Skills and qualifications for the special library environment in Jamaica: a job advertisement analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to examine what employers seek when recruiting library and information professionals for a special library environment in Jamaica.Design/methodology/approachA content analysis of a sample of 47 advertisements for information professionals in a special library environment in Jamaica from 2013 to 2019 was collected.FindingsThe findings indicated that a variety of professional, generic and personal attributes were in demand for these professionals. There was a strong emphasis on advanced computer skills as well as communication and interpersonal skills.Research limitations/implicationsWhile job advertisements offer some insight into skills requirements and qualifications for employment, it may not reflect the actual person employed.Practical implicationsThis paper will provide useful information for library school educators, existing information professionals and those interested in entering the field as it provides an overview of the skills and requirements for jobs in the special library environment in Jamaica.Originality/valueDespite there being a plethora of job advertisements studies in librarianship, few studies examine advertisements for information professionals in a special library environment. To the best of the author's knowledge, there is no study focusing on Jamaica.

Sentencing with Love, Not Hate

Judge Jack B. Weinstein approached every sentencing with his trademark compassion and intellectual rigor. This was nowhere more evident than in two of the most challenging sentencing contexts: child pornography and terrorism. This essay considers Judge Weinstein’s refusal to sentence based on assumptions about defendants and their conduct, and his insistence on empirical data, expert evaluations, and asking the hardest questions about motivation and future behavior before imposing sentence. It focuses on Judge Weinstein’s sentencing practices in terrorism and child pornography cases, the two areas in which Congress and the U.S. Sentencing Commission have most limited judicial discretion in sentencing. It shows that despite those limits, Judge Weinstein sought always to impose individualized sentences based on the actual person before him. He believed every person—no matter their worst act—could be salvaged, and deserved happiness.

There Is No Primacy Effect in Interpersonal Perception: A Series of Preregistered Analyses Using Judgments of Actual Behavior

First impressions are commonly assumed to be particularly important: Information about a person that we obtain early on may shape our overall impression of that person more strongly than information obtained later. In contrast to previous research, the present series of preregistered analyses uses actual person judgment data to investigate this so-called primacy effect: Perceivers ( N = 1,395) judged the videotaped behavior of target persons ( N = 200) in 10 different situations. Separate subsamples of about 200 perceivers each were used in moving from exploratory to increasingly confirmatory analyses. Contrary to our expectations, no primacy effect was found. Instead, judgments of the targets in later situations were more strongly associated with overall impressions, indicating an acquaintance effect. Relying on early information seems unreasonable when more comprehensive information is readily available. Early information may, however, affect perceivers’ behavioral reactions to the targets and thus their future interactions, if such interactions are possible.

Between Power and Love: Pilate’s Transformation in The Master and Margarita

Summary The conventional reading of the “ancient” chapters of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita attributes the role of an active moral subject to Pilate and a largely passive role to Ieshua. Proceeding from this assumption, the encounter between these characters is interpreted as an ethical event, in which Pilate is supposed to make decisions based entirely on his own will. This paper challenges this reading by arguing that Ieshua, generally considered the epitome of love, is the actual source of the events in which Pilate is involved. This idea is demonstrated by a comparison with the early Christian experience that views divine love as prior to power and intellect. The analysis traces Pilate’s inner transformation caused by the impact of proactive love and of the actual person of Ieshua, rather than his ideas, which clarifies the meaning of the encounter of these protagonists in Bulgakov’s novel.

Baartman, Sara

Sara Baartman (also known as Saartje, Saartjie, or Sarah), a South African woman, was widely known on stage in England and France in the early 19th century, and subsequently internationally since then, as the “Hottentot Venus,” the Western racist fiction of the primitive, sexualized, black woman. Until the 21st century, scholars paradoxically paid more attention to the fiction than the actual person. Further research showed that Baartman was born on the colonial frontier in the 1770s and lived in Cape Town in conditions similar to urban slavery from the 1790s through 1810, when she was taken to London. There and later in the English countryside and in Ireland, she was displayed on stage. In 1814, she was sold to an animal trainer in Paris who forced her to display herself to restaurant patrons and who possibly also forced her into prostitution. George Cuvier, the founder of Comparative Anatomy, interviewed her and, after her death in December 1815, performed an autopsy, not to discover the cause of death but to see if her body, literally, was the connection between humankind and animals. The Museum of Man in Paris displayed a nude plaster cast of Baartman’s body until the 1970s. Following the coming of democracy to South Africa, activists petitioned to bring Baartman’s remains home, and they were buried on South African National Women’s Day, August 1, 2002, as part of a nationally televised ceremony. Her burial site is in Hankey, Eastern Cape.

BOOK REVIEW Make Learning Personal: The What, Who, Wow, Where, And Why

This book is indeed insightful and a challenge to many people who might be complacent in their usual ways of managing teaching and learning. Old habits die hard. For sure, it sounds personal as the title suggests. It resonates with everyone—you and I; it draws us closer to the heart of the matter, that is, managing how we teach, managing learning, and that matters greatly if we consider the learners’ perspectives. Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey argue that we should change our “perceptions about learning and realize [that] every child is a learner” (p. xxiii). The idea is, if you are a learner, you ought to be thinking seriously about learning as something you are responsible for, making it your own, if you will. If you are a teacher, you ought to be shifting your paradigm by now; make teaching less centered on you but more on the actual person who is receiving what you teach, the learner. Know your learner, understand what they want and what they think would work for them. The point to drive home is learner-centeredness tends to be the buzz word for the twenty-first century classroom.

