Assessment of Services Available for Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence in Anchorage, Alaska

The Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) plans to expand services provided under its Flourishing Child initiative, and requested an assessment of service needs for children in the Anchorage area that are exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV). Specifically, CITC wishes to know if the proposed expansion of Flourishing Child services will satisfy an unmet need in the community. This assessment includes a brief introduction and review of related concepts, and an assessment of services available within the Municipality of Anchorage.Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Child and Family Services DivisionIntroduction / Definition: Intimate Partner Violence / Exposure of children to IPV / Prevalence of children exposed to IPV / Effects of exposure of children to IPV / Interventions and services for Children exposed to IPV / Services available in Anchorage, Alaska / Conclusion / Reference

Repeat Maltreatment in Alaska: Assessment and Exploration of Alternative Measures

Most deaths and serious injuries among children who are abused or neglected are preceded by multiple reported instances of maltreatment. The Office of Children Services (OCS), Alaska’s child protection agency, is very concerned about repeat maltreatment. It’s extremely damaging to children and demoralizing to everyone who tries to help prevent it. Over the last several years, Alaska has consistently had among the highest rates in the country of repeat child maltreatment, as reported by the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Those federal figures measure the percentage of children who were the victims of at least two substantiated reports—that is, confirmed reports—of maltreatment within six months. In 2009, nearly 10% of children who were the subjects of investigation by OCS were reported as suffering repeat maltreatment, compared with less than 6% nationwide. By 2013, the share in Alaska was at nearly 13%, compared with a national rate of less than 5.5% (Figure S-1). But even those grim federal statistics don’t provide a complete picture of repeat child maltreatment in Alaska. Many analysts believe that not all cases where maltreatment may have occurred are substantiated, and that maltreatment of a child may be reported a number of times, over a longer period, before it is substantiated. Also, for various reasons, many reports of maltreatment are not investigated at all, in Alaska and other states, and only a small share of those that are investigated are substantiated. For example, in Alaska in 2013, 42% of reports in an average month were not investigated, and only 12% of reports were substantiatedExecutive Summary / Introduction / Definition of repeat maltreatment: some challenges / Data / Findings / Varying the indicator / Varying time periods / Demographics of repeatedly maltreated children / Discussion / Limitations and suggestions for future research / Conclusion / Reference

Trends in Age, Gender, and Ethnicity Among Children in Foster Care in Alaska

In Alaska, as in every other state, people who suspect children are being abused or neglected can contact the designated child protection agency. In Alaska, that agency is the Office of Children Services (OCS). It is responsible for investigating all reported incidents and determining the level of risk to the health, safety, and welfare of children. In a number of instances, children will be removed from their families and homes due to unsafe conditions, and they are often placed in foster care. 1 Being taken away from their families is of course traumatizing for children. The number of American children in foster care at any time, and the length of time they spend in foster care, has been closely watched over the last several decades. Several changes in policy and practice were introduced in the last 20 years, at national and state levels, to reduce both the number of children in foster care and the length of time they stay in foster care. These changes caused some dramatic trends at the national level: the number of children in foster care in the U.S. declined by almost a quarter (23.7%) between 2002 and 2012, with the decline being most pronounced among AfricanAmerican children (47.1%). As of 2012, African-American children made up 26% of all children in foster care nationwide, down from 37% a decade earlier. But during the same period, the proportion of children in foster care classified as belonging to two or more races almost doubled. And American Indian/Alaska Native children are the highest represented ethnic group among foster children—13 of every 1,000 American Indian/Alaska Native children in the U.S. were in foster care in 2012. In contrast, no such dramatic changes happened in Alaska in recent years. This paper reports on foster children in Alaska by age, gender, race, and region over the period 2006-2013. This information is important for state policymakers working to better protect abused and neglected children. At the end of the paper we discuss questions the data raise and describe additional data needed to better help children in foster care in Alaska. We compiled data for this analysis from monthly reports of key indicators on foster children in the state. OCS publishes monthly data on select indicators (Alaska State Statutes 2011, Monthly reports concerning children, AK. Stat. § 47.05.100), in PDF format on its website (http://dhss.alaska.gov/ocs/Pages/statistics/default.aspx). Data presented here are snapshots in time and do not follow unique children over time.Introduction / Summary of findings / How many children are in foster care, and where are they from? / How old are the children in foster care? / Boys or girls: Who is more likely to be in foster care? / Are Alaska Native children over-represented among children in foster care? / Discussion / Limitations / Note on population of OCS regions / Acknowledgement

