Brady Statute Data: Adjudicated Mental Defectives and Involuntary Mental Commitments

Currently, Alaska law enforcement agencies do not obtain data on four noncriminal categories prohibited by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 from obtaining firearms. This, the first of four reports on these categories, describes how adjudicated mental defectives and involuntary mental commitments can be identified within an Alaska context and discusses possible procedures, problems, and solutions associated with data collection. The report discussed federal statutory definitions of the terms adjudicated as a mental defective, committed to a mental institution, and legal authority; compares these terms with those current in Alaska Statues and used by social service and mental health agencies in the state; and describes, in general, data held by federal, state, local, and private agencies in Alaska. At present, there is no clear or cost-effective way to create and maintain a database for either of the two categories with any accuracy: besides technical difficulties in getting different databases to "talk" to each other, records are not kept on mentally ill individuals, and even if they were, access would be prohibited in the face of federal and state laws regarding privacy.Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice Grant No. 96-RU-RX-K026Introduction / Adjudicated Mental Defectives / Involuntary Mental Commitments / References / Appendix A: Mental Health Commitments (Civil Commitments) / Appendix B: Forms USed in the Alaska Court System During the Involuntary Mental Commitment Proces

Brady Statute Data: Establishing Noncriminal Classifications for the Alaska Department of Public Safety—Executive Summary

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 prohibited the purchase of firearms by persons in certain noncriminal categories. This executive report summarizes study findings on potential data sources for the identification of mental committments, addicted substance abusers, noncitizens in the U.S. illegally or unlawfully, and persons who have been the subject of a domestic violence restraining order and briefly discusses possible procedures, problems, and solutions associated with data collection for the purpose of Brady background checks. Lack of infrastructure for collecting certain types of data, incompleteness of information, and state constitutional protections, including the guarantee of privacy, were the chief obstacles to completely meeting the provisions of the Brady Act in Alaska.Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S.Department of Justice. Grant No. 96-RU-RX-K026Background / Needs and Benefits / Goals and Objectives / Project Design / Findings by Classification / Conclusio

Brady Statute Data: Persons Who are Subject to a Court Order Restraining Them from Threatening or Committing Acts of Domestic Violence or Abuse

Currently, Alaska law enforcement agencies do not obtain data on four noncriminal categories prohibited by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 from obtaining firearms. This, the second of four reports on these categories, describes how persons subject to a domestic violence restraining order can be identified within an Alaska context and discusses possible procedures, problems, and solutions associated with data collection. The state is rapidly moving to the point where all individuals who meet the Brady definition for this category will be identified, the information housed in a separate database, and reported to federal agencies. AS 18.65.540 provides for a central registry of Domestic Violence Protective Orders, a product of the (state) Domestic Violence Prevention and Victim Protection Act of 1996.Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice Grant No. 96-RU-RX-K026Introduction / Background / Civil Protection Orders / Handgun Applications / New Policies / Conclusion / References / Appendix A: APSIN Screen

Brady Statute Data: Persons Who Are Illegally or Unlawfully in the United States

Currently, Alaska law enforcement agencies do not obtain data on four noncriminal categories prohibited by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 from obtaining firearms. This, the fourth of four reports on these categories, describes how undocumented immigrants who are unlawfully in the United States can be identified within an Alaska context and discusses possible procedures, problems, and solutions associated with data collection. It was found that the most feasibile means for obtaining information for the purposes of Brady background checks would be the Verification Information System (VIS) of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). However, project researchers received no response from INS to inquiries about requirements of access to VIS.Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice. Grant No. 96-RU-RX-K026.Introduction / Background / Definitions / INS Records Availability / Determining an Individual's Classification for Brady / Verification Process / Conclusion / Appendix A: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Guide to Commonly Used Documents Used to Identify Persons Eligible for Benefits Under the Immigration and Naturalization Act / Appendix B: U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Statement of Intent to Obtain a Handgun(s

Brady Statute Data: Establishing Noncriminal Classifications for the Alaska Department of Public Safety

