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Sex trafficking is one type of human trafficking, which involves scenarios where individuals are not paid and are forced to engage in forced sex, forced prostitution, and sexual slavery. Online advertising is increasingly used by traffickers as an anonymous and efficient method to exploit victims. Large sporting events have been linked to increases in sex trafficking, although there is limited empirical evidence to support this claim. The goal of this study is to answer the following question: What is the relationship between Super Bowls and potential online sex trafficking? Using time series Poisson analysis of secondary data on online sexual service advertisements in Florida during the 2020 and 2021 Super Bowls, which took place in Miami and Tampa, Florida, respectively, the result indicates an increase in online advertisements that exhibit indicators of sex trafficking during the two Super Bowls. The paper concludes by providing recommendations for federal, state, and local law enforcement for improving sex trafficking responses during large sporting events and outlines a future research agenda on the relationship between large sporting events and sex trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper recounts struggles over a Confederate monument in Tampa, Florida. Dedicated in 1911 to white supremacy and "undying love" of the Confederate cause, by 2017 the monument hung in the balance of contestations over landscape, power, and city form between anti-racist social justice movements, white nationalist neo-Confederates, and post-racial neoliberal boosters. Drawing on urban political economy, regional history, and discourse analysis, we read the fight over the monument as a flashpoint in ongoing struggles over the racialization of urban space and over regional political realignments. We trace differences among the monuments' opponents over whether its removal heralds a closing or opening of struggles for racial justice, and delineate tensions emerging among Southern white nationalists over a position with one foot searching for continued purchase in hegemonic cultures of American nationalism and militarism, and another newly planted among ascendant neoliberal-multicultural paradigms. Este artículo relata las luchas por un monumento confederado en Tampa, Florida. Dedicado en 1911 a la supremacía blanca y al "amor eterno" de la causa confederada, en el 2017 el monumento se coló en el balance de las disputas sobre el paisaje, el poder y la ciudad entre los movimientos de justicia social antirracistas, los nacionalistas blancos neo-confederados y los impulsores neoliberales pos-raciales. Usando la economía política urbana, la historia regional y el análisis del discurso, leemos la lucha por el monumento como un punto crítico en las luchas sobre la racialización del espacio urbano y sobre los realineamientos políticos regionales. Analizamos las raíces de los differencias entre los opositores de los monumentos que si su eliminación anuncia un cierre o apertura de las luchas por la justicia racial, y delimitamos las tensiones que surgen entre los nacionalistas blancos del sur sobre una posición con interés en busca de una compra continua en las culturas hegemónicas del nacionalismo y el militarismo estadounidense y otro recién plantado entre paradigmas neoliberales-multiculturales ascendentes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban stormwater managers have traditionally used pipes, ditches, ponds and other gray infrastructure elements to quickly divert runoff away from its main sources—buildings and roadways. In contrast, proponents of green infrastructure attempt to manage stormwater near its origin, utilizing natural drainage pathways and best management practices (BMPs) to reduce runoff and increase infiltration. In doing so, stormwater is retained where it is needed to support urban vegetation. This vegetation, in turn, helps reduce future runoff, while producing a whole range of environmental, economic, and social/human health-related benefits. Despite the many advantages of green infrastructure, retrofitting the infrastructure of a city is a costly process that requires careful planning. The transition from gray to green infrastructure requires communication between managers from different disciplines and a willingness to stray from management strategies that have defined stormwater management for centuries. The Gray to Green (G2G) green infrastructure planning tool is designed to facilitate these conversations—showing both technical and non-technical users how green infrastructure BMPs can work within the urban forest to manage stormwater on existing or proposed development sites. This paper details the data sources and research at the core of G2G—documenting all methods, equations, and assumptions used in its creation to provide users with a fully-transparent and peer-reviewed planning tool. The paper concludes with descriptions and user insights from two case studies from Tampa, Florida (United States) and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (United States). