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Fair warning this answer will be fairly longish and a bit meandering. My goal is to provide useful nuggets of information for not just potential interns but also for longer term stays as well as for the plain old curious. A peek as well into the unique NIH culture. Coinciding with its gravy train days, I was at NIH from 1997 to 2009. The longest stretch of my life in one place, I'll start with what I missed most intensely once I left, the library services and the seminars, the latter happily not a permanent loss as I'll explain.The NIH has incomparable biomedical research library services and here's whyThe uninitiated and came-of-age in the internet era may instinctively turn to Google Scholar as their first and last stop for biomedical literature. Poor they, say I. Those lucky enough to have institutional access to Scopus or Web of Science might use it as their go to guide but neither can match PubMed access at NIH. Wait, what? PubMed, that old, clunky, so 20th century has-been of a database? Yes, and here's why. Unlike Google Scholar, PubMed lists only vetted peer-reviewed journals, and unlike Scopus, where access to a full-length article depends on the degree of institutional access, PubMed access at NIH guarantees access to every full length article that can be pulled up by a PubMed search. Here's how.The links below give more information about NLM's Loansome Doc service, who has access to it and how, etc.Loansome Doc Ordering SystemLoansome Doc® Fact SheetThe NIH offers incomparable access to scientific seminarsOn any given (work) day, a veritable who's who in biomedical research and beyond is likely at the NIH campus giving a seminar. The weekly Calendar of Events (the Yellow Sheet) lists all the notable ones. Was called the Yellow Sheet because in the pre-internet era, it would show up in one's physical mail box as a bright yellow sheet with all the seminars for that week listed in black. I recall getting it in my mail box until well into 2005 or thereabouts. Of course, now it's online:Calendar of Events (Yellow Sheet). Searchable by day, week, month but that's not all.There's also the fabulous NIH videocast, NIH VideoCasting and Podcasting. The list of talks with the videocast icon are available for live as well as recorded streaming (see figures below). Very few of these talks are restricted to NIH alone, meaning they're available free of cost to anyone with internet access anywhere in the world. Veritably a priceless scientific resource. Go ahead and check it out. Have a favorite or famous scientist in your field? If they ever visited NIH and gave a seminar that was available on videocast (i.e., in the past 20 years or so), likely you'll find that seminar in the videocast archive, Past Events (as of Nov 21, 2015, listing 8, 080 events). Many are the days I watched a live seminar at my computer in the midst of an assay at the bench. Unfortunately, these days livestreaming for on-campus employees is deemed a luxury because of its cost. With the Great Recession, the NIH gravy train came to a hard and abrupt stop indeed.NIH Interest GroupsSeminars bring us logically to another NIH treasure, the various NIH Interest Groups (IGs), Scientific Interest Groups.Join NIH, get an NIH email account, join the IG(s) of your choice and you'll be signed up to those IGs' emails and listserves.The largest and most important ones like IIG (Immunology Interest Group) sponsor weekly seminars (Wednesdays 4:15PM in Building 10's Lipsett auditorium) where visiting scientists present their latest data or an overview of their field.The IIG also sponsors an annual 3-day retreat, where NIH immunologists present posters and seminars of their work to each other.Interest group listserves are a useful place to post questions about urgent reagent/mouse needs, and find and interact with potential collaborators and/or those with similar research interests.Parking at the NIH, post-9/11 a perennial nightmareTraffic into and out of the NIH is a nightmare. Difficult to conceive but true? Pre-9/11, the campus was open (no silly and useless wall that cost millions of dollars to build), i.e., could just walk onto the campus, and entrance by vehicle into and out of campus required nothing but the NIH ID card. Flash it at the electronic monitor at any of the many entrances, barriers would swing up, just drive in. Heaven, but those days are now tragically long gone. Now, wait endlessly at the three or four manned security gates.As the NIH budget increased year on year from the Clinton era thru' 2005-2006, where else would the excess money go but into constructing more and more multi-million dollar buildings? Result? Parking's at a premium even with all the new multi-level car parks.Speaking of NIH parking lots reminds me of how hierarchy is alive and kicking, yes very much so, even in so-called egalitarian US.From the parking office in Building 31, everyone who works at NIH can get a parking permit to hang off of the rearview mirror.The parking permits are in different colors, Red, Black, Orange or Green.Red are for important staff, i.e., PIs (Principal Investigators) and above.Black are for NIH staff, Orange for NIH contractors, and Green for CP (Car Pool).NIH Parking spots are not just designated for handicapped but there are also Red and CP spots.Only those with Red parking stickers can park in Red parking spots.CP spots are the source of many mirthful memories for me. There were a lot more CP parking spots than people with CP parking permits. Everyday