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 prohibits the purchase of firearms by persons in certain noncriminal categories. These reports describe potential data sources for the identification of mental committments, addicted substance abusers, illegal aliens, and persons who have been the subject of a domestic violence restraining order and discusses possible procedures, problems, and solutions associated with data collection for the purpose of Brady background checks. Lack of infrastructure for collecting certain types of data, incompleteness of information, and state constitutional protections, including the guarantee of privacy, are the chief obstacles to completely meeting the provisions of the Brady Act in Alaska.Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice Grant No. 96-RU-RX-K026Background / Needs and Benefits / Goals and Objectives / Project Design / Findings by Classification / Conclusio

When Being Down Isn\u27t Enough: Examining White Antiracism and Racial Integration in the Era of Colorblindness

White supremacist racism is systemic to the structure of society in the United States. White people often minimize, rationalize, deflect, and deny contemporary acts of racism. However, there have been many whites who have actively opposed racism. As new conditions of racial segregation and inequality emerge in the United States, it is increasingly imperative that we consider which factors lead some whites to commit to antiracism. In this research, I examine how a selection of young white adults negotiate their racial and antiracist activist identities in the era of colorblindness. Utilizing feminist qualitative research methods, I explore my sample’s understanding of the factors most influential in raising their race consciousness. Employing in-depth interviewing techniques, I find that early life racial messages and the quality of interracial contacts one maintains throughout their lifetime have the greatest implications for influencing young whites’ involvement with antiracist activism

Exploring complex vowels as phrase break correlates in a corpus of English speech with ProPOSEL, a prosody and POS English lexicon

Real-world knowledge of syntax is seen as integral to the machine learning task of phrase break prediction but there is a deficiency of a priori knowledge of prosody in both rule-based and data-driven classifiers. Speech recognition has established that pauses affect vowel duration in preceding words. Based on the observation that complex vowels occur at rhythmic junctures in poetry, we run significance tests on a sample of transcribed, contemporary British English speech and find a statistically significant correlation between complex vowels and phrase breaks. The experiment depends on automatic text annotation via ProPOSEL, a prosody and part-of-speech English lexicon. Copyright © 2009 ISCA

Radiological assessment for Space Station Freedom

Circumstances have made it necessary to reassess the risks to Space Station Freedom crewmembers that arise from exposure to the space radiation environment. An option is being considered to place it in an orbit similar to that of the Russian Mir space station. This means it would be in a 51.6 deg inclination orbit instead of the previously planned 28.5 deg inclination orbit. A broad range of altitudes is still being considered, although the baseline is a 407 km orbit. In addition, recent data from the Japanese A-bomb survivors has made it necessary for NASA to have the exposure limits reviewed. Preliminary findings of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements indicate that the limits must be significantly reduced. Finally, the Space Station will be a laboratory where effects of long-term zero gravity on human physiology will be studied in detail. It is possible that a few crewmembers will be assigned to as many as three 1-year missions. Thus, their accumulated exposure will exceed 1,000 days. Results of this radiation risk assessment for Space Station Freedom crewmembers finds that females less than 35 years old will be confined to mission assignments where the altitude is less than about 400 km. Slight restrictions may also need to be made for male crewmembers less than 35 years old

Automatically generated, phonemic Arabic-IPA pronunciation tiers for the boundary annotated Qur'an dataset for machine learning (version 2.0)

In this paper, we augment the Boundary Annotated Qur?an dataset published at LREC 2012 (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2012a) with automatically generated phonemic transcriptions of Arabic words. We have developed and evaluated a comprehensive grapheme-phoneme mapping from Standard Arabic \ensuremath> IPA (Brierley et al under review), and implemented the mapping in Arabic transcription technology which achieves 100% accuracy as measured against two gold standards: one for Qur?anic or Classical Arabic, and one for Modern Standard Arabic (Sawalha et al [1]). Our mapping algorithm has also been used to generate a pronunciation guide for a subset of Qur?anic words with heightened prosody (Brierley et al 2014). This is funded research under the EPSRC " Working Together" theme