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The trends of surface runoff and flood area changes were different. • Rainfall change is the dominant driver compared with land use change. • There are coupled effects from rainfall and land use changes on both surface runoff and flood area. • The easily flooded areas would experience negative coupled effects under future rainfall and land use conditions. • The areas with inadequate drainage and low elevation variation would be of high probability to suffer flooding issues. Future rainfall and land use are two important factors for flood management since they both directly and indirectly affect the functionality and performance of urban stormwater drainage infrastructures. Although some studies have already examined the coupled effects of future rainfall and land use conditions, they have not concluded how such effects on both surface runoff and flood areas would change with regional surface elevation variation and infrastructure conditions. This paper analyzed the coupled effects of future rainfall and land use on urban drainage systems in terms of surface runoff quantity and flood area changes using EPA SWMM. Future downscaled and bias-corrected precipitation projections for 2040–2060 and 2080–2099 from "Downscaled CMIP3 and CMIP5 Climate and Hydrology Projections" Archive and future land use for 2050 s and 2090 s from EPA ICLUS project were used for the City of Tampa in Florida (USA). It was shown that potential runoff volume and flood area changes ranged from −40% to 160%, and −40% to 400% due to rainfall change, while potential changes induced by land use change ranged from 0% to 3.5%, and 0% to 18% respectively. Additionally, this study examined the coupled effects of future rainfall and land use changes on flood area variations, considering the capacity of drainage infrastructure and elevation variation of study site. Results showed that flood area variations are not solely influenced by runoff quantity changes due to the two external drivers, but also by other factors. Specifically, in low-relief areas with inadequate drainage infrastructure and less elevation variation, these two drivers have no additive effects on the percentage of flood area changes. In contrast, in areas with adequate drainage infrastructure and greater surface elevation variation, there are additive effects from rainfall and land use changes on flood area expansions. These findings have important implications for stakeholders involved in city planning and flooding control, particularly for urban areas facing future precipitation and urbanization challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuroscience can provide evidence in some cases of legal matters, despite its tenuous nature. Among others, arguing for diminished capacity, insanity, or pleading for mitigation is the most frequent use of neurological evidence in the courtroom. While there is a plethora of studies discussing the moral and legal matters of the practice, there is a lack of studies examining specific cases and the subsequent applications of brain knowledge. This study details the capital punishment trial of Kelvin Lee Coleman Jr., charged in 2013 with double murder in Tampa, Florida, to illustrate the extent that expert opinions – based on neuroimaging, neurological, and neuropsychiatric examinations – had an impact on the court's decisions. The defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. According to the comments of the trial's jury, the most influential reason for not sentencing the defendant to death is the fact that during the incident was that he was under extreme mental and emotional disturbance. Other reasons were evidence of brain abnormalities resulting from neurological insult, fetal alcohol syndrome, and orbitofrontal syndrome contributing to severely abnormal behavior and lack of impulse control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduced hosts are capable of introducing parasite species and altering the abundance of parasites that are already present in native hosts, but few studies have compared the tolerances of native and invasive hosts to introduced parasites or identified the traits of introduced hosts that make them supershedders of non‐native parasites.Here, we compare the effects of a nematode Aplectana hamatospicula that is native to Cuba but appears to be introduced to Florida on the native Floridian treefrog, Hyla femoralis, and on the Cuban treefrog (CTF), Osteopilus septentrionalis. We were particularly interested in CTFs because their introduction to Florida has led to reported declines of native treefrogs.In the laboratory, infection with A. hamatospicula caused a greater loss in body mass of H. femoralis than CTFs despite H. femoralis shedding fewer total worms in their faeces than CTFs. Field collections of CTFs, H. femoralis, and another native Floridian treefrog, H. squirella (Squirrel treefrog) from Tampa, FL also showed that CTFs shed more larval worms in their faeces than both native frogs when controlling for body size. Hence, the non‐native CTF is a supershedder of this non‐native parasite that is spilling over to less tolerant native treefrogs.Any conservation intervention to reduce the effects of CTFs on native treefrogs would benefit from knowing the traits that contribute to the invasive host being a supershedder of this parasite. Hence, we conducted necropsies on 330 CTFs to determine how host sex and body size affect the abundance of A. hamatospicula, and two other common parasites in this species (acuariid nematodes and