Manns was convicted of molesting a teenage boy almost a decade ago, and the Illinois sex offender registry lists him as compliant. Living under the assumed name Jermel Beckford, he moved to Florida in 2008 and was hired as the youth pastor at Celebration Tabernacle Church, but no nationwide criminal background check was run on him. Manns failed to register as a sex offender in Florida.

Senior pastor and Jermel’s uncle, Errol Beckford, was shocked to hear of his nephew’s arrest and his past. Pastor Beckford stated that national background checks will now be run on all applicants, and “It could be the Pope, we’re going to run a national and pay for it.”  Read more…

We cannot be too cautious when it comes to protecting our children  online, at school, church or at home. We at DataRockit! implore parents and businesses to vet any and all people who will be caring for your children. Run a national sex offender and criminal background search and subscribe to services that provide frequent updates in your area.

Sponsored by DataRockit!, Inc.

As the Chatroulette hype began to build, a group of male friends  – all older than 30 – decided to check it out. The very first image displayed was a man’s genitals, followed by disgusted groans from the test audience with shouts of  “Gross!” and “Dude! Click next! Hurry!”. What came next was simply described as “filthy”, and the test exercise was over. If a group of grown men thought the images were over-the-top vulgar, is this new social craze something in which young children and teens should dabble? My mother used to say that while you may be able to forget words that you hear, your mind rarely forgets what it has seen.

Every parent has a different set of rules and social norms for their children and family, so it is ultimately up to each of us to decide. I am not a fan of censorship, but do believe we all need to make educated, informed decisions. To read one mother’s journey into Chatroulette’s world, click here…

Sponsored by DataRockit!

The Department of Justice National Sex Offender Website lists the following facts about sexual abuse:

• Over 56,000 cases of child sexual abuse were reported and substantiated in 2007.
• As many as one in three girls and one in seven boys will be sexually abused at some point in their childhood.
• In as many as 93% of child sexual abuse cases, the child knows the person that commits the abuse.
• Most perpetrators are acquaintances, but as many as 47% are family or extended family.
• Approximately 30% of cases are reported to authorities.

The last fact is probably the most frightening of all.  If only 30% of abuse cases are reported, imagine how many sexual offenders – predators – remain free to mingle in society, seeking yet another innocent victim. Prevention education is paramount to protecting our children.

We at DataRockit! are committed to protecting our communities and urge you to read more about how you can prevent sexual abuse at Stop It Now!

• Parental controls are an important part of staying safe online. They should be openly discussed with children so everyone understands exactly how these services work to shield the entire family from Web dangers. Children don’t like to feel as if they’re being spied upon.
• PCs should be placed in an area where an adult can keep an eye on the monitor, for example, in the living room.
• When creating accounts for social online communities like Facebook, parents/teachers should study each site’s privacy features and compile lists of trustworthy individuals with whom children are safe to communicate with online.
• Under no circumstance should children meet people they don’t know; and if they must, then a parent or a teacher should escort them for safety purposes.
• Teach children to always end conversations they find uncomfortable, and how to do so. Should someone on the Web – even a friend – make them feel scared, confused, trapped, offended or threatened, make sure they know to find an adult to talk to about what happened, and how to stay safe.
• Help children identify e-mails that contain spam, obscene or aggressive messages, and make sure they know to refrain from forwarding these kinds of e-mails or chain messages to friends.
• Parents/teachers should regularly search children’s names together in a search engine to see what comes up. They may see information such as blogs they may have, communities they’re active in, and family background – this also gives children a sense of how information shared online.
• Know the chat lingo, i.e. P911 – my parents are coming; PA – parent alert; PAL – parents are listening; TAW – teachers are watching.
• During activities that require PC usage in class, students should be closely supervised. If they suddenly turn off the PC, quickly change windows, or laugh while in groups during lab hours, then teachers should look for inappropriate sites.
• And finally, students and children should understand that not everything they see or hear on the Internet is true. Information people give away about themselves is not always trustworthy and ill-intentioned individuals could use a great variety of methods to mislead children and even hurt them.

Read the entire article…

As the number of cyberattacks from organized hackers against the computer networks of U.S. companies continues to escalate, demand for cybersecurity professionals is growing rapidly. Top executives in government and industry are struggling to find qualified  applicants.