this would lead to a most comical situation. CP spots unoccupied after 9:30AM were fair game for everyone else. So for example, the employee parking lot in front of Building 4 where I worked would fill up around 9AM with general parking permit staffers (Black/Orange) who'd park in CP spots and just sit in their cars until 9:30 AM. Why? As long as the cars were occupied, no parking ticket could be issued to them. Every so often, campus police would drive in and hound them out, and they'd just drive around campus and come back in by 9:30 to park in the now-open CP spots. Ah, the bureaucratic quirks of a US federal government agency.Visitors need to park in designated Visitor parking lots.The one place sure to have available spots anytime of the day? The open-plan one at the South end, Lot 41 (see figure below).More parking info here: Parking InformationTaking the metro? Get metro passes or a Metro SmarTrip card at the parking counter in Building 31. Yes, NIH subsidizes metro travel for its employees. Get your metro pass quota for the month and you don't have to pay for metro travel in the DC metro system. In 2009, this amounted to ~$130 of metro travel per month. Apply, Recertify, Modify or Terminate your NIH Transhare MembershipCan't get both the Metro pass and parking permit. Only one or the other.The NIH Tunnel, a surrealistic subterranean workplaceMention of lot 41 of course brings me to one of most intriguing and helpful quirks of the NIH Bethesda campus, 'The Tunnel' (see figure below). Starting in Building 14 in front of lot 41, it stretches ~1 mile, all underground, all the way north to Building 10 (the Clinical Center), feeding a vast network of building maintenance offices for all the buildings above. Why I found it so interesting? Such a vast subterranean workplace for the hundreds of building engineers and technicians maintaining these buildings, all built in the Cold War heyday of nuclear holocaust fears and distinctly imprinted as such.I often parked in Lot 41 for two reasons, one, the long subterranean walk was damn good exercise, an ~ 1mile-long uninterrupted tunnel available come rain, sleet, snow or shine, and two, all my experimental mice were housed in Building 14 so I could go in, pick up the mice I needed for my experiment that day, walk to my lab with my boxed mice, and immediately get started with my experiment for the day.Building 13, the regrettably lost, unforgivably unlamented way of doing artisanal craftsperson-like scienceBack when there was still an artisanal craftsperson-like touch to science, Building 13 supplied NIH the workforce necessary for such efforts. Custom-made lab equipment, maintenance, what have you, there was a dedicated cadre of talented NIH personnel who could jerry-rig what one sought. Sadly, in the 21st century as folks retired and budgets shrank, NIH also lost this distinct artisanal craftsperson approach to biomedical scientific research, and now Building 13's workforce is mostly gutted, a sad shadow of its former glory.Brief MiscellanyKeep in mind that in post-9/11 NIH, even the NIH ID gives after-hours access only to those building(s) a person is authorized to enter. Since Buildings 10, the Clinical Center, and 31, which houses the NIH Federal Credit Union and the R&W (Research & Welfare) office, are so central to NIH life, all NIH personnel have access to them.The R&W gives discounted/subsidized tickets to all kinds of DC area sports and entertainment events. Also both 10 and 31 have gift shops.National Institutes of Health, the annual NIH Research Festival used to be held in the Natcher building across from NLM, now held in Building 10, the Clinical Center. An opportunity for NIH graduate students and post-docs to present their work to peers and experts.During the Festival, biomedical research vendors from all over set up stalls in the Building 10 parking lot. Great time to get an overview on the latest and greatest in commercial research supplies and technologies, and of course, all kinds of freebies.There's also a Summer Poster Presentation where summer students get to present their work.Office of Intramural Training & Education at the National Institutes of Health, the OITE (Office of Intramural Training and Research) in Building 2 is the place to get this kind of info.I often joke that if I ever became homeless, I'd make my way into Building 10, the Clinical Center, arguably the largest brick building in the world. So many nooks and crannies, a person could live there for decades with no one the wiser.Food at the NIHIronically for the world's premier biomedical research institute, food at the NIH is for the most part overpriced crap.Cafeterias (see figure above) are in Building 10 (the Clinical Center, 2 of them), 31, 1 and 12, plus a Starbucks (closes at 4PM) in the vast Building 10 lobby.The best food? In Building 1 where else. After all, that's where many, if not all, Institute Directors plus the NIH Director work. Again, class and hierarchy are very much alive and kicking in the US, at least going by the NIH.The Building 10 basement 1 cafeteria's salad bar is better than the one in 31 but both are flagrantly overpriced!The Building 10 2nd floor cafeteria is the only one open until 8PM.The NIH storeEvery lab at the NIH gets a spending card to use at the NIH store to buy lab and office supplies.During its heyday, there were 2 such stores, one each in Buildings 35 and 10. The Building 35 one shut doors sometime in 2005-2006.The NIH store offersAll kinds of office supplies, especially the distinctive lab