Class Certification and the Substantive Merits

The United States Supreme Court, in its 1974 decision, Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, held that judges should not conduct a preliminary inquiry into the merits of a suit as part of the decision whether to certify a class. The federal courts have struggled ever since to honor Eisen\u27s bar while still conducting a credible certification analysis-a task complicated by the fact that merits-related factors are often relevant to Rule 23 requirements. The result is a muddled body of case law in which courts tend to certify generously and avoid inquiring into the merits of substantive issues even when those issues are crucial to the certification analysis. This approach creates high social costs by inviting frivolous and weak class action suits. This Article argues that the Eisen rule should be abolished. Trial judges should assess competing evidence, not just allegations, and should evaluate case strength whenever the specific requirements of Rule 23 call for an inquiry into merits-related factors. For example, a party relying on a substantive issue to show commonality or predominance should have to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the issue. The Article also goes further and recommends that judges always conduct a preliminary inquiry into the merits before certifying a class, regardless of whether merits-related factors are directly relevant to a specific requirement of Rule 23. The Article first reviews the history of the Eisen rule and surveys the current state of the law, before turning to a policy analysis of the rule\u27s effects. The policy discussion criticizes the traditional arguments and then offers a systematic evaluation of error and process costs. Error costs must be evaluated in light of the extremely high probability of postcertification settlement. Eisen\u27s liberal approach creates a substantial risk of erroneous certification grants that cannot be corrected later when a case settles. This risk coupled with the high likelihood of settlement invites frivolous and weak class action suits. The result is a serious error-cost problem with regard to certification. At the same time, requiring a merits review at the certification stage increases the risk of erroneous certification denials. But for several reasons this risk is not likely to increase dramatically, and the associated costs are not likely to be large. The net result therefore supports a merits inquiry, and this conclusion remains valid even after process costs are added to the policy mix

Just-in-time characterization and certification of DOE-generated wastes

Transportation and disposal of wastes generated by Department of Energy (DOE) activities, including weapons production and decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) of facilities, require that wastes be certified as complying with various regulations and requirements. These certification requirements are typically summarized by disposal sites in their specific waste acceptance criteria. Although a large volume of DOE wastes have been generated by past activities and are presently in storage awaiting disposal, a significant volume of DOE wastes, particularly from D&D projects. have not yet been generated. To prepare DOE-generated wastes for disposal in an efficient manner. it is suggested that a program of just-in-time characterization and certification be adopted. The goal of just-in-time characterization and certification, which is based on the just-in-time manufacturing process, is to streamline the certification process by eliminating redundant layers of oversight and establishing pro-active waste management controls. Just-in-time characterization and certification would rely on a waste management system in which wastes are characterized at the point of generation, precertified as they are generated (i.e., without iterative inspections and tests subsequent to generation and storage), and certified at the point of shipment, ideally the loading dock of the building from which the wastes are generated. Waste storage would be limited to accumulating containers for cost-efficient transportation

