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Why Are You Here? Modeling Illicit Massage Business Location Characteristics With Machine Learning, Anna White, Seth Guikema, Bridgette Carr
Why Are You Here? Modeling Illicit Massage Business Location Characteristics With Machine Learning, Anna White, Seth Guikema, Bridgette Carr
Articles
Illicit massage businesses are a venue for sex and labor trafficking in the United States. Though many of their locations are made publicly available through online advertising, little is known about why they choose to locate where they do. In this work, we use inferential modeling to better understand the spatial distribution of illicit massage businesses within the U.S. Based on addresses web-scraped weekly from online advertisements over 6 months, we modeled illicit massage business prevalence at the census tract and county levels. We used publicly available data to characterize census tracts and counties, finding that the state in which …
Illegal Sex Toy Patents, W. Nicholson Price Ii
Illegal Sex Toy Patents, W. Nicholson Price Ii
Reviews
In Patenting Pleasure, Professors Sarah Rajec and Andrew Gilden highlight a surprising incongruity: while many areas of U.S. law are profoundly hostile to sexuality in general and the technology of sex in particular, the patent system is not. Instead, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has over the decades issued thousands of patents on sex toys—from vibrators to AI, and everything in between. This incongruity is especially odd because patent law has long incorporated a doctrine that specifically tied patentability to the usefulness of the invention, and up until the end of the 20th century one strand of that …