Trafficking Technology: A Look at Different Approaches to Ending Technology-Facilitated Human Trafficking

In 2018, many believe that slavery is an antiquated concept. But as with anything else, if it has not become extinct, it has evolved with time. Human trafficking is no different. Each year, millions of men, women and children are trafficked in the United States, and internationally, and forced to work against their will. Through the rise of technology and an increasingly globalized world, traffickers have learned to use technology as a tool to help facilitate the trafficking of persons and to sell those victims to others they never could have reached before. But what are we doing about it? Domestic and international laws provide the framework to fight human trafficking and end this type of slavery overall. In the United States, for example, the Trafficking Victim Protection Act sets a standard for the law federally and serves as a guideline for such legislation on the state level. But due to the variance between state and federal laws, and the rapid pace at which technology has transformed, the laws have failed to keep up with the needs of law enforcement to effectively detain and prosecute traffickers who utilize technology in their illegal work. This Comment delves into several current domestic and international laws aimed at preventing human trafficking, and discusses the measures by which we, as a global society, can take toward ending modern-day slavery

Bifurcated polarization rotation in bismuth-based piezoelectrics

ABO3 perovskite-type solid solutions display a large variety of structural and physical properties, which can be tuned by chemical composition or external parameters such as temperature, pressure, strain, electric, or magnetic fields. Some solid solutions show remarkably enhanced physical properties including colossal magnetoresistance or giant piezoelectricity. It has been recognized that structural distortions, competing on the local level, are key to understanding and tuning these remarkable properties, yet, it remains a challenge to experimentally observe such local structural details. Here, from neutron pair-distribution analysis, a temperature-dependent 3D atomic-level model of the lead-free piezoelectric perovskite Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 (NBT) is reported. The statistical analysis of this model shows how local distortions compete, how this competition develops with temperature, and, in particular, how different polar displacements of Bi3+ cations coexist as a bifurcated polarization, highlighting the interest of Bi-based materials in the search for new lead-free piezoelectrics

Disc Golf and Walking Benefits: A Pedometer-Based Physical Activity Assessment

Background: The purpose of this study was to assess the contributions of walking when participating in disc golf and achieving the recommended 10,000 steps per day. Data from men (n = 226) and women (n= 109) participants who played on 15 disc golf courses were analyzed to determine if gender, age, score or playing format had an effect on the average number of steps walked per hole. Each participant wore a pedometer while playing. Participants averaged 311 steps per hole, which equates to 5613 steps for an 18- hole round of disc golf. Women took 69.3 fewer steps per hole than men and each additional throw resulted in 3.2 additional steps per hole. Playing an 18-hole round of disc golf provided for over half of the recommended 10,000 steps per day for healthy living, but these steps were not evenly distributed across all types of players

Surrogacy in invasion research and management: inferring “impact” from “invasiveness”

Biological invasions are widely accepted drivers of biodiversity decline, yet the ecological impacts of invaders in many contexts remain largely unmeasured. Consequently, other measures of a species invasion (e.g. local abundance) are regularly used as surrogates (or ‘proxies’) to infer impact on recipient ecosystems. The use of surrogates for impact represents an implicit application of ecological surrogacy in invasion science, but without the evaluation and validation of surrogate-target relationships that characterizes surrogate use in other fields. While there are practical reasons for this, there also are risks associated with not testing the accuracy, stability and certainty of surrogate-impact relationships that need to be acknowledged. Recognizing the role of surrogacy in invasion science offers previously unappreciated solutions for increasing the quantitative rigor of invasive species impact assessments that inform management decisions.ARC Laureate Fellowshi

Spectrometry: Report of panel

Spectroscopic measurements are required to define the spectral background and provide the detailed spectral information that is essential for the design of species-specific systems and the analysis of data obtained from them. This function of spectroscopic measurements is expected to be an important part of any tropospheric remote-sensing program, and both emission and absorption spectroscopy are relevant in this context. The data from such observations are of value to tropospheric science in their own right, during the initial phases while species-specific techniques and instruments are under development. In addition, there are a number of unresolved problems in tropospheric radiative transfer and spectroscopy which presently limit the accuracy and reliability of all remote sensing methods. Only through a supporting program of spectroscopic measurements can progress be made in improving the understanding of these aspects of radiative transfer and ultimately reaching the desired confidence in the accuracy to species-specific monitoring techniques

The Use of Resources in Resource Acquisition

The author considers the processes through which a firm can acquire resources and argues that its current stock of resources create asymmetries in competition for new resources. Two simple models illustrate how this can work through linkages on the demand and/or cost side. The normative implication is that firms should expand their resource portfolios by building on their existing resources; different firms will then acquire different new resources, and small initial heterogeneities will amplify over time

Implementation of On-Line Data Reduction Algorithms in the CMS Endcap Preshower Data Concentrator Card

The CMS Endcap Preshower (ES) sub-detector comprises 4288 silicon sensors, each containing 32 strips. The data are transferred from the detector to the counting room via 1208 optical fibres running at 800Mbps. Each fibre carries data from 2, 3 or 4 sensors. For the readout of the Preshower, a VME-based system - the Endcap Preshower Data Concentrator Card (ES-DCC) is currently under development. The main objective of each readout board is to acquire on-detector data from up to 36 optical links, perform on-line data reduction (zero suppression) and pass the concentrated data to the CMS event builder. This document presents the conceptual design of the Reduction Algorithms as well as their implementation into the ES-DCC FPGAs. The algorithms implemented into the ES-DCC resulted in a reduction factor of ~20