Just Certification

Through the justice principles –equality, time, status, need, efficiency and worth– developed by Jon Elster, we show in this article how fair trade certification for producers is legitimatised by stakeholders. Based on a field investigation with coffee growers in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia and with fair trade organisations in the North (Max Havelaar/FLO, Andines and Artisans du Monde), the analysis firstly reviews just certification according to the impersonal criteria of “mechanical” justice, such as equality, time and efficiency. The second section looks at more individualised criteria such as the status, need and worth of the beneficiaries. Finally, it determines in what way fair trade is really a mixed bag, one which calls upon different principles of justice to justify what it is out to accomplish. The main result of the analysis is that fair certification granted to producer organisations is not being distributed according to a unique system of justice based on just one criterion. On the contrary, fair trade is a complex and hybrid bag that uses different components from each distribution procedure.À travers les principes de justice – égalité, temps, statut, besoin, efficience et mérite – développés par Jon Elster, cet article montre de quelle manière la certification du commerce équitable pour les producteurs est justifiée par les acteurs. Basée sur une étude de terrain auprès de caféiculteurs travaillant au Pérou, en Équateur et en Bolivie, et auprès d’organisations du commerce équitable au Nord (Max Havelaar/FLO, Andines, Artisans du Monde), l’analyse traite en premier lieu la juste certification selon les critères impersonnels de la justice « mécanisée », comme l’égalité, le temps et l’efficacité. La seconde partie porte sur des critères plus individualisés comme le statut, le besoin et le mérite des bénéficiaires. Enfin, il s’agit de voir en quoi le commerce équitable représente une configuration mixte, faisant appel à différents principes de justice pour justifier son action. Il découle de l’analyse que la certification équitable octroyée aux organisations de producteurs n’est pas distribuée selon un système de justice unique, relevant d’un seul critère. Au contraire, le commerce équitable fait appel à une configuration complexe, hybride, utilisant différents éléments de chaque modalité de distribution

Certification- possibilities and challenges for obtaining sustainable tourism

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the possibilities and challenges of certification for obtaining sustainable tourism. On the basis of the purpose, I have designed two research questions. 1.Which are the possibilities of certification? 2.Which are the challenges of certification? My problem approach is descriptive and my aim with the thesis is to explain “how things are” at a certain time and situation. I have chosen do to a case-study on the Costa Rican certification for sustainable tourism. I have been doing interviews with managers of the hotels and guests staying at certified hotels in Costa Rica. I choose an intensive design to investigate a phenomenon deeply, which is to do interviews with few people from different hotels. My questionnaire is made up by mostly open questions, as in a qualitative approach. But I mixed it with some standardized questions as well. I use context knowledge from existing literature and research, and use it for my case- study. The thesis highlights the importance of future sustainable tourism achievements in order to minimal negative tourism impacts worldwide. Some businesses are being social and environmental responsible, others falsely claim to be it and some just doesn’t care. Certification has possibilities and challenges for obtaining sustainable tourism. Certification could be a future important strategy, when it comes to helping businesses to improve themselves. Going through a certification process is by the certified businesses educational and it enables manager to make decisions with confidence, even though they self don’t maintain enough knowledge. The study shows that most costumers don’t choose a certified hotel due to the certification. Instead motives for business to improve its operation by becoming certified should be promoted as an educational program and to improve the business functional dimension. According to Grönroos (2007) developing the functional dimension would add increasing value for customers and create an important competitive advantage. It is very important as many companies today provide customers with similar technical products. This thesis highlights that the customer’s awareness of certification are low but instead the total perceived quality at certified hotels are high. It can be assumed that certification can increase the value for costumers and therefore create competitive advantages for certified businesses

The organics iceberg and the tyranny of organic certification

The existence of an ‘organics iceberg’ is a hypothesis rather than a fact. Nevertheless, reports in The World of Organic Agriculture that there are 37,245,686 certified organic hectares worldwide and that this accounts for 0.86% of global agriculture are lower bounds, in fact underestimates, of the size and the achievements of the organics movement. While such statistics are seductively precise, they are merely the countable manifestation of a larger phenomenon, and perhaps a much larger phenomenon, which may be - an organics iceberg. Just how large is the uncounted ‘world of organic agriculture’, as compared to the counted world of certified organic agriculture, is a matter of speculation, but its existence is doubtless. In a recent study in India comparing the experience of organic farmers and chemical farmers, all of the 350 organic farmers lacked certification. A fortress organics mentality denies the reality that there are many reasons to be non-certified organic, and they include cost, access, and size of operation, lack of market advantage, and there is a plethora of other reasons including independence, privacy, bother, paper-work, intrusion, bio-security, and farm sovereignty. Black-letter organics has its place, but it is a place at the organics table and it is not the whole table. Consumers can differentiate between ‘organic’ and ‘certified organic’. In a study of Australian consumers half of the organics price premium was attributed to the ‘organic’ claim and half was attributed to the ‘certified’ claim. The captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith, may have wondered “Perhaps there is an iceberg?” In The World of Organic Agriculture, we may be getting a good view of the tip but how much ‘berg’ are we disregarding? It is time to move beyond the tyranny of certification to embrace, celebrate and foster the diversity of the organics diaspora. A fuller and broader metrification of the world of organic agriculture is a challenging enterprise and will undoubtedly introduce a greater degree of fuzziness into the metrics, nevertheless, accounting for a world of certified and non-certified organic agriculture would be a timely enterprise that can lay the basis for warranting more organics research, more organics research funds, greater recognition for organics, greater consideration for the organics enterprise, and more shelf space for organics produce

