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: 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: 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 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

Developing an Ontology of Concepts in the Qur'an

In recent years, there is growing interest in IT for Islamic Knowledge. Researchers in religious studies have started to use ontologies to improve knowledge construction and extraction from religious texts such as the Qur’an and Hadith. An ontology can be used to describe a logical domain theory with very expressive, complex, and meaningful information. Recent research has been done in Arabic language ontology and on holy Qur'an ontology but they are still incomplete. Also there are some other issues including the process used to extract and construct an ontology that needs extra work. This paper describes our actual and ongoing work in developing an ontology. Our approach is to investigate the applicability of ontology methods of formal Knowledge Representation from Artificial Intelligence and Text Analytics research to capture and represent abstract concepts in the Qur'an. We will implement three ontology methods. The first one is to elicit or extract the abstract concepts from experts in the domain. Another approach is to semi-automatically extract concepts from text sources from the domain. The last approach is to find existing partial ontologies for the domain, and try to unify and re-use them. Finally to evaluate our general Qur'an ontology, we will investigate practical use of the ontology in a semantic search application. We have implemented the third approach, merging of existing ontologies, The experimental verification result reveals that our proposed merging methods work well, as checked by human expert. A similarity measure was applied for ontology merging, and we report a high accuracy and recall through experiments

An ELISA to Detect Serum Antibodies to the Salivary Gland Toxin of Ixodes holocyclus Neumann in Dogs and Rodents

The Ixodes holocyclus tick causes paralysis in up to 10,000 companion and domestic animals each year in Australia. Treatment requires the removal of the parasite and the administration of a commercial tick antiserum that is prepared from hyperimmune dogs. Each batch of this serum is initially tested for toxin-neutralising potency in a mouse bioassay that is expensive, time consuming, and subjective. With the aim of developing a rapid in vitro assay to replace the bioassay, we used a partially purified antigen prepared from I. holocyclus salivary glands to develop an ELISA to detect toxin-reactive antibodies in hyperimmune dog sera. The optimised ELISA reliably detected antibodies reactive to I. holocyclus salivary gland antigens. Parallel testing of sera with a negative control antigen prepared from the salivary glands of the nontoxic tick Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus provided further evidence that we were detecting toxin-specific antibodies in the assay. Using the ELISA, we could also detect antibodies induced in rats after experimental infestation with I. holocyclus. This assay shows promise as an alternative means of assessing the potency of batches of hyperimmune dog serum and to screen for toxin-reactive monoclonal antibodies produced from immunised rodents

Feline aortic thromboembolism

Aortic thromboembolism is one of the most serious and difficult-to-manage complications. of feline cardiac disease. Most, but not all, cats presenting with signs of aortic thromboembolism are found to have underlying cardiac disease at the time of presentation. In most cases no underlying disease has been diagnosed prior to presentation with paresis/paralysis and profound anxiety. This article will review commonly used treatments for thromboembolism and agents proposed for prophylaxis. Many of the proposed treatments are themselves associated with a high morbidity rate and long term clinical trials are required to make comparative risk-to-benefit ratio assessments of these different options. In cats which do survive the initial treatment, clinicians are still faced with the perplexing problem of long term thrombus prevention, as a majority of cats have been shown to re-embolise despite prophylaxis

Middlesex University’s Invisque visual analytics tool: supported by text analytics techniques from the University of Leeds

This report describes the joint entry from Middlesex University and the University of Leeds for Mini Challenge 3 for the VAST Challenge 2011. In order to address the challenge question, the primary tool we used was Middlesex University’s Interactive Visual Search and Query Environment (INVISQUE), which served as the user interface to the Mini-Challenge 3 news corpus. INVISQUE was supported by corpus text analytics from the University of Leeds, which provided additional information that was visualised on the INVISQUE user interface