The dominant understanding in the United States of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” in which pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them. Such narratives of oppression typically depend on postarrest testimonials by former prostitutes and pimps in punishment and rescue institutions. In contrast, this article presents data collected from active pimps, underage prostitutes, and young adult sex workers to demonstrate the complexity of pimp-prostitute dyads and interrogate conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution. A holistic understanding of the factors that push minors into sex work and keep them there is needed to designand implement effective policy and services for this population.

SummaryThis technical report describes a comparison of experimentally identified dynamic models for the planar motion of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The objective is to determine a model which is (1) sufficiently rich to enable effective model-based control design, (2) sufficiently simple to allow straight forward parameter identification, and (3) sufficiently general to apply to a variety of hullforms and actuator configurations. Starting from a three degree-of-freedom nonlinear model obtained from physical principles, we consider five simplified variants that include four linear models and two nonlinear models for low speed operation. The first linear model comes from linearizing the full planar boat dynamics about a straight constant speed. A first order steering model relates steering angle to turn rate. A second order steering model relates steering angle to turn rate and sideslip angle. A first order speed model relates throttle setting to forward speed. The two nonlinear models are derived from potential flow around a simple shape. Linear damping and quadratic damping are included in each nonlinear model respectively. To identify parameters for these models, data must be collected that show the dynamic and steady-state relationships between inputs and outputs. Using these data sets, simple models that satisfy the three given criteria are identified for three types of unmanned surface vehicle: a rigid hull inflatable boat with an outboard engine, a rigid hull inflatable boat with a waterjet propulsion system, and a small pontoon boat with two electric thrusters.i

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It has often been said that there is an ‘urban bias’ in development, due to the assumption that economic growth and modernization naturally occurs in cities and has as its ultimate destination development by urbanization. This has meant that problem oriented interventions are typically focused on excluded rural people and built around rural paradigms. Even in development practice that is explicitly urban, stakeholders are often viewed through a rural lens. This has often left development practice with what amounts to a rural bias. Nowhere has this urban bias in development policy and rural bias in development practice been more clearly manifest than in the developmentalist states of Asia. Drawing on contemporary empirical data from the Urban Poverty Project (UPP), an ongoing World Bank/Indonesian government urban anti-poverty initiative in Northern Java, we discuss some of the ways in which this rural bias has weakened the conceptual tools for imagining development in urban environments. It will be our argument that the dominant rural/village development trope and its corresponding scalar dichotomies between local and global and social dichotomies between traditional and modern have formed the basis of much of the way we think about and practice development. This has often obscured, rather than clarified what people actually want and need and how it can best be delivered.