notebooks with the embossed NIH logo.All kinds of lab consumables (pipettes, flasks, culture plates, etc), and reagents (PCR kits, dyes, etc.).All these purchases come off of the budget of the lab/office the employee/contractor works in.All this, of course, in addition to ordering online through the procurement system and getting supplies delivered to the lab/office.Finding people at the NIH: Use NED(NIH Enterprise Directory; see figure below), NIH Enterprise Directory (NED)The NIH budgetPIs at the NIH famously get to play permanently (sort of) in the sand box. No grants to write, plus an annual lab budget that typically runs into a few million dollars per lab (most of it gets spent on procuring, breeding and housing research mice).One of the funniest quirks about the NIH is control not through money but through space.The US government FY (Financial Year) runs from October to October.Come September, there'd be about a 3 to 4 week period when nothing could be ordered while the administrators worked on the budget reconciliation.So around July-August, labs would start ordering and stockpiling the supplies they needed to get thorough until October.The budget was also on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, i.e., unspent money at year-end meant less money the next year.This meant that around July-August, labs would estimate how much money was still left in the lab budget.Too much? Go on a spending spree but fast, ordering big ticket items like Taqman machines, DNA sequencers and the like!Yes, Christmas at NIH is in August.So there you have it, an extremely brief summary of what NIH is like from the inside.For someone headed to the NLM, meeting/listening to Eugene Koonin should definitely be on their to-do list. And if you meet Sameer Antani, this ex-NIHer Quoran says hi.Thanks for the A2A, Kritika Gupta.

This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.Really? Well, let’s start with:18 USC 922(g)(g)It shall be unlawful for any person—(1) who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;(2) who is a fugitive from justice;(3) who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));(4) who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution;(5) who, being an alien—(A) is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or(B) except as provided in subsection (y)(2), has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa (as that term is defined in section 101(a)(26) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(26)));(6) who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;(7) who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship;(8) who is subject to a court order that—(A) was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had an opportunity to participate;(B) restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child; and(C) (i) includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or(ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury; or(9) who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.This is the Federal “prohibited persons” provision, a cornerstone of Federal firearms law. It describes the various criteria defining a “prohibited person”, and actually prohibits them shipping, transporting, receiving or possessing any firearm in or affecting interstate commerce (and any gun that’s been in an FFL’s hands has, by definition, moved in interstate commerce). Punishment for violating this section of the US Code is laid out in Section 924(a)(2), and prescribes a punishment not to exceed 10 years imprisonment and a fine not to exceed $250,000. 18 U.S. Code § 922 - Unlawful acts, 18 U.S. Code § 924 - Penalties, 18 U.S. Code § 3571 - Sentence of fineThe National Instant Check System or NICS is required to be used by all FFLs transferring a firearm from their possession to anyone who isn’t an FFL or the lawful owner of the firearm giving it to the FFL for purposes of inspection, repair or sale who is now due to reclaim his property. That requirement is paragraph (s) of section 922.NICS conducted about 26 million background checks in 2018 (a few million of those are in furtherance of carry permit laws in some states; most are for purchase of a firearm). From 1998 through 2018 it has issued 1.6 million denials, or about 80 thousand a year. Depending on the specific year those denials can be as high as 120,000. NICS Firearm Checks: Month/Year | Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Denials | Federal Bureau of InvestigationThese denials are evidence of a crime; up to 120,000 people in a year tried to buy a firearm with a prohibiting event on their record. The most common reason for denial was for conviction on a felony offense, followed by being a fugitive from justice (active arrest warrant pending), being an unlawful user of marijuana or narcotic drugs (it’s still illegal under Federal law), and misdemeanor domestic violence convictions. These are generally not things you just forget when you belly up to the counter of a gun store, so the general assumption is that 120,000 people are committing a 10-year Federal felony.How many are prosecuted, annually? About 12. Approximately one one-hundredth of one percent of people who intentionally tried to buy a firearm with a legitimate prohibiting event on their Federal record actually see a courtroom for committing this crime. Only about 1% are even given a second look by the FBI/ATF. https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694290.pdfWhile I wouldn’t expect 100k prosecutions annually, for a number of reasons (false