched and we got used to being watched while being coaxed to self-market.
With artificial intelligence, the data industry is getting a new level of control. A company gathers license-plate location data and sells it to local police and now to ICE, mapping people’s travels and predicting when and where they can be arrested. Algorithms are use do decide who gets a loan, a job, or a prison sentence. Companies and the state can identify our faces, our voices, our gait, and they can tell where we are and who we associate with while making assumptions about us based on behavioral data. All of this is being done without accountability, without auditing, without necessarily learning from mistakes, because it’s a trade secret.
These systems have a high error rate and have bias baked in. They can also be manipulated, and not just for political purposes. Some guy on Reddit has been sharing instructions on how to put any woman’s face onto bodies in porn videos. Zeynep Tufekci has said “we’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads,” which to some extent is true. Facebook, Twitter, and Google seem as shallow as John Perry Barlow in their understanding of society and are shocked, shocked when their plans to make the world better are derailed by naughty behavior. But this dystopia is also built on the vacuum left when there is no ethical basis for a company or a state’s actions other than innovation, growth, power, and profit.
Back in the day, Carnegie had a selfish interest in building a better workforce and a more stable society through libraries, confident he was positioned to decide what was good for society. But he built public support for libraries into his plans, knowing that reliance on gifts and volunteerism wouldn’t be sustainable. Local control over those libraries and the evolution of values in our profession over 150 years have given librarians a perspective that needs to be applied to our entire information environment. Let’s ask hard questions. Let’s promote our values as guideposts for this terrible bind we’re in before it’s too late. Let’s take this message beyond our libraries.
I’m not saying librarians are exceptional. Like most people, we don’t live up to our aspirations. We value diversity, but can’t seem to figure out how to welcome people of color into a profession that is 87 percent white. We value privacy but allow Amazon to track readers who borrow library-licensed ebooks and we put social media links on our websites, which serve as surveillance beacons for Facebook and Twitter. We value access to knowledge for all, but librarians who feel proud of creating well-equipped maker spaces with the latest in 3-D printers may not give much thought to residents in a neighboring community where the library can only afford a half-dozen aging computers. We’re myopic, focused on local communities, but fail at thinking collectively. Librarians, no matter how forward-thinking or community-oriented, won’t change the world by ourselves. What could save us is seeing, on an everyday basis, that another world is possible and already exists in small pockets of hope just down the street, a small-scale proof of concept model for a better world.
The idea of the public library was built on the optimistic belief that people are curious and socially responsible, able to make up their minds provided they have the liberty to explore a wide range of ideas and viewpoints without interference from autocrats or algorithms. People have proven they are willing to pay their fair share to make this experience available to all, at least at the local community level. Over more than a century, librarians have developed a set of guiding values that stand in stark contrast to the assumption that markets know best and freedom is just another word for consumer choice. Providing equal access to knowledge, standing up for intellectual freedom, protecting privacy, promoting diversity, democracy, social responsibility, and the value of the public good over private interests – these values scaled up could go a long way toward changing our troubled world for the better. What libraries do every day is a statement of faith that we can, together, create a more just and equal society.
How would this actually play out? I’m hoping the rest of this conference will help me figure out some practical steps to take and some goals I can set for myself. What I hope is this:
- We will reflect critically on the compromises we make and fight against those that don’t fit our values. We can say “no, we aren’t going to spy on our students to demonstrate value, here’s why, and here’s how we’re going to document our value differently.” Take courage. Resist in small ways. Do it daily.
- We will join with others in the fight to take our information infrastructure back from corporate control. This means engagement in political battles about who gets access to the internet and on what terms, resistance to both government and corporate surveillance, and resistance to the use of proprietary black-box algorithms in making decisions about housing, health, education, and law enforcement. We should stay informed about these things and in turn inform our communities. We see information as systems, and we are trusted. Let’s become irresistibly positive public agitators, recognized for our passion about our values, values that matter to everyone.
