The Colorado branch of the Polaris Project, a national organization that combats human trafficking, monitored ads on Craigslist, particularly in the “casual encounters” section, from April 1 through the Democratic convention last month.

Dennis said the organization has not found any ads in either region indicative of child trafficking.

In preparation for the Republican convention, the St. Paul police contacted police departments in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Diego–the previous locations of the last few Republican and Democratic conventions.

Anyone under the age of 18 who is providing commercial sexual services would be considered a victim under Trafficking Victims Protection Act (PDF) if there is another person benefiting from the minor’s services, such as a pimp.

The results mirrored what CNET News reported last week, according to Finger. She said through July, there was an average of 390 posts per day requesting sexual services, but that the ads spiked to more than 800 per day on Monday and Tuesday during the week of the convention. She said the online activity is typical for an event of that type.

Web sites try to discourage trafficking Contrary to Dennis’ findings,Louis vuitton Watches, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told us: “The trend on Craigslist is clearly positive.”

Denver and St. Paul police, as well as nonprofits the Klaas Foundation and the Polaris Project, have turned to classified advertising Web sites like Craigslist to monitor such illegal activities during the Democratic and Republican conventions.

Ferrer said Backpage.com also bans ads for illegal services and responds to law enforcement subpoenas promptly. Like Craigslist, the site tries to deter inappropriate ads by soliciting the help of its users, who remove 150,000 postings each month out of the million the site hosts, according to Ferrer.

To be sure, neither the police nor the advocacy groups turned up any evidence of human trafficking–meaning the involvement of people under 18 years old, or situations involving coercion–at either the Denver or St. Paul conventions. Nor was there evidence of additional prostitution, at least in the form of increased arrests.

Backpage.com also requires users to submit credit card information when posting any adult service or in the massage category.

The Klaas Foundation monitored more than 135 sites for Denver-based sexual services during the Democratic convention, as well as about 80 targeted at St. Paul during the Republican convention, for any indications of child sex trafficking.

Even with other departments’ help, however, “we’re learning as we go,” he said. “Four years ago, the Internet wasn’t the tool it is today.”

This raises the possibility that there may be zero human trafficking and minimal additional prostitution occurring during these events–and the spike in sex ads online amounts simply to more people in town partaking in a perfectly legal practice between consenting adults.

Mobilizing support online The Polaris Project has turned to the Internet for more than just monitoring sex ads. The organization uses sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Change.org to enhance their grassroots efforts to promote awareness of trafficking risks. The organization also makes daily updates to its online grassroots action center.

The Web site also participates in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline program and collaborates with law enforcement when contacted.

“This is one way we can publicly document participation in the commercial sex industry and the increase during large events,” said Amanda Finger, the coordinator for Polaris Project Colorado.

“There are sites we monitor with law enforcement circles, but we don’t think they know about the monitoring,” he said. “Craigslist and BackPage know we’re on there, but people on those sites don’t care. Quite frankly, the ads are getting worse and worse.”

“The activity is unusually high,” Dennis said. “They’re coming in for the conventions–that’s exactly what they put on their Web sites.”

Dennis said the Klaas Foundation looks for certain indications on Web sites of trafficking, such as key words having to do with age, out-of-state phone numbers, or photographs that hide a person’s face. He said the Klaas Foundation searches Craigslist, Backpage.com, and a number of other sites that he would not disclose.

ST. PAUL, Minn.–The tremendous jump in online requests for sexual services that seems to occur during large political conventions has placed police departments and advocacy groups on the alert.

The site implemented new measures in March of this year such as telephone verification for ads that have reduced inappropriate erotic service ads by 80 to 90 percent, Buckmaster said.

“When we’re talking about individuals being forced into trafficking, many have been videotaped, and it’s difficult to track those images online and remove,” Finger said. “We’re talking about the constant victimization of these people globally.”

“St. Paul takes the idea of human trafficking very seriously,” Walsh said.

“We recognize that online advocacy is incredibly important and critical to reach whole new populations who are more online- and tech-savvy.” –Bradley Myles, Polaris Project

The Denver police department, according to a report in The Denver Post, has not seen an increase in online prostitution ads during the week of the convention (the department did not return our phone calls for this story). Similarly, the St. Paul police department has not seen any unusual illegal activity online during the Republican convention,wholesale jewelry, according to Tom Walsh, the department’s public information officer–although he added: “We have information that supports the idea that human trafficking and prostitution increases during large events.”

“We recognize that online advocacy is incredibly important and critical to reach whole new populations who are more online- and tech-savvy,” said Bradley Myles, Polaris Project deputy director.