trematode metacercariae).There was a significant linear increase in A. hamatospicula and encysted acuariids with CTF body size, but there was no detectable relationship between host body size and the intensity of metacercariae. Female CTFs were bigger, lived longer and, on average, had more A. hamatospicula than male CTFs.Synthesis and applications. These results of the study suggest that there is parasite spillover from the invasive Cuban treefrog (CTF) to native treefrogs in Florida. Additionally, at least some of the adverse effects of CTFs on native treefrogs could be caused by the introduction and amplification of this introduced parasite, and female and larger CTFs seem to be amplifying these infections more than males and smaller CTFs, respectively, suggesting that management could benefit from targeting these individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The spatial and temporal evolution of traffic flow reconstructed for all highways in Florida for hurricane Irma evacuation. • A simplified framework is built to reconstruct evacuation traffic flow based on limited highway camera data. • The data reconstructed could improve survey-based evacuation demand simulators. Hurricane evacuation has long been a difficult problem perplexing local government. Hurricane Irma in 2017 created the most extensive scale of evacuation in Florida's history, involving about 6.5 million people in a mandatory evacuation order and an estimated 4 million evacuation vehicles. Traffic jams emerged in mid-Florida and rapidly spread to involve the entire state. To understand the hurricane evacuation process, the spatial and temporal evolution of the traffic flow is a critical piece of information, but it is usually not fully observed. Based on game theory, this paper employs the available traffic observation of main highways to reconstruct the traffic flow on all highways in Florida during Irma. The reconstructed traffic conditions compare well with those simulated by dynamic models while the reconstruction model is computationally much cheaper to use. Validation with smartphone data further confirms that the reconstruction model captures the traffic conditions for real evacuation processes. The reconstructed data show that the evacuation rates for 5 representative cities -- Key West, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville-- in Florida were about 90.1%, 38.7%, 52.6%, 22.1%, and 7%, respectively. The peak evacuation traffic flows from Tampa and Miami arrived in the Orlando region at almost the same time, triggering the catastrophic congestion through the entire state. Also, the evacuation for Hurricane Irma was greater than that predicted by an evacuation demand model developed based on previous event and survey data. The detailed evacuation traffic flow reanalysis accomplished in this article lays a foundation for studying evacuation demand as well as developing evacuation management policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Sand samples from Tampa (T) and Panama (P) City beaches in Florida were used as catalysts for dehydrogenation of NaBH4 in methanol. T and P sand samples were sieved to <250, 250 to 500, and >500 μm sizes, and the smallest fractions resulted in faster hydrogen generation rates (HGR), 565 ± 18 and 482 ± 24 mL H2 (min.g of catalyst)−1, respectively. After various base/acid treatments, HGR values of 705 ± 51 and 690 ± 47 mL H2 (min g of catalyst)−1 for HCl‐treated T and P sand samples were attained, respectively. Next, T and P sand samples were modified with polyethyleneimine (PEI) that doubled the HGR values, 1344 ± 103, and 1190 ± 87 mL H2 (min.g of catalyst)−1 and increased ~8‐fold, 4408 ± 187, and 3879 ± 169 mL H2 (min g of catalyst)−1, correspondingly after protonation (PEI+). The Ea values of T and P sand samples were calculated as 24.6 and 25.9 kJ/mol, and increased to 36.1, and 36.6 kJ/mol for T‐PEI+ and P‐PEI+ samples, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many application areas, data are collected on a count or binary response with spatial covariate information. In this article, we introduce a new class of generalized geoadditive models (GGAMs) for spatial data distributed over complex domains. Through a link function, the proposed GGAM assumes that the mean of the discrete response variable depends on additive univariate functions of explanatory variables and a bivariate function to adjust for the spatial effect. We propose a two-stage approach for estimating and making inferences of the components in the GGAM. In the first stage, the univariate components and the geographical component in the model are approximated via univariate polynomial splines and bivariate penalized splines over triangulation, respectively. In the second stage, local polynomial smoothing is applied to the cleaned univariate data to average out the variation of the first-stage estimators. We investigate the consistency of the proposed estimators and the asymptotic normality of the univariate components. We also establish the simultaneous confidence band for each of the univariate components. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by two simulation studies. We apply the proposed method to analyze the crash counts data in the Tampa-St. Petersburg urbanized area in Florida. for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]