denials are a thing, and it’s plausible that someone might be unaware they are a fugitive from justice or that a particular event in their lives is considered prohibiting), these can be better resolved with dramatic improvement in long-term crime numbers by following up on the denial. If the denial was incorrectly issued, the records can be cleaned up, minimizing the chance this will be a problem in future. If a person was unaware of a prohibiting event or that an event was prohibiting, it could be an honest mistake, “everybody gets one”. But now you’re on notice; you can’t own a firearm, and Feds should follow up with local law enforcement to be sure they don’t (or that the prohibiting event is resolved; being a fugitive from justice can be as simple as a failure to appear warrant for a speeding ticket, not a permanent disqualifier).Now, that’s assuming they’re denied in the first place. The Sutherland Springs church shooting happened because the Air Force JAG forgot to report Devin Kelley’s domestic violence court-martial and bad conduct discharge to NICS, and as a result, his record was clear enough that an Academy Sports outside San Antonio sold him the AR-15 he used in the shooting as well as two other pistols he had on him at the conclusion of the chase. A subsequent audit of all military Judge Advocate General’s Corps dispositions found over 4000 other disqualifying convictions that went unreported to NICS; this represents about 8 years’ worth of the JAG Corps’ total caseload. So Kelley wasn’t an isolated “whoopsie” that fell through the cracks; they weren’t even trying.You want another one? How about…18 USC 922(q)This is the Federal Gun-Free School Zones Act. Passed largely in response to the Stockton Shooting as well as a worrying general rise in violent crime and gang violence correlated with the 1990–91 recession, Congress made it illegal to possess a firearm while in a school zone (basically within 1000 feet of the nearest entrance to a school building), unless the person was a law enforcement officer on duty, was on their own property, was participating in a school-sanctioned event for which the gun was necessary, or if State law made other provisions for licensed firearm carriers. After a round through the courts challenging Congress’s power to make such a law (the initial version relied on the fact that public schools received Federal funds and were therefore Federal facilities, which was rejected by SCOTUS), an amended version using the Commerce Clause to define the prohibited guns was allowed to stand in 1998.Enforcement? Boils down to a few million of these littered on poles next to sidewalks and streets:For 99% of schools, that’s the extent of the means to proactively enforce this law.One guess how many school shooters have seen the sign and gone “oh darn, guess I won’t be committing multiple counts of premeditated murder here, there’s a sign on a post warning of a 5-year Federal prison sentence if I walk past it with a gun”.If you want a “gun free zone”, a real one, this is how you do it:Entry checkpoints with metal detectors and armed security. Ideally, backed up with a few of these guys strategically positioned to be able to quickly get to any of a few nearby checkpoints:They don’t have to be fully kitted out SWAT-style, just visibly present and visibly ready for some put-upon little punk in a trenchcoat planning on taking his frustrations out on his classmates. A would-be shooter can try to shoot his way past a security checkpoint, Matrix-style, but against several officers trained not only to shoot but to work together, that can group and converge in seconds instead of minutes, that shooter’s not getting to the kinds of double-digit casualty counts that make shooters into household names.What’s that I hear? “Too expensive”? “Requires double the current active-duty police force during school hours”? “10,000 public schools needing security retrofits that already can’t afford textbooks”? Valid points, all. But I’ll let you in on a little secret; you’d need all this anyway to actively prevent mass killings at schools. Even without any so-called “assault weapons” in civilian hands. Most events tracked as “mass shootings” by the Gun Violence Archive are committed with handguns, which the Supreme Court ruled are very definitely protected by the 2A regarding their ownership and storage in a ready-to-use state. So you can do whatever you think is in your power to ban scary-looking rifles, and kids intent on killing classmates will break into their parents’ safe for a 9mm with 10-round magazines, and with just two or three magazines he’ll have enough to be all the cable news networks can talk about for days. Even short of that, mass shooters have also brought bombs to school (fortunately for us, to date, they’ve been lousy bombmakers), and in countries with strict gun control, vehicles are the weapon of choice.There is, of course, a less expensive option:Yeah, yeah, get it all out of your system. I’m calling to “arm the teachers”, so naturally I want overworked underpaid educators who routinely engage in fistfights with their own students in many areas of the country to be packing, so instead of simply body-slamming an unruly student they can empty a magazine into him.And why not? Coach Aaron Feis was a security guard when not coaching football at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He had a Florida carry permit. But as school faculty, he was prohibited to carry a firearm on campus. Had he had the opportunity to shoot back instead of