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The term criminal career is used to describe the course or progress of criminal activity: its onset, duration, termination, severity, and change in severity. Such a term has important implications, given that significant criminal justice, social, and health policies such as crime control, parole, and correctional treatment and management are predicated on achieving the reduction of criminal careers of serious, repeat offenders. Despite its conceptual simplicity, however, criminal career is often treated as having no depth or scope, for example, merely as the number of crimes or length of prison sentence. These indices often give no or little consideration to criminal career parameters and tend to account for only a small portion of the construct of criminal careers. Ideally, a simple metric to measure the onset, duration, termination, severity, and change in severity of a pattern of criminal activities is needed to facilitate the description and measurement of criminal careers of offenders. <p>The Criminal Career Profile (CCP), which uses commonly available criminological information and requires minimal professional skills to execute, can be considered a simple and precise measure of criminal careers. The CCP is a chronological representation on a Cartesian plane of the time in years an offender has spent in prison (y-axis) plotted against the time in years spent out of prison (x-axis) of all incarcerations and time spent in the community. Given that the CCP is a step function, a regression line can be generated. Serious crimes are generally given longer sentences, and more time in than out of prison would generate a steeper regression line. Shallower regression lines result from less time in than out of prison. As such, the CCP regression line can be considered an indication of the seriousness of offending, and the slope or angle of the regression line can be considered a quantitative index of criminal career severity. Larger slopes or angles (used in this Program of Research) suggest more serious criminal careers. Conversely, smaller slopes or angles suggest less serous criminal careers. Taken altogether, the CCP can provide a quantitative measure of criminal careers: its onset (age at first conviction, which is plotted as the first point on a CCP graph), duration (total time in and out of prison since onset), severity (CCP slope/angle), change in severity (change in CCP slope/angle), and termination (end point or when the CCP slope or angle becomes smaller and closer to 0).<p>This Program of Research was done to assess the CCPs validity and utility in measuring offenders criminal career. More specifically, the investigation focused on the seriousness of criminal careers. A number of criteria were used to validate the CCP angles ability to measure criminal career severity. In Study 1, psychopaths and violent recidivists showed a significantly larger CCP angle than nonpsychopaths and violent nonrecidivists, respectively. Finer groupings based on risk (high, medium, and low), a number of risk measures (Psychopathy Checklist Revised, Violence Risk Scale, and Violence Risk Scale Sexual Offender Version), and different types of offenders (i.e. violent, nonviolent, sexual, Dangerous Offenders) were used in Study 2. Two consistent findings across different groups of offenders in Study 2 were CCP angles significantly varied as a function of risk group and correlated with risk ratings. The pattern of results was that larger CCP angles tended to be associated with worse risk groups. In Study 3, both treated offenders and treatment dropouts showed a reduction in CCP angles from pre- to post-treatment. A nonsignificant interaction of group by treatment, however, suggests that post-treatment changes could not be attributed to treatment. Finally, Study 4 showed that CCP angles change with age. Taken altogether, the results of the four studies provided converging evidence for the validity of the CCP as a measure of criminal careers and the CCP angle as a measure of criminal career severity.

The term criminal career is used to describe the course or progress of criminal activity: its onset, duration, termination, severity, and change in severity. Such a term has important implications, given that significant criminal justice, social, and health policies such as crime control, parole, and correctional treatment and management are predicated on achieving the reduction of criminal careers of serious, repeat offenders. Despite its conceptual simplicity, however, criminal career is often treated as having no depth or scope, for example, merely as the number of crimes or length of prison sentence. These indices often give no or little consideration to criminal career parameters and tend to account for only a small portion of the construct of criminal careers. Ideally, a simple metric to measure the onset, duration, termination, severity, and change in severity of a pattern of criminal activities is needed to facilitate the description and measurement of criminal careers of offenders. <p>The Criminal Career Profile (CCP), which uses commonly available criminological information and requires minimal professional skills to execute, can be considered a simple and precise measure of criminal careers. The CCP is a chronological representation on a Cartesian plane of the time in years an offender has spent in prison (y-axis) plotted against the time in years spent out of prison (x-axis) of all incarcerations and time spent in the community. Given that the CCP is a step function, a regression line can be generated. Serious crimes are generally given longer sentences, and more time in than out of prison would generate a steeper regression line. Shallower regression lines result from less time in than out of prison. As such, the CCP regression line can be considered an indication of the seriousness of offending, and the slope or angle of the regression line can be considered a quantitative index of criminal career severity. Larger slopes or angles (used in this Program of Research) suggest more serious criminal careers. Conversely, smaller slopes or angles suggest less serous criminal careers. Taken altogether, the CCP can provide a quantitative measure of criminal careers: its onset (age at first conviction, which is plotted as the first point on a CCP graph), duration (total time in and out of prison since onset), severity (CCP slope/angle), change in severity (change in CCP slope/angle), and termination (end point or when the CCP slope or angle becomes smaller and closer to 0).