- We will be responsible citizens in our communities, allied in struggles for fair labor conditions, environmental stewardship, and human rights.  What if we spent half of that time reaching out and making ourselves heard? If I spent as much time talking to my local academics about open access as I did venting to librarians, maybe I’d make a dent. If I turned my concerns about privacy into local workshops, maybe I’d help my neighbors. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find this easy. It takes me out of my professional comfort zone. It isn’t what my workplace expects of me. It makes me nervous. But it’s worth it, because our values are about so much more than libraries, and they could do a lot of good if we applied them more widely.
There is hunger for this kind of change. Ursula Le Guin said at the National Book Awards a few years ago
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.”
For us, it begins in our values: our care, our compassion, our belief in our own responsibility for the public good. As a profession we’ve had a century and a half to develop our guiding ethics. Google and Facebook have been in existence for less than two decades. Their stunted values are antithetical to ours. Since they and their kind are unwilling and incapable of fixing the problems they’ve created, the existence of libraries and the values they represent are a blueprint society could follow to demand change. At least, so I hope.
Sources
Dana, John Cotton. “Anticipations, or what we may expect in libraries” Public Libraries vol. 12, no. 10 Dec. 1907, p. 382
— “Anticipations, or What We May Expect in Libraries,” Public Libraries, 1907, reprinted in Libraries: Addresses and Essays, H. W. Wilson, 1916, pp 147-152.
Dewey, Melvil. “The Future of the Library Movement in the United States in the Light of Andrew Carnegie’s Recent Gift.” Journal of Social Science vol. 39, 1901, pp. 139-157.
Marwick, Alice Emily. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, 2013.
Schlesselman-Tarango, Gina. “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (September 13, 2016): 667–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0015.
Garrison, Dee. Apostles of Culture : The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 /. Print Culture History in Modern America. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: B/D/W/Y Broadway Books, 2017.
Schneier, Bruce. Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, 2016.
Van Slyck, Abigail Ayres. Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Wiegand, Wayne A. Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library, 2015.
Image credits
Mr. Money Bags by Alec Monopoly, photo by aisletwentytwo
NYPL by Gustavo Morales Diaz
NYPL reading room by Diliff
People’s Library (Oakland) by Steve Rhodes
Andrew Carnegie by Theodore C. Marceau
Mark Zuckerbergrberg by Elaine Chan and Priscilla Chan
Boston Public Library exterior via Wikimedia Commons
American Institution via Library of Congress
Children at the Webster Branch via NYPL Digital Collections
It Can’t Happen Here poster via Library of Congress
Nazi march in New Jersey via The Atlantic / AP
This is America via National Archives
Data Visualization by Marcin Ignac
Librarian Bomber by hafuboti
Fonts
Dana Library Hand by Margo Burns
LRT Nutshell by Lauren Thompson
Rubber Stamp by Billy Argel


6.7 Lab Experiments
Lab Three
Important: be sure to show your name, handwritten or typed, visible in the background of all your submitted photos and videos. You need to do this in order to get credit for your work.
3.1 Build the following circuit, which will light up an LED when bright light shines on the CDS cell. You need to choose four resistors in this circuit. Choose a value for Vref so that the LED does not glow in the presence of ambient room light; it should only glow when bright light (such as a flashlight or the light from a smartphone) shines directly onto the CDS cell at short distance.
3.2 Attach one of you breadboards to your assembled car chassis by removing the peel-off backing from the breadboard. Connect one of your car motors to the op amp output in parallel with the resistor & LED output circuit in the circuit from lab 3.1. Does the motor operate when you shine bright light on the CDS cell? If it does, try mechanically loading the motor by letting the car operate on the ground or on a carpet. You should find the output voltage of the op amp drops to a low value owing to the large current pulled by the motor. The op amp can not supply this current. Build the following circuit, where you drive your car’s motor using a TIP120 power transistor configured as a low-side switch. (Note: The video above and the circuit shown below use a TIP31 transistor and a small hobby motor; you should use the TIP120 transistor supplied in your kit and one or both motors from your assembled car chassis.) All resistance values shown in this circuit are example values only. You should use the resistances you came up with for the previous problem.)
