Roundtable: Mayor's Race, San Diego Hate Groups, Crowdsourcing Emergency Aid

Mayoral Candidates Shift Positions, Tactics: Another day, another mayoral debate. Wednesday’s was about making San Diego a more creative and innovative city.

City Councilman Carl DeMaio, who is for innovation, said fiscal soundness will allow the city to make gains in innovation and creativity.

Congressman Bob Filner, who is also for innovation, said he will focus on making San Diego an aqua economy--green and blue, because of local research based on the ocean.

Wednesday’s debate was somewhat more muted than other recent debates. The new relative calm may reflect how the candidates have changed since the June primary. Among the changes for DeMaio: after saying San Diego's mayor has little to do with education, education is now part of his platform. DeMaio now accepts purifying sewage, and he's become interested in border development. He has also warmed up to downtown business leaders.

Filner has done a 180 on Proposition B, which he now says is the will of the voters. He has softened his tone on both the Balboa Park Plaza de Panama project and the Convention Center financing plan.

At this point there are 60 days and about 20 debates to go until the election.

Hate Groups In San Diego: California’s attorney general announced this week that reported hate crimes in the state had decreased 4 percent, from 1,107 to 1,060.

The most common types of hate crimes in California are those based on race, ethnicity and national origin. Anti-black crimes accounted for 29.5 percent of the total. Hate crimes against Latinos decreased by 43.6 percent.

Racist groups continue to carve out a foothold in San Diego County. In July, a “Summer of Hate” concert of skinhead bands was organized by the Hammerskin Nation, a nationwide skinhead group, in El Cajon. Wade Michael Page, a member of Hammerskin Nation, killed six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin the same month.

Other neo-Nazi groups are sprinkled throughout the county, and several are regarded by The Southern Poverty Law Center as dangerous.

Crowdsourcing Disaster Aid: When a UC student and his friend were late coming back from a climb in the Andes, Tomnod, a company in San Diego, used a satellite photo of the mountain to tell rescuers where to look.

Tomnod, a company started by four engineering PhDs from UC San Diego, divided the photo into smaller parts and posted it on the internet. Within hours, dozens of people had identified areas worth investigating, one of which turned out to be the place where the climbers had fallen 1,000 feet to their deaths.

Looking at all the images takes a lot of time, which is where crowd-sourcing comes in. The next time someone disappears, they hope to be fast enough to make a difference.

The company began with a project in collaboration with National Geographic to search for the tomb of Genghis Kahn, which they may have found. Religious issues have kept the Mongolian government from opening it so far.