<p>This Program of Research was done to assess the CCPs validity and utility in measuring offenders criminal career. More specifically, the investigation focused on the seriousness of criminal careers. A number of criteria were used to validate the CCP angles ability to measure criminal career severity. In Study 1, psychopaths and violent recidivists showed a significantly larger CCP angle than nonpsychopaths and violent nonrecidivists, respectively. Finer groupings based on risk (high, medium, and low), a number of risk measures (Psychopathy Checklist Revised, Violence Risk Scale, and Violence Risk Scale Sexual Offender Version), and different types of offenders (i.e. violent, nonviolent, sexual, Dangerous Offenders) were used in Study 2. Two consistent findings across different groups of offenders in Study 2 were CCP angles significantly varied as a function of risk group and correlated with risk ratings. The pattern of results was that larger CCP angles tended to be associated with worse risk groups. In Study 3, both treated offenders and treatment dropouts showed a reduction in CCP angles from pre- to post-treatment. A nonsignificant interaction of group by treatment, however, suggests that post-treatment changes could not be attributed to treatment. Finally, Study 4 showed that CCP angles change with age. Taken altogether, the results of the four studies provided converging evidence for the validity of the CCP as a measure of criminal careers and the CCP angle as a measure of criminal career severity.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Wideband data acquisition units have been used as part of an instrumentation system for several decades. Historically, these units operated asynchronously from each other, and from the rest of the instrumentation system when installed on the same test vehicle. When many wideband units are required to slave their formats or sampling rate to the test vehicle’s event of interest such as external computer event clock, radar, or laser pulse train; few solutions were available. Additionally, a single test vehicle may use ten to thirty wideband units operating at up to 20 Mbps each. Such systems present a challenge to the instrumentation engineers to synchronize, transmit safety of flight information, and record. This paper will examine a distributed wideband data acquisition system in which each acquisition unit operates under its own data rate and format, yet remains fully synchronized to an external fixed or variable simultaneous sampling rate to provide total system coherency. The system aggregate rate can be as low as a few Mbps to as high as 1 Gbps. Data acquired from the acquisition units is further multiplexed per IRIG-106 chapter 10 using distributed data multiplexers for recording.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In current practice sensor data is digitized and input into computers, displays, and recorders. To try to reduce the volume of digitized data, our original hypothesis was that by selecting a subset of digital values from an over-sampled signal, we could improve signal identification and improve perhaps Nyquist performance. Our investigations did not lead to significant improvements but did clarify our thinking regarding the usage of digitized data.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There are two misty understandings about PCM telemetry system in conventional concept: Waveform can not be restored accurately; to be restored accurately, a measured signal must be sampled at a higher sample rate. This paper discusses that by making use of multi-sample rate DSP technology, the sample rate of a measured signal can be reduced in transmission equipment, or system precision can be retained even if the performance of low pass filter declined.

Lake Vättern has been contaminated with high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) for decades, which could be due to the release of wastes from industries and urban communities surrounding the water system. This has especially had a negative effect on fatty fishes, which could accumulate large amounts of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and thereby also become a source of environmental toxicants to humans through consumption. Most PCB analysis only quantify a handful of congeners, the so called indicator-PCBs (I-PCBs), but this might leave out important information. In this study, an existing analytical method was improved by supplementing with additional congeners to detect a larger set of PCB congeners in Arctic char (Salvelinus salvelinus) and European whitefish (Coregonus acronius) caught from Lake Vättern, Sweden. New pre-packed multilayer silica columns from CAPE technologies were tested and used to pretreat the fish samples prior to analysis with a Gas Chromatograph coupled to low-resolution Mass Spectrometer using Atmospheric Pressure Ionization (API GC/MS). It was found that modifications of the clean up method for PCBs were necessary, such as lowering the amount of hexane in the washing step and combining the two eluent fractions. The Arctic char and the European whitefish showed a fat content of 0.18% and 0.74%, respectively. Concentrations of detected congeners ranged from 0.5 to 1470 pg g-1 fresh weight (fw) in Arctic char and varied between 1.2 to 6550 pg g-1 in European whitefish. For Arctic char and European whitefish, the WHO2005-TEQ values were 0.4 pg g-1 fw and 0.6 pg g-1 fw, respectively. The greatest total PCB concentration of 25900 pg g-1 was measured in European whitefish. The total concentration of I-PCBs (#28, 52, 101, 138, 153, 180) was 3710 pg g-1 for the Arctic char and 13900e pg g-1 for the European whitefish. All obtained results were lower than those reported from other studies. Constructed congener profiles show that the two species have similar ratios of PCB #138 and #153. Differences are observed of PCBs with a higher chlorination grade, probably due to differences in migration patterns, habitats of the lake, diets, metabolism or bioaccumulation.