Important: For parts 3.1 and 3.2, the LED and/or motor must remain off during the presence of ambient, or background room light, and they turn on only in the presence of strong light on the CDS cell. You may not cover the CDS cell during these experiments; instead, the reference voltage for the comparator circuit needs to be set appropriately so that the LED & motor remain off during ambient light conditions.
What to submit:
- Submit two photographs of your circuit from part 3.1, one in ambient room light with the LED off and another with bright light shining on the CDS cell and the LED on.
- Submit a short video demonstrating part 3.2. Your video must demonstrate that the LED and motor from your car are off in the presence of ambient room light, and they turn on when a strong light shines directly on the CDS cell.
- As always, be sure that your name is visible in the background of both the photo and video.


Mrs. Van Alstyne
MY song shall be of Jesus;
His mercy crowns my days,
He fills my cup with blessings,
And tunes my heart to praise.
My song shall be of Jesus,
The precious Lamb of God,
Who gave Himself my ransom,
And bought me with His blood.
2
My song shall be of Jesus;
When, sitting at His feet,
I call to mind His goodness,
In meditation sweet:
My song shall be of Jesus,
Whatever ill betide;
I’ll sing the grace that saves me,
And keeps me at His side.
3
My song shall be of Jesus;
While pressing on my way
To reach the blissful regions
Of pure and perfect day:
And when my soul shall enter
The gate of Eden fair,
A song of praise to Jesus
I’ll sing forever there.


12.1 Chapter Reading Guide
Elizabeth B. Pearce
You may wonder about the inclusion of art and beauty in a text that discusses the needs of families. On the other hand, you may ask, “Why only visual culture? What about music and other artistic expressions?” While all forms of artistic expression are important, here we will focus on the ways visual culture impacts families, both in terms of when it is viewed but also the ways it affects us, even when it is something we have not personally selected. It can be argued that American individuals and families need art both as individuals and as a society. As you read, think about the aspects of visual culture that have influenced you and your family.
The reading is designed to help you meet the following chapter objectives. Preview those to have an idea of where you are headed. You may also want to preview the key terms that follow. These terms will be bolded the first time they appear in the chapter. You can read the definitions here and also in the hyperlinks.
Chapter Learning Objectives
- Explain how art shapes our understanding of the history of the United States.
- Examine the role of dominant culture in defining “art.”
- Discuss the ways that unintended cultural exposure affects families.
- Analyze the effects of intersectionality on potential creators, artists, and art lovers.
- Explain how socially constructed ideas about beauty affect one’s identity and family experience.
- Examine visual media from an equity perspective.
- Describe the value of creativity, art, and beauty to families in the United States.
- Apply theoretical concepts related to creativity, art, and beauty to your own observations and experiences.
Key Terms Preview
- Artistic representation: the use of a medium, such as clay or paint, to construct a representation of the real thing. Artistic representations are constructions of reality.
- Beauty ideals: a specific set of beauty standards regarding traits that are ingrained in women throughout their lives.
- Colorism: prejudice or discrimination that favors people with lighter skin over those with darker skin, especially within a racial or ethnic group.
- Eemphasized femininity: a concept rooted in the patriarchy that women must conform to the needs and desires of men by compliance with the normative ideas of femininity.
- Hegemonic masculinity: a specific type of culturally valued masculinity tied to marriage, heterosexuality, and patriarchal authority that legitimizes men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of women, nonbinary people, gay men, and other marginalized groups of men.
- “Ism”: an oppressive and discriminatory attitude or belief.
- Life chances: a social science theory created by German sociologist Max Weber in 1920. The theory of life chances postulates that an individual’s opportunity to lead a successful and fulfilling life are correlated to a variety of factors, including social stratification, social class, social mobility, and social equality, all of which can give a person low or high life chances.
- Male gaze: the idealized notion of a heterosexual man as the intended audience in a way that facilitates men objectifying or sexualizing women and women seeing themselves as objects of men’s desire.