The new measures supplement Craigslist’s previously established protocol, which includes prohibiting illegal activity and asking users to flag inappropriate ads. Additionally, Craigslist derives no revenue from erotic service ads.

A nationwide effort The Klaas Foundation, a national organization that helps to locate missing children, has found a number of ads for high profile escorts servicing the Denver and St. Paul areas explicitly for the conventions, according to Brad Dennis, the director for the foundation’s national search center for missing and trafficked children.

“We do it for large events to help us understand the situation better and to see if we can find some child that is listed as missing,” he said.

He said Polaris is using the Internet to appeal to people who may be vulnerable to trafficking and sexual exploitation, mobilize supporters to contact their representatives in the U.S. Congress, promote media awareness of the issue of trafficking, and to solicit donations to support victims of trafficking.

Carl Ferrer, founder of classifieds site Backpage.com, said that large events do spur an increase in postings in all of the site’s categories, including its adult section.

“It is a big challenge for sites like ours to keep out spam, scam, inappropriate, and illegal content,” he said.

Overall, the Klaas Foundation is currently monitoring more than 300 sites for suspicious sexual ads. Besides those affiliated with the political conventions,OMEGA Watches, they’re also monitoring sites in regions of the country where there are missing children, in the event they are being prostituted by human traffickers.

While certain Web sites have made it easier to track what’s happening in this area, Finger and Myles said the rise of Internet pornography has exacerbated the problem of trafficking. Internet pornography desensitizes the public to human trafficking, Finger said, and enables traffickers to exploit victims worldwide. (In the United States, child pornography laws prohibit the possession or distribution of lascivious visual depictions of a minor. Obscenity laws regulate what kind of material depicting adults can be distributed; only a handful of Web sites have ever been declared by a court to be obscene.)

“It is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20 percent to 80 percent, depending on the study and how you measure,” Brin said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin launched his personal blog on Thursday with some sobering news: he carries a particular genetic mutation that means he’s much more likely than average to get Parkinson’s disease.

“I feel fortunate to be in this position. Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age, only we don’t know what they will be. I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine–and I have decades to prepare for it,” Brin said. And, he added, “research into LRRK2 looks intriguing (both for LRRK2 carriers and potentially for others).”

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“I know early in my life something I am substantially predisposed to. I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g. there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson’s). I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me,” he said. “And, regardless of my own health, it can help my family members, as well as others.”

Brin’s mother and her aunt both have Parkinson’s, and recent research has uncovered a genetic link in some cases of the disease, Brin wrote. And through the services of start-up 23andMe, co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and Linda Avey, he found that he carries the same mutation. The research is still early, though, he said. And he had an optimistic take on the news.

Brin said the knowledge gives him some power.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin

The inaugural post on Brin’s blog, too.blogspot.com, is titled “LRRK2″ after the gene that he found carries a mutation called G2019S, which, “while rare even among people with the disease, accounts, in some ethnic groups, for a substantial proportion of familial Parkinson’s,” Brin said in the blog post.

If you think that’s a good question, then here’s another: Why bother? After all, isn’t that just opening up a can of worms, upsetting the applecart? Well, not exactly.

My in-laws were in town this past weekend, escaping the Wisconsin snowstorms for a few sunny days in Silicon Valley. Hanging out with them was a welcome break from all the usual nonsense we call day-to-day life.

Unfortunately, the status quo is the path of least resistance. As a result, reassessment and change – whether it’s about life or corporate strategy – isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen by itself. It requires honest answers to difficult questions. It requires objectivity. It requires commitment and hard work.

It got me thinking about how infrequently we take a step back from our gadget-filled, workaholic lives to gain some perspective. How often do you ask yourself if you like what you’re doing, if you’re on the right track, or if you should be doing anything differently?

Sure it’s tough, but the alternative is far worse.

Some say that point may already be too late, that people and companies should be asking themselves those deep questions periodically all along. Who knows?

For individuals, it’s waking up one day and realizing you’re miserable, filled with regret, and it’s too late to do anything about it.

The same goes for companies. After all, companies are made up of people. Executives and directors are people. How often do they step back and assess the company’s technology, products and services, and strategy with respect to the competition?

In both cases, the result can be tragic. Perhaps what’s most tragic is that, in both cases, the result can be prevented.

You can only plod along, putting one foot in front of the other, for so long before external conditions change or something happens to make you wonder if you shouldn’t be heading somewhere else or doing things differently to get there.

