Courtesy of Spanish National Police

What do we really know about sex trafficking?

In Madrid two prostitution rings were busted this week. When a 19-year-old woman was rescued from enslavement, authorities noticed a tattoo with a barcode on her wrist. Her abductors had branded their victim with an identifying tattoo after she once tried to escape.

Sex trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery.  It is defined as a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under the age of 18 years.

Sex traffickers frequently subject their victims to debt-bondage. After abducting young women, the traffickers tell their victims that they owe money (often relating to the victims’ living expenses and transport into the country). They are then coerced to pledge their personal services to repay the debt.

Once under their control, sex traffickers use a variety of methods to “condition” their victims including starvation, confinement, beatings, physical and sexual abuse.

In the United States it is estimated that over 75,000 victims are trafficked into America for sexual servitude and that is not factoring the 100,000-300,000 American children forced into prostitution under our noses.

If you think you have come in contact with a victim of human trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1.888.3737.888.

Here are some resource links for more information:

Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force Strategy and Operations E-Guide

https://www.ovcttac.gov/TaskForceGuide/EGuide/Default.aspx

Trafficking in Persons Report 2011

http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2011/

This afternoon at Carnegie Mellon University, Dissertation Coach Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale discussed the “10 Mistakes the Graduate Students Should Avoid” at the PROMISE AGEP/QoLT Center’s Dissertation House workshop. She discussed this post’s title (attributed to science.org), as she told students that they need to learn how to multitask.  Too often, students work on one thing and get stuck on that one thing (e.g. paragraph for a paper, method for an experiment, piece of code) and they are unable to work on anything else until they are satisfied with the outcome.  It is important to be focused, but there are often many things to do … or rather many things that must be done simultaneously.  Advanced graduate students have to write, look for employment, run experiments, complete literature reviews, satisfy grant agencies that fund the advisor’s research, and several also teach.  It is imperative to learn how to work on things in chunks.  Keep those fires burning!

Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, March 28, 2012 for “Understanding your advisor and your committee” from 1:00 – 2:00 PM in Gates-Hillman 4405 on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Pittsburgh.  All graduate students are invited (e.g., Pitt, CMU, students visiting for the NSBE conference, any discipline, any level, all backgrounds, part-time or full-time.) Light refreshments will be served.

Congratulations to the students who are participating in the Dissertation House and the associated activities at Carnegie Mellon.

Related articles

• Are you in Pittsburgh? Come to our Dissertation House Seminars @CarnegieMellon 3/27 & 3/28 (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com)
• Next full-scale Dissertation House at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, March 26-28, 2012 (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com)

The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center at Carnegie Mellon & the University of Pittsburgh, and PROMISE: Maryland’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) are sponsored by the National Science Foundation.   Follow QoLT and PROMISE on Twitter: @QoLTCenter, @PROMISE_AGEP.

This afternoon at Carnegie Mellon University, Dissertation Coach Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale discussed the “10 Mistakes the Graduate Students Should Avoid” at the PROMISE AGEP/QoLT Center’s Dissertation House workshop. She discussed this post’s title (attributed to science.org), as she told students that they need to learn how to multitask.  Too often, students work on one thing and get stuck on that one thing (e.g. paragraph for a paper, method for an experiment, piece of code) and they are unable to work on anything else until they are satisfied with the outcome.  It is important to be focused, but there are often many things to do … or rather many things that must be done simultaneously.  Advanced graduate students have to write, look for employment, run experiments, complete literature reviews, satisfy grant agencies that fund the advisor’s research, and several also teach.  It is imperative to learn how to work on things in chunks.  Keep those fires burning!

Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, March 28, 2012 for “Understanding your advisor and your committee” from 1:00 – 2:00 PM in Gates-Hillman 4405 on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Pittsburgh.  All graduate students are invited (e.g., Pitt, CMU, students visiting for the NSBE conference, any discipline, any level, all backgrounds, part-time or full-time.) Light refreshments will be served.

Congratulations to the students who are participating in the Dissertation House and the associated activities at Carnegie Mellon.

Related articles

• Are you in Pittsburgh? Come to our Dissertation House Seminars @CarnegieMellon 3/27 & 3/28 (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com)
• Next full-scale Dissertation House at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, March 26-28, 2012 (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com)

The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center at Carnegie Mellon & the University of Pittsburgh, and PROMISE: Maryland’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) are sponsored by the National Science Foundation.   Follow QoLT and PROMISE on Twitter: @QoLTCenter, @PROMISE_AGEP.

galactic-kat:

SCREENING OF A VERY POTTER MUSICAL!!!

My emotions in (totally relevant) gif form:

And then this one because it makes me laugh.

LOL, KAT!

Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, and Michelle Scott, associate professor of history, were guests on the “Marc Steiner Show” on Monday to discuss the case of Trayvon Martin, a young African American man who was killed by a neighborhood watchman in February.

The conversation turned to the role and perception of black men in society, and Moffitt related the incident to her worries for her own son.

 “There has been a study done that shows that, really interestingly, for young, African-descended boys in this country, around the age of 8 or 9 there’s a shift that happens where we no longer see them as these cute little boys, running around, having fun and enjoying life, but that they then become a threat and seen as a danger to society. So when I think of my 7 year old who is about to turn 8, that becomes a concern as to how people will relate to him,” she said.

Scott related the way black men are seen to the legacy of slavery in America. “You still have the victimized black body, and still that legacy and history, just in the twenty-first century.” She said.

The full interview can be heard here.

Lindsey Loeper ’04, American studies, acknowledges the futility of trying to keep pace with the hands of the watch and the rapidly turning pages of the calendar. No matter how quickly she and other members of the Special Collections team archive the stacks of UMBC documents they receive every day, there are always more coming. History never stops happening at a university that’s still building its story.

“We’re often asked when we’ll have everything digitized and we never will,” smiles Loeper, who earned her master’s of library sciences at College Park. “Instead, we try to create an online record that can lead you back [to the library], into the stacks.”

Already, the cool, darkened aisles contain 250 shelves stacked with nearly 750 linear feet of physical records, all neatly arranged in gray boxes. Add to that the online digital archives – launched in 2008 to make UMBC’s earliest documents, including many issues of The Retriever Weekly, easily available to the public – and you’re talking years and years of history waiting to be explored…

Read the full story, including features on other “Cool Jobs You Didn’t Know Existed at UMBC” in the Winter 2012 of UMBC Magazine.

Web Extra: Lindsey Loeper

Photo courtesy of Beyond Hollywood

• The Hunger Games made a killing at the box office, taking in $152.5 million, making it the third best opening weekend of all time, as well as the best for a non-sequel. This indicates that this will be a huge franchise for years to come and that audiences are into a strong heroine who isn’t sexualized.

• UPDATE: We blogged at the beginning of the month about the MPAA’s refusal to rate the documentary Bully lower than an R for using the F-word. Well, studio head Harvey Weinstein and director Lee Hirsch have decided to release the doc unrated. This refusal to operate within the MPAA system might mean that more will see it without being turned off by the R, or that no one will see it because unrated films can be treated more harshly than NC-17 rated films. Hopefully for Hirsch and Weinstein, the intended audience will be able to see the documentary.

• And for fun, a random, very recently released trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, not to be confused with the Spielberg-directed Lincoln also due out this year.  AL: VH is a very self-explanatory, very history revisionist movie based on a New York Times bestselling novel and will be released June 22.

Did you like The Hunger Games? What do you think about the MPAA’s rating of Bully? Do you think Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter looks ridiculously awesome or ridiculously stupid?