- Objectification: a social meaning imposed on one’s being that defines them as an object or thing, typically within a sexual context.
- Protest art: a way of using creative work to communicate used by activists and social movements.
- Public art: art in any medium whose form, function, and meaning are created for the general public, often through a public process.
- Symbolic annihilation: a concept that refers to how marginalized groups of people are left absent, condemned, or trivialized through mass media representations, instead portraying oppressive ideologies created and enforced by dominant groups.
- Typecasting: the act of casting a person in a media role, often based on physical appearance or stereotypes.
- Visual culture: combinations of visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure are expressed tangibly or visibly.
- Whiteness: the quality of being light or White skinned in color and the normalization of White racial identity throughout history in the United States.
Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Reading Guide
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Reading Guide” by Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.
the shared meanings and shared experiences passed down over time by individuals in a group, such as beliefs, values, symbols, means of communication, religion, logics, rituals, fashions, etiquette, foods, and art that unite a particular society.
combinations of visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure are expressed tangibly or visibly.
an approach originally advanced by women of color that finds it critical to look at how identities and characteristics (such as ethnicity, race, and gender) overlap and influence each other to create complex hierarchies of power and oppression.
ensuring that people have what they need in order to have a healthy, successful life that is equal to others. Different from equality in that some may receive more help than others in order to be at the same level of success.


Module 6: Probability and Probability Distributions
Introduction to Continuous Probability Distribution
Introduction to Continuous Probability Distribution
What you’ll learn to do: Use a probability distribution for a continuous random variable to estimate probabilities and identify unusual events.
In the last section, we studied discrete (listable) random variables and their distributions. Now we explore continuous (decimal valued) random variables that can take on values anywhere in an interval. For example, a person’s exact weight without rounding is a continuous random variable. If rounded to the nearest pound, weight is a discrete random variable. Decimal valued numbers arise often in real life, often in measuring things such as weight or length. To best study real life data that has values lying all over an interval, we need to build a solid foundation in continuous probability distributions.
- Concepts in Statistics. Provided by: Open Learning Initiative. Located at: http://oli.cmu.edu. License: CC BY: Attribution


Interdisciplinarity & Collaboration
Chen Wu
Summer 2019
This past summer was exceptional because of my experience in the CPLC. I walked into the CPLC with some exercises in the open-lab and cluster-based teaching in my economics classes. The meetings, presentations, discussions and workshops at CPLC were eye-opening. I left the last meeting of CPLC with feel that I learned a great amount of tools, framework, and insight into the cluster pedagogy.
My key takeaway from the CPLC activities is that I should actively seek collaboration opportunities with colleagues across the campus and there is Co-Lab in the Lamson Library which provides support and assistance to the collaborative efforts.
In the upcoming academic years, my teaching and research in economics, and my administrative services as the director of graduate programs, could lead to opportunities in collaborations: it could be some way in co-teaching a interdisciplinary class with colleagues in another academic unit; it could be some student event that involves students from different majors; it could be a cluster project in which students carrying various background work as a team to serve the needs of an external partner, etc.


20
Camu Camu
Camu camu, Myrciaria dubia, is a small, bushy tree that grows in swampy areas of the Amazon basin in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil. The plant grows to heights ranging from 10 to 16 feet. It produces small, sweet-smelling white flowers and reddish-purple berries the size of cherries.
The camu camu plant begins to bear fruit from the age of three, and grows best in hot, damp tropical climates. It requires a ton of water, and is able to withstand flooding for 4 to 5 months at a time with its roots completely submerged. In fact, the fruit is harvested at the peak of the rainy season, which must be accomplished by boat.
On average, one plant will produce around 26 pounds of fruit per year. Camu camu berries are very acidic, so the pulp has traditionally been mixed in milk or water with a little sugar added for taste. Today you can find camu camu in ice cream, sweets, and fruit drinks all over the Amazon region.