Justice Without Power: Yemen and The Global Legal System

The war in Yemen has remained the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since 2015, and yet it is shockingly invisible. The global legal system fails to offer a clear avenue through which the Yemeni people can hold the state actors responsible for their harm accountable. This Note analyzes international legal mechanisms for vindicating war crimes and human rights abuses perpetrated in Yemen. Through the lens of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, it highlights gaps in the global legal structure, proposes alternative accountability processes, and uses a variety of sources—including interviews with practitioners and Arabic language legal scholarship—to explicate a victim-centered transitional justice process for the Yemeni people

An investigation of speaker independent phrase break models in End-to-End TTS systems

This paper presents our work on phrase break prediction in the context of end-to-end TTS systems, motivated by the following questions: (i) Is there any utility in incorporating an explicit phrasing model in an end-to-end TTS system?, and (ii) How do you evaluate the effectiveness of a phrasing model in an end-to-end TTS system? In particular, the utility and effectiveness of phrase break prediction models are evaluated in in the context of childrens story synthesis, using listener comprehension. We show by means of perceptual listening evaluations that there is a clear preference for stories synthesized after predicting the location of phrase breaks using a trained phrasing model, over stories directly synthesized without predicting the location of phrase breaks.Comment: Submitted for review to IEEE Acces

Load balancing in distributed query management at web enabled systems

Every day more and more Business are using web as compulsory medium to provide services. Ever increase in technological advancement leads more devices and applications are accessing web based application around the clock. So single node web applications are prone collapse, designing an application with Distributed frame work and mange those application often reduce the risk of single point failure. In that strategy load balancers plays an important role to direct the traffic to multiple Servers. Existing load balancers are Prone to fail and centralized strategy to distribute the load among the server. Our proposed heuristic based load balancer follows Decentralized approach to solve the problem and our ANN based supervised back propagation technique gives optimized results that existing Load balancer

Synthesis and electrochemical studies of novel ionic liquid based electrolytes

Room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) have received substantial interest as nonaqueous electrolytes in lithium ion- and metal-air batteries in recent years due to their low volatility, non-flammability, wide liquid range, and thermal stability characteristics. Towards developing a new generation of high specific energy lithium ion batteries, a series of imidazolium and pyrrolidinium based ionic liquids were synthesized and explored as nonaqueous electrolytes in lithium-, lithium ion-, and lithium-air batteries. Pyrrolidinium-TFSI based ionic liquids have wide electrochemical stability (5.7 - 6.2 V vs Li/Li+); however, they show limited thermal stabilities and lithium cell discharge characteristics. TFSI-based ionic liquids are thermally and electrochemically more stable when compared with their BF4-based analogues. A series of fluorinated ionic liquid electrolytes were synthesized and investigated for their use in lithium-air batteries. These ionic liquids have improved the diffusion coefficient and higher solubility of oxygen when compared with currently used nonaqueous electrolytes. Cathode materials, such as LiNi1/3Mn1/3Co1/3O2 and LiFePO4, were chemically delithiated using nitronium tetrafluoroborate (NO2BF4), or disodium peroxydisulfate (Na2S2O8\u3e), to explore their effect on the oxidative degradation of the carbonate based electrolytes. Using fluoroethylene carbonate as the electrolyte additive, electrolyte degradation was monitored by 19F NMR spectroscopy. Formation of the solid electrolyte interface (SEI) on the delithiated cathode materials was probed using surface techniques, such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) --Abstract, page iii