valiantly (and vainly) trying to shield students from the gunfire, some lives might have been saved at the cost of one mentally-deranged recently-expelled former student who had already fallen through every single extant crack in the school, social and criminal justice systems at every level.This story of teachers being willing and able, but prevented by law, from carrying on campus is repeated across every school in the country. You balk at the cost in man-hours and equipment required to “harden the targets” with entry checkpoints; the very least we can do is allow the teachers who are willing and able to maintain proficiency with a firearm to carry that firearm in their own workplace. They have to be there anyway. We’re already paying their salaries to teach our kids. Subsidizing the cost of their carry permits and making an exception to the law can be done at a small fraction of the cost of a single police officer or private security contractor.And besides, teachers own guns. This is not news. People can easily bring weapons into schools. This is not news either. If teachers carrying concealed at school were going to be a problem, it would already be one. A teacher would already have been the perpetrator of a mass shooting, laws or no laws; they’re subjected to even less scrutiny by what little campus security we have than the students.This is classic “blood in the streets” dire prediction mode from gun control advocates, that they roll out any time there’s a proposal to increase the presence of weapons held by trained, licensed law-abiding individuals. It has never come true. Concealed carry, open carry, Constitutional carry; every time one of these laws is proposed, you hear “wild wild west, people gunned down for jaywalking”. Hasn’t happened yet, in fact by most measures concealed carriers are more law-abiding than the police themselves.The ATF, at last report, has a budget of about $1.2 billion, with which it employs about 5,000 total enforcement agents and administrative staff. Those manpower numbers are nearly identical to the numbers from 2000, and the budget increases are easily attributable to COLAs based on inflation in that time. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and ExplosivesThe agency is required by law to audit every FFL’s sales and inventory records annually. It manages a full audit of just 7% of the roughly 135,000 FFLs. It is also required to process and approve NFA forms for the manufacture, sale, purchase and licensure of Title II weapons categories, as well as ordinary FFLs. Last I checked the backlog on this paperwork was about 8 months long.A records retention center in West Virginia houses not only NICS, but the ATF Firearms Tracing Center and a records repository “of last resort” for 4473 forms and inventory logs of gun dealers who have gone out of business without a successor entity to take over the bookkeeping. As of the mid-2010s, that facility was literally bursting at the seams and buckling the rafters under the weight of paper records it is generally prohibited to digitize in any computationally-queryable formatunder the Firearm Owner’s Protection Act, because a searchable database of gun transaction records is a “registry” and the US government is forbidden by law to maintain one. It recently got approval to scan them in as ordinary image files, no OCR or other metadata translation allowed, and searchable only by filename, basically giving them a digital equivalent of the paper file system they were managing. That effort is still ongoing, as they had about 285 million records as of when they got the ability to do this, and receive about two million new sheets of paper every month.So the ATF does not have the people or the funding it requires to do the job with which it is tasked. This causes it to chronically fail to meaningfully enforce the bulk of US firearms law, simply because it does not have the time to devote to a full investigation. Neither, for that matter, does the FBI, who is better-funded, but most of its funding in the 21st Century has been earmarked for counter-terrorism, drug interdiction and financial crimes in partnership with other three-letter agencies. They’re not going to drop all that to go bust Johnny Gangbanger for trucking straw-bought handguns across the Indiana-Illinois border to sell on Chicago’s West Side or in East St Louis. That leaves the matter to State and local law enforcement, where laws for felon-in-possession and for trafficking across state lines either don’t exist or carry much lower penalties (a year or two in jail instead of 10). Most of these charges end up getting dropped in plea-bargain deals for crimes with more public interest like drug possession or burglary.

Students who are looking to score good in ACC 290 can visit the website http://www.acc290genius.com which helps you to score well in your exams. ACC 290 Week 1 Practice Connect Practice Assignment Complete the Week 1 Practice in Connect. Note: You have unlimited attempts available to complete practice assignments 1 On July 1, Tommy Wrigley established Wrigley Home Appraisal Services, a firm that provides expert residential appraisals and represents clients in home appraisal hearings. TRANSACTIONS 1. The owner invested $100,000 in cash to begin the business. 2. Paid $20,250 in cash for the purchase of equipment. 3. Purchased additional equipment for $15,200 on credit. 4. Paid $12,500 in cash to creditors. 5. The owner made an additional investment of $25,000 in cash. 6. Performed services for $9,750 in cash(more)