In order to discover top-quality cybersecurity candidates, companies, like Boeing, are sponsoring cyberdefense competitions.  The goal of such competions is to help companies recruit students who can assist in bolstering their defenses against cyberattacks. Read more …

Sponsored by DataRockit!

Phoebe’s  death prompted the Massachusetts legislature to pass a law introducing an anti-bullying curriculum in the state’s public schools.  Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel said that Prince’s suicide was “the culmination of a nearly three-month campaign of verbally assaultive behavior and threats of physical harm.”  Some parents are outraged that no charges have been brought against school officials, especially those to whom Prince’s mother had spoken regarding her daughter’s harassment.  State Representative John Scibak said on “Good Morning America” this morning, “I think if people knew about it and did not report it, this is a very serious allegation and one that really needs to be investigated.”

Scibak supported legislation passed by the Massachusetts House and Senate that would address bullying and cyberbullying in public schools. TScibak stated that the bill would require schools “to provide training to parents, to teachers, to students, that incidents of bullying must be reported [and] the principal, upon hearing that determines whether this should go to law enforcement officials. The parents of the bully as well as the victim must be called in, it needs to be addressed.” Scibak hopes to have the bill on Gov. Deval Patrick’s desk in a few weeks.

You can read more about Pheobe Prince and the investigation at ABCNews.com.

-Sponsored by DataRockit!

1. A total record set approaching 4 Billion rows, some of these data sets are hundreds of columns wide
2. All of our customers want to access them differently, meaning we have to optimize them differently for lots of people ( no magic bullets )
3. It is updated frequently, ranging from weekly to quarterly depending on the data
4. Raw data we get is usually poorly formatted, inconsistent from update to update, and usually has lots of “clean up” needed.
5. Serving approximately 50 million queries per month with an average response time less than 500 ms but in some cases as fast as sub 1 ms.  Oh yeah, and most customers want to search “all” of the data at once.

So it’s a somewhat unique problem we deal with in the data world.  How do you scale?  Well generally there are two approaches.  You go vertical – meaning you buy very large expensive machines and need less people to manage them that are highly trained or you buy a lot of commodity hardware and take a map reduce / grid style approach needing lots of people to manage your ever growing server farm that also have to be highly trained.  There is a third option and like many things, the “truth” usually lies somewhere in the middle.  What we do is buy hardware that is mid-grade but not mainframe and use virtualization.  This gives us what many are terming “elastic” scalability.  It’s a very powerful thing.

With elastic scalability you essentially have the power to dynamically re-allocate compute resources on the fly.  Do we have a new data set that just came in raw and needs to be processed, optimized, and served up?  Great, let’s take some development nodes offline and spin up more processing nodes.  Are we experiencing higher search demands than normal?  No problem, we’ll slow processing by taking some processing nodes down and spin up more search nodes.  It’s the ultimate do less with more strategy from man power all the way to hardware.

Virtualization Technology allows you to do less with more.

For instance, we enjoy a VM oversubscription rate of 4:1, meaning for every real machine cpu core we buy we can have 4 virtual machines that share it and maintain our service levels.  That means less man power to maintain a room full of servers, that means less power costs, etc.  That means for every 7 dual quad core physical servers bought I can run 200+ virtual ones.  This combined with central management from VMware lets me reallocate compute power quickly and easily from anywhere.

I digress.  So back to our scaling problem…  We will buy a few more mid grade machines, install VMware and at the end of the same day the operations team gets the hardware in from the vendor, our problem is solved.  Before you jump head first into this model it’s only fair to caution you that you have to embrace the model from end to end.  Your software and server architecture must be designed to take advantage of multiple machines and “handle” them being brought on and offline constantly with no intervention… ala the “cloud”.  You really have to have some talented server and network people to keep everything running fast when you are constantly running equipment at full utilization.  In short, you need human capitol, and in my experience investing in people yields a far greater return than machines.

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Roy Johnson is the Chief Executive Officer of DataRockit, Inc. the leader in data services technologies.  DataRockit! provides the most up to date and comprehensive consumer, criminal, real-estate, and registered sexual offender data in the world via the DataRockit! XML gateway.  This revolutionary service provides speed, simplicity, and power never before seen in the data industry.  To find out more about DataRockit! and how they can solve your data problems, visit http://datarockit.net today and setup a risk free trial.