Camu Camu Benefits
Camu camu is a substantive source of minerals, such as potassium, sodium, zinc, magnesium, calcium, manganese, and copper. It also contains a wide range of amino acids, organic acids (like citric and malic acids), and fatty acids, such as linoleic and oleic acids.
Camu camu is a major source of bioactive compounds like polyphenols, which include flavonoids, phenolic acids, tannins, and lignans. But the main nutrient in camu camu that gets the most attention is vitamin C.
Camu camu has so much vitamin C (around 2-3% of its weight) that it’s hard to fathom. In fact, it has 50-60 times more than oranges, which are famous for their vitamin C content. Camu camu is the highest known source of this important nutrient, containing over 1000% of our daily recommended value in just one teaspoon of its powder.
Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant, which sometimes gets lost in the never ending list of more obscure, and more in-vogue, antioxidants. And if you’ve forgotten, antioxidants are important disease fighters, as they reduce the oxidative damage caused by free radicals that would otherwise run amok in our bodies.
Vitamin C is also a strong anti-inflammatory, and if you know anything about inflammation, having less of it means less chance for disease. In fact, some believe that disease cannot exist without inflammation, and vice versa. The presence of so much vitamin C in camu camu equates to superior eye health, along with lower rates of cancer and heart disease.
Few studies have been conducted on camu camu, as it’s still one of the new kids on the superfood block. However, purported benefits based on nutrient content, and a handful of studies, include …
- Cancer prevention
- Improved eye health
- Enhancement of cognitive function
- Improved mood
- Improved immune function
- Prevention of bacterial and viral infections
- Treatment for depression
- Prevention of gum disease
- Reduction in wrinkles
- Treatment for diabetes
- Better cardiovascular health
- Treatment for arthritis
One of the benefits of camu camu may be as a treatment for diabetes. A substance prolific in this Amazonian super fruit called ellagic acid has been shown to possess antidiabetic effects, as this 2012 study concluded.[104]
Because of its high vitamin C content, camu camu is excellent for the skin. Vitamin C is vital for healthier, more youthful looking skin, as it’s an important building block for collagen, which gives skin its elasticity. And it’s the breakdown of collagen that causes wrinkles. This in-depth article from Oregon State University details that vital connection between vitamin C and healthy skin.[105]
This 2015 clinical trial studied the antioxidative and anti-inflammatory properties of camu camu.[106] The trial consisted of 20 male smokers with an accelerated oxidative stress state. One group was given 1050 mg of vitamin C, while the other was given an amount of camu camu containing the exact same amount of vitamin C.
After just 7 days, all participants in the camu camu group showed significant reductions in oxidative stress markers, serum total reactive oxygen species levels, and several inflammatory markers. While the participants in the vitamin C group showed absolutely no changes. Which is exactly why it’s so important to get nutrients the way nature intended, rather than isolating them.
This 2013 study investigated the anti-obesity action of camu camu.[107] After 12 weeks of camu camu supplementation, the mousy subjects showed a reduction in weight, glucose levels, triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, and blood insulin levels. While HDL (good cholesterol) actually increased. And while the subjects of the study were rats, it’s still an impressive list of results.
Camu Camu Uses
Most likely you’ll be using the powder form of camu camu, which will be far superior to any store bought juice. However, there are still numerous possibilities for incorporating it into your diet. You can add it to smoothies, yogurt, oatmeal, homemade ice cream, or other frozen desserts.
You can use camu camu as an ingredient in homemade salad dressing, sauces, homemade energy bars, and other raw treats. And because it’s so acidic, you can even use it to marinade meat. Check out this video, where chef Julie Morris will tell you a bit more about camu camu, and the various ways you can use it.
And of course the internet is littered with recipes. Check out this camu camu recipes page on Pinterest. And another camu camu recipes page on the Navitas Naturals website. Both are loaded with mouth-watering recipes.
My go-to source for camu camu powder is Navitas Naturals. You may be able to find it at a local grocery store. But if not, you can order it online though iHerb for probably less. Especially considering you’ll get $5 off if you follow the link above.