Companies milk a business model until someday revenue growth begins to decline or margins begin to shrink. You know, stuff happens. The competitive landscape is never static, especially not in the technology world. That’s when companies should ask themselves some penetrating questions and consider some changes.

So once in a while, get some perspective. Just to be on the safe side, do it whether you need to or not. Or you may fall prey to a saying my father-in-law’s stepfather – Mahalio Peric – was fond of saying: “Too soon old, too late smart.”

The bottom line is that, when things change, your strategy and plans may need to change too. And to do that, you need perspective. Perspective is important. It’s the same for people and companies.

Sometimes you wake up after a couple of decades of hard work and decide you need a breather. Maybe you’re not getting the same fulfillment from your career you got years before. Or perhaps you’ve been successful and there’s something new and different you’ve always wanted to try and never had the opportunity or the guts.

For executives or boards of directors, it’s waking up and realizing you’ve run your company into the ground and disappointed thousands of employees, customers, vendors and shareholders.

What games do you think are missing from the Wii Virtual Console? Sound off at our discussion board!

(Credit:
nintendolife.com)

This week brings Dr. Mario to the DSi and Wonderboy to the Virtual Console.
DSiWare
Dr. Mario Express (Nintendo, 500 DSi Points): The classic color-matching puzzle game makes its way to the Nintendo portable in Dr. Mario Express. Play alone or against the computer in the race to fight off viruses.
Master of Illusion Express: Deep Psyche (Nintendo, 200 DSi Points): Continuing the series of magic tricks for your DSi, Deep Psyche will ask you a number of questions in order to reveal a startling truth.
WiiWare
Crystal Defenders R1 (SQUARE ENIX, 800 Wii points): See how many encroaching monsters you can hold off by deploying soldiers and Black Mages. Test your skills over various levels with different layouts and difficulty settings.
Virtual Console
Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair (1990, Sega Genesis, 900 Wii points): Monster Lair is a Japanese import that never saw the light of day in North America until now. Use your sword to defend Xenobia with a friend or endure the battle alone.

Greg Brown, who only came on board as Motorola’s chief executive late last year, will act as co-CEO. Brown will head up the company’s broadband network division.

Now Motorola is looking toward the future. The company is expected to release several new phones, including ones with touch screens, in time for this year’s holiday season. The hope is that these new products can help put new life into the company’s tired device lineup. And with Jha at the helm of the mobile-device unit, the company can move forward with the planned split, which is expected to be complete in the third quarter of 2009.

(Credit:
Qualcomm)

Sanjay Jha, co-CEO and head of mobile devices for Motorola

Motorola has picked an industry veteran to take the helm of its troubled cell phone divison.

On Monday, the company announced that Sanjay Jha will be co-chief executive and head of the mobile-device business. Motorola said earlier this year that it will separate the mobile-device business from the rest of the company. And since the split was announced, it had been searching for someone to head up the division.

Jha will certainly have his work cut out for him. Over the past year and a half, the company has lost market share and seen its stock price plummet amid heavy losses as it struggles to find a hit product to replace the Razr. Last year, it fell from the world’s second-largest supplier of handsets to third.

Jha, 45, is a smart choice for Motorola, as it tries to turn around its cell phone business. For the past 14 years, Jha has been at cell phone chipmaker Qualcomm, where he most recently ran the company’s CDMA division. Qualcomm’s CEO, Paul Jacobs, wished him well in a press release, saying Jha had been instrumental in helping Qualcomm become “the No. 1 wireless semiconductor supplier.”

Last week, Motorola surprised Wall Street with a small profit for the second quarter. But the company’s handset division continued to drag on earnings. Most of the gains in the second quarter came from cost cutting and from its Internet and cable businesses. Still, the company managed to hang on to its market share position, a surprising result, as many analysts had expected No. 1 Nokia and No. 2 Samsung to pick up share.

If my hunch is right, Chris Tolles has a better shot at representing the future of media than does Chris Matthews and his ilk. And that would be so fine by me–and probably lots of you, as well.

Topix is on to a big idea, and so if Tolles or any other start-up can shake up the media landscape, more power to them. Too many important stories are passing by without notice.

(Credit:
Trinity United Church of Christ)

(Credit:
Topix.com)

The formula’s working. ComScore now rates Topix just behind The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today in terms of individually branded Web sites. Knight Ridder, the Tribune Company, and Gannett liked what they saw and bought up a 75 percent chunk of the company.