The interesting thing about this industry is that it is dominated by marketers!  Why in the world is that interesting you might ask.  I mean this is obviously a business for marketers, right?  Well, actually I would argue it’s a business for engineers.  And those engineers have a market full of marketers that would gobble up the right product.  The database marketing industry is stuck in 1992.  Lists of billions and billions of records are bought and sold in flat text files of comma separated values every day.  If you can search one of these lists on more than three fields and get results in less than a minute you are sitting pretty.  Every list consumer has their own proprietary way of pulling the proverbial needle from the data haystack.  If the marketers only knew what we could do…

The problem space of Database Marketing lies in extracting meaningful information from billions and billions of records.  Providing just the data someone is looking for and nothing else.  Innovation is providing this data instantly instead of in weeks and weeks.  Innovation is connecting hundreds or even thousands of these lists together to provide complete profiles of whatever the marketer wants to know.  Generating data about the data collected in of it’s self is another gold mine that is yet to be realized.  The biggest blunder however is none of these things.  It’s so simple that you almost wonder how a marketer could have missed it.  The demand for this information is huge but the market for it is small and for one reason and one reason alone.  If you want the information you have to figure out how to do it yourself.  This data is not accessible.  They are selling car parts to people who want automobiles and forcing them to put it together on their own.  Oops =/

The future of Database Marketing is providing access to anyone with a web browser the ability to build the lists they want instantly.  The future lies in allowing users to upload and transfer their own information into these massive lists so they can be cross-referenced and linked instantly.  The future is in processing and compiling relationships among lists when new data is acquired in hours instead of weeks.  In the future  we provide this data via standard accessible formats like XML and anyone can hire a programmer with no knowledge of managing massive data sets, and create innovative new products and tools that build off of this information.  Now the marketers can focus on what they do best instead of fighting the technical problems they are forced to deal with today.  Now the barrier to entry is removed and you don’t need to be a data genius to use massive data sets any longer, now, you can truly innovate.

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Roy Johnson is the Chief Information Officer of DataRockit, Inc. the leader in data services technologies.  DataRockit! provides the most up to date and comprehensive consumer, criminal, real-estate, and registered sexual offender data in the world via the DataRockit! XML gateway.  This revolutionary service provides speed, simplicity, and power never before seen in the data industry.  To find out more about DataRockit! and how they can solve your data problems, visit http://datarockit.net today and setup a risk free trial.

Have we gone too far – or just insane – with policies on zero tolerance or being politically correct? When did doodling on a desk in school become a crime punishable by arrest rather than a visit to the principal’s office?  Gone are the days of corporal punishment or “paddling”, yet an arrest record for a minor school infraction is acceptable. If Alexa was carted off to the police department in handcuffs for drawing with a marker, what would happen to a student who carved a phrase in a desk the way so many of us had done in the past? Is this really violent behavior? Destruction of property, perhaps, if you get technical. Perhaps having the student clean desks in the classroom after school may have been an appropriate consequence for a child who has not been in trouble heretofore in lieu of being prosecuted. One strike and you’re out? Even violent criminals have a Three Strikes policy in 24 states.

CNN’s article cites Emma Jordan-Simpson, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund, a national children’s advocacy group,  “We are arresting them at younger and younger ages [in cases] that used to be covered with a trip to the principal’s office, not sending children to jail.” Are we truly protecting  our children from a life of crime with this form of punishment? It seems as though this preemptive-strike form of discipline may actually set some children up for failure rather than scaring them straight, as it were.

Sponsored by DataRockit!: Protecting Communities

While many victims are hit financially by fraudulent use of a credit card or bank account, having someone apply for a job or a loan taken out in their names, etc, other victims have been falsely accused of committing crimes.

The international community was rocked by the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai on January 20, 2010. The 11 suspected assassins may have used either stolen or forged documents from innocent people in their plot to murder Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

DataRockit! [sponsored link] is committed to protecting communities and encourages citizens to protect themselves from this devastating crime by regularly checking their credit report. The Fair Credit Reporting Act guarantees you access to a free credit report from each of the three nationwide reporting agencies  (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) every 12 months.

Sponsored by: DataRockit!