PHISHSTORM: Detection Mechanism for Finding the Phishing and Legitimate Websites by Implementing the Search Engine

This paper proposes software for detecting the phishing and legitimate websites. In that software, we build and explain the mechanism behind the detection of the phishing and legitimate websites. Phishing is defined as a fraudulent attempt, used to obtain confidential information through which an attacker emulates an actual person or institution by disguising them as an official person or entity through e-mail or other communication mediums. We created this project to safeguard the users from the phishing websites so that they won’t lose their personal details like usernames, passwords and credit card details. Here, we combined Storm in the architecture, thereby detecting the phishing and legitimate URL’s manually. A bloomfilter is a space-efficient data structure used to test the element either present in the set or may not be in the set. The simulation is carried out in the search engine, entering the search word, viewing the phishing and legitimate websites, downloading the files, give feedback about the websites and transformation is done wherever it is needed.

Pandharpur and Vitthal

Pandharpur, with its main deity, Viṭṭhala (hereafter Vitthal), alias Viṭhobā or Pāṇḍuraṅga, is the most popular pilgrimage site in Maharashtra. Every year it is visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, first of all in connection with the Āṣāḍha and Kārttika festivals of the Vārakarī (hereafter Varkari) Sampradāya. Vitthal is a manifestation of Viṣṇu in his Krishna incarnation (avatāra). According to local tradition Vitthal arrived in Pandharpur attracted by the filial devotion of the seer Puṇḍalīka, or, according to another, later tradition, while looking for his wife Rukmiṇī. Since then he has established himself there for the favor of his devotees while Puṇḍalīka is considered to be the founder of the devotional cult known as Varkaris. The real explanation of Vitthal’s arrival in Pandharpur is another matter. Although many scholars have taken the myth about Puṇḍalīka to reflect a story about an actual person credited with bringing the worship of Vitthal to Pandharpur, some modern scholars believe that the myth is inspired by Purāṇic traditions legitimizing the establishment of Śaiva liṅgas. In fact, the idol of the Puṇḍalīka samādhi, one of the oldest temples in Pandharpur, contains a Śiva-liṅga. This, taken together with the fact that some of the oldest temples in the town are devoted to Śiva, suggests that Pandharpur was originally a Śaiva place that was later Vaiṣṇavized with the introduction of Vitthal, who may have been of pastoral origin and come from Karnataka to the south. When exactly this Vaiṣṇavization took place is not sure but it seems to have more or less coincided with the earliest historical inscription mentioning Pandharpur and Vitthal dating from the end of the 12th century when a temple of Vitthal was founded. At the end of the 13th century the cult was attracting support from the northern Marathi-speaking area when it was probably visited by the Yadava king Rāmacandra and his chief minister Hemādri as well as by Jñāneśvara, the “founder” of the Varkari Sampradāya. Literary sources for the study of Pandharpur either belong to the devotional Varkari tradition and are in the vernacular Marathi or they belong to the local Brahmanic tradition in the form of Sanskrit māhātmyas. Since the latter have either been unedited or are difficult to access, a characteristic of the research on Pandharpur until the 1980s is that it has mainly been based on literature in the Marathi language.

In Person

In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema delineates a new performative genre based on replay and self-awareness. The book argues that in-person reenactment, an actual person reenacting her past on camera, departs radically from other modes of mimetic reconstruction. In Person theorizes this figure’s protean temporality and revisionist capabilities, and it considers its import in terms of social representativity and exemplarity. Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-Holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini’s proposal that in neorealism everyone should act his own story in a sort of anti-individualist, public display (Love in the City and We the Women). It checks the convergence between verité experiments, a heightened self-critique in France, and the reception of psychodrama in France (Chronicle of a Summer and The Human Pyramid) in the late 1950s. And, through Bazin, it reflects on the quandaries of celebrity biopics: how the circularity of the star’s iconography is checked by her corporeal limits (Sophia: Her Own Story and the docudrama Torero!). In Person traces a shift from the exemplary and transformative ethos of 1950s reenactment toward the unredemptive stance of contemporary reenactment films such as Lanzmann’s Shoah, Zhang Yuan’s Sons, and Andrea Tonacci’s Hills of Chaos. It defines continuities between verité testimony (Chronicle and Moi un Noir) and later parajuridical films such as The Karski Report and Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, suggesting the power of co-presence and in-person actualization for an ethics of viewership.

Pedro Infante and the Mexican Imagination

Pedro Infante (1917–1957) remains one of Mexico’s most beloved entertainers of all time. His films and songs, his life story and his charm, but also his death and funeral and the contestation over his patrimony have combined to sustain his popularity to this day. In part, his contemporaneous and posthumous representation as a common man, a man of el pueblo (the people), cemented a prominence that was already unparalleled during his lifetime. An overview of his life, career, and legacy provides a viable lens to understand his enduring fame, locating him within the Mexican imagination. That is, important events in his life make more sense when seen as specific images that Infante has represented: the humble carpenter, charro (cowboy), singer, boxer, and tragic figure. He has even represented Mexico itself for the Mexican community of the United States. The man and his characters seem to blend into an array of personas that consistently convey humility and charisma. Therefore, one can see why people around him have tried to appropriate his image and his story—efforts that began while he was still alive. Notably, his funeral marked the birth of the Infante who has reverberated among several generations of fans, but one that does not always match the Infante that his contemporaneous audiences admired. All versions of Infante, including the actual person and the characters that he played, have garnered attention and admiration since he began his career in the 1930s.