This is how Tolles put it to me: “As we’re seeing all the time, newspapers, which once were local monopolies, are watching that one-time windfall go off to money heaven. When newspapers go on the Internet, they make 10 percent of what they used to make. I’m giving Molotov cocktails to the mob. If the sheriff is a bad guy in a small time, what you want is some guy who just got shafted to go online while he’s still hot and say this jerk sheriff, etc. etc. You want a platform for opinions that can speak truth to power for the individual.”

At the Web 2.0 Expo last week, I had a long conversation with Tolles, who runs Topix.com, about the fragmentation of media and where technology is taking it. If you’re not familiar with Topix, get to know it.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. Oil’s hovering near an all-time high, rising prices combined with food shortages are responsible for riots around the world, and we’ve got ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN are literally wasting hours on the existential significance of a Chicago pastor. As we used to say in Brooklyn, give me a frigging break.

Does anyone seriously doubt that we’re at a point where the need to talk back to the talking heads is super-important? The orgy of idiocy surrounding the Jeremiah Wright coverage is a perfect case in point. I thought I was inured to the banality that informs the punditry of Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the blabatocracy. Not even close. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the electronic media had collectively adopted the new corporate slogan: “All Jeremiah Wright, All the Time.”

Chris Tolles

Most people in New York and San Francisco many not be using Topix, but Tolles has a bigger audience in mind: most of the folks between the coasts, who are increasingly underserved by corporate media.

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

I’m generalizing here, but it’s safe to say that vapid television coverage that’s less and less relevant to their lives has become the norm, rather than the exception, everywhere in this country–especially outside the big urban population centers.

My hunch is that most mainstream media would choke at the prospect, but you want the most people participating.

Tolles operates on the sound assumption that the media outlets with the most engaged audiences will thrive. Nowadays, about 60 percent of the content on his site consists of original user content. Reader opinion gets featured prominently next to regular news feeds. In addition, Topix uses a network of volunteer editors (around 4,400) who package and post news tailored to their localities.

Are Twitter’s performance problems due to flimsy engineering or the choice of Ruby on Rails to build the application?

In the Twitter developer blog on Thursday, an engineer said that Ruby on Rails still rocks as a Web development platform. The service’s woes are due more to a creaky architecture, he said.

Ruby is a scripting, or dynamic, language, which means that it can be slower than Java or C for some applications. The trade-off is that in general it’s faster to write code with. Rails, meanwhile, is a Web development framework optimized for speed.

Many people have questioned whether choosing to write the application using Ruby on Rails was a smart move and whether Twitter should shift to a different Web development technology.

Twitter performance problems have brought heaps of scorn from the busy Web 2.0 digerati. That has prompted the company to disclose more technical details like today’s Q and A format blog.

We have some limits, and we’re adding more. Legitimate users should never notice them, but these new limits should help mitigate the worst case failures and attacks.

The outages and slow performance are due to “popular” members of Twitter with many followers who “tweet” a lot all at once, according to Twitter. Because of that, the company says will put some limits on what some users can do, but it should not be noticeable.

We’ve got a ton of code in Ruby, and we’ll continue to develop in Ruby with Rails for our front-end work for some time. There’s plenty to do in our system that Ruby is a great fit for, and other places where different languages and technologies are a better fit. Our key problems have been primarily architectural and growing our infrastructure to keep up with our growth. Working in Ruby has been, in our experience, a trade-off between developer speed/productivity and VM speed/instrumentation/visibility.

Ruby still makes sense for much of what Twitter does–essentially sending messages around the Web–but the company has left the door open to using other languages. The Twitter developer blog says this:

In addition to these two updates, creator Sandosh Vasudevan has fixed some of the problems that plagued it when we first took a look. For instance, you can now create new documents right from the toolbar, as well as see and search through all of your docs without having to visit the Docs and Spreadsheets home.

Remember gDocsBar (download), that handy
Firefox extension we checked out a few months back? It got a pretty neat update today that lets you do things that might not have been originally intended for Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets service. The first is called Webclips, which is a fancy way of saying automatic copy and paste. If you find a big chunk of content you like, you can simple copy it, then drag it into the toolbar. gDocsBar will create a new document out of whatever you’ve highlighted, and preserve, as much as possible, the formatting and links.

(Credit:
gDocsBar.com)

The other new feature that power users are going to enjoy is templates. You can take any document you’ve made, or create a new one, and set it up to be a template in Google Docs. This will likely come in handy to spreadsheet junkies who repeatedly use a particular form or document with formulas built in. Using templates would save you some of the hassle of copying and pasting over the data from an existing spreadsheet and doing it again.

You can read more about the update on the gDocsBar blog. If you’ve got an earlier version of the extension installed, click on Tools > Add-ons then click the “check for updates” button.

