Sex Industry and Sex Workers in Nevada

Las Vegas has long been known as the symbolic center of the commercial sex industry. Nevada is host to the only legal system of prostitution in the United States. From the early legalization of quickie divorce and marriage to the marketing of its large resorts, sexuality has been a key component of Nevada’s tourist economy. If trends continue, for good or for ill, the sex industry will be an even larger part of the economy in the future. The sex industry refers to all legal and illegal adult businesses that sell sexual products, sexual services, sexual fantasies, and actual sexual contact for profit in the commercial marketplace. The sex industry encompasses an exceedingly wide range of formal and informal, legal and illegal businesses, as well as a wide range of individuals who work in and around the industry. This report will review the context in which sexually oriented commercial enterprises have flourished, discuss general trends in the Nevada sex industry, and make policy recommendations

Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots

This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots) and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task execution of cooperating robot teams

USB SECURITY CAMERA

USB Security Camera is a new way for a cheaper and convenient security system. The objective of this project is to develop a software that can recognizes more than one USB cameras connected to a single computer and streams each camera's output simultaneously or alternately to a computer's monitor. The software was written in Visual Basic 6.0 so that it is compatible with Windows platform. The main features of the application developed are automatic picture snap, motion detector and can support any USB camera. Motion detection features is a useful features in a place where there should be no movement. Unfortunately, the main aim which is to develop software that can detect more than one camera has failed. The software is not working as planned

Bridging the communication gap: a driver-passenger video link

"In a recent large-scale naturalistic study, driver-passenger interactions were identified as a major source of driver distraction. According to this study, driver inattention to the road is often caused by conversation with passengers. This suggests that when driving and conversing with passengers, drivers attempt to bridge the visual communication gap with passengers by turning to look at them. In an online survey presented in this paper, responses confirmed that most drivers interact with their passengers while driving and and want eye contact during these interactions; however most would also prefer to keep their eyes on the road while driving. To address these conflicting preferences, a driving simulator user study was conducted with a monitor-based and a head-up display (HUD) video system. Results show that a video system can provide drivers with greater visual contact with passengers without degrading driving performance. Participants also had greater interest in using a HUD-based system." (author's abstract

Wicked Problems and Gnarly Results: Reflecting on Design and Evaluation Methods for Idiosyncratic Personal Information Management Tasks

This paper is a case study of an artifact design and evaluation process; it is a reflection on how right thinking about design methods may at times result in sub-optimal results. Our goal has been to assess our decision making process throughout the design and evaluation stages for a software prototype in order to consider where design methodology may need to be tuned to be more sensitive to the domain of practice, in this case software evaluation in personal information management. In particular, we reflect on design methods around (1) scale of prototype, (2) prototyping and design process, (3) study design, and (4) study population