Make and re-use templates in Google Documents and Spreadsheets with the gDocsToolbar.

Despite the recent pairing between Yahoo and Google, signs indicate that Microsoft is after the Sunnyvale-based Yahoo for its search capabilities. That doesn’t come as a huge surprise since that was the essence of the last round of talks before the deal was completely yanked off the table. And if we’re likening this courtship to teenage love, I suppose that makes Carl Icahn the too-cool-for-school senior who’s waiting to see how and when he can benefit most when the dust finally settles.

Like two teenagers trying to figure out if they like each other, Yahoo and Microsoft are back at it again, trying to determine if a relationship can work. In Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, I spoke with CNET News.com’s Ina Fried about this latest round of talks and who is more desperate for the partnership.

While the world rightly awaits
Firefox 3.0 with anticipation, it’s actually the mobile Firefox browser Fennec that I am looking most forward to seeing. According to the head of Mozilla Europe, we should be seeing Fennec in September, with a beta release later in 2008.

commentary

The problem? It won’t run on my iPhone:

In sum, the news is bittersweet. Mobile Firefox is coming, but it’s deployment will be hobbled (for me) by Apple.

For the
iPhone, Apple’s licence can not install software to have an interpreted language. But Firefox includes JavaScript, which makes it legally impossible to carry on the iPhone….For Android, Webkit is integrated into the OS, and only Java applications can run. And Firefox is not written in Java. So that’s why [Fennec will not run on Android]. However, in both cases, things may change in future, but it does not depend on Mozilla.

It will be hugely disappointing if Apple forces the world into its Safari browser. I like Safari and used to prefer it (until CNET forced me to use Firefox, much to my belated delight), but I’d prefer to use Firefox on my mobile device, just as I do on my
Mac. Long term, Firefox is going to be where the innovation is.

In Richmond, perched on a top plank, in the corner of the communal sauna, naked and arms wrapped around my crossed legs, I meet a very large welder from Saco, a slight visitor from Massachusetts and a pleasant older man from I don’t know where. It is strange sitting in this confined space…in New England…watching the cauldron burble, snow piled to the windows and sleet slicking the window, sweating among these strangers…naked, large and small, hirsute and corporally-bald men.

This particular evening in this particular sauna doesn’t have nearly the same joie de vivre as the time I met a young musician at the Strawberry Park Hot Springs in Colorado; he was to fly home the next day to take a job with the Vermont Symphony. I watched him sit for a long time at the edge of an outdoor stone pool. When he finally stripped down and slipped into the water, he told me he was waiting for sunset when “clothing optional” would take effect. An east-coaster, beaming, he was gleeful to have permission to skinny dip in public.

Amidst the strangeness, steaming in a wood sauna strikes me, once again, that climate and geography and local resources must dictate sustainable energy practices. Maine has a lot of wood; the West has a lot of geothermal. Maine has a lot (a lot!) of water which it has used for hydro-electricity, and the West has a lot (a lot!) of coal…and wind. Both have a lot of sun, but as yet, I have not run across a solar-powered sauna. There is talk here in Maine of tapping geothermal for geoexchange heat pumps using vertical loops. And there’s the wide-eyed talk by homeowners of mounting small-scale wind turbines on their roofs and in their fields.
Mainers have used coal to heat their homes, and I hear it is an option considered by some here these days…and, indeed, there are hydro-electrical plants in the West.

In Colorado, and elsewhere in the West, lovers of steam and heat use vast geothermal hot springs to calm nerves, soothe aching muscles and sweat. From Idaho Hot Springs, Steamboat, Ouray, Granite, Bozeman to Thermopolis…from New Mexico to Montana, I’ve soaked in many.

The Richmond Saunas in rural Richmond Corners, Maine — about 40 minutes up Route 295 from Portland — are heated by wood. In the corner of each sauna, private and communal, stands a wood burning stove and a cauldron of water which is used to douse the cairn of rocks sitting atop the stove.

Heather Rae, a contributor to cleantechblog.com, is a consultant in sustainability. She currently manages a home performance program in Maine and serves on the board of Maine Interfaith Power & Light. In 2006, she built out a biobus using green building materials and wrote on cleantechblog of her drive from Colorado to Maine and her quest for biofuels. In 2007, she began renovation of an 1880 farmhouse using building science and green building principles.

But coal for Maine and water for an arid West are kind of like New Englanders sitting around naked, sweating in mixed company. As my brother in New York might observe, with dismay, “that’s just wrong.”