Medical specialty certification exams studied according to the Ottawa Quality Criteria: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND Medical specialty certification exams are high-stakes summative assessments used to determine which doctors have the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes to treat patients independently. Such exams are crucial for patient safety, candidates' career progression and accountability to the public, yet vary significantly among medical specialties and countries. It is therefore of paramount importance that the quality of specialty certification exams is studied in the scientific literature. METHODS In this systematic literature review we used the PICOS framework and searched for papers concerning medical specialty certification exams published in English between 2000 and 2020 in seven databases using a diverse set of search term variations. Papers were screened by two researchers independently and scored regarding their methodological quality and relevance to this review. Finally, they were categorized by country, medical specialty and the following seven Ottawa Criteria of good assessment: validity, reliability, equivalence, feasibility, acceptability, catalytic and educational effect. RESULTS After removal of duplicates, 2852 papers were screened for inclusion, of which 66 met all relevant criteria. Over 43 different exams and more than 28 different specialties from 18 jurisdictions were studied. Around 77% of all eligible papers were based in English-speaking countries, with 55% of publications centered on just the UK and USA. General Practice was the most frequently studied specialty among certification exams with the UK General Practice exam having been particularly broadly analyzed. Papers received an average of 4.2/6 points on the quality score. Eligible studies analyzed 2.1/7 Ottawa Criteria on average, with the most frequently studied criteria being reliability, validity, and acceptability. CONCLUSIONS The present systematic review shows a growing number of studies analyzing medical specialty certification exams over time, encompassing a wider range of medical specialties, countries, and Ottawa Criteria. Due to their reliance on multiple assessment methods and data-points, aspects of programmatic assessment suggest a promising way forward in the development of medical specialty certification exams which fulfill all seven Ottawa Criteria. Further research is needed to confirm these results, particularly analyses of examinations held outside the Anglosphere as well as studies analyzing entire certification exams or comparing multiple examination methods

Letter to the Editors

I just read your report on education in Minnesota in the Women\u27s Studies Newsletter (Winter 1974). I\u27m pleased that you gave some coverage to Minnesota, which, from my current geographical vantage point, seems like a progressive paradise. However, the emphasis in your paragraph on the State Board of Education is somewhat misleading. You mention the State Department of Education\u27s certification requirement and then add that groups like the feminist Emma Willard Task Force have been used to teach the sexism component. Actually, there would be no such certification requirement without the Emma Willard Task Force. I am one of the founders of the Task Force and I worked with it nearly full-time for the first year (Spring 1971 to Fall 1972). Most of our energy that year was expended in convincing the State Department and school administrators that sexism was a serious problem which they should deal with in their official capacities. It was no easy task. We learned some valuable political lessons about evasion, buck-passing, tokenism, divide-and-conquer, and co-optation

Predicting Paid Certification in Massive Open Online Courses

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been proliferating because of the free or low-cost offering of content for learners, attracting the attention of many stakeholders across the entire educational landscape. Since 2012, coined as “the Year of the MOOCs”, several platforms have gathered millions of learners in just a decade. Nevertheless, the certification rate of both free and paid courses has been low, and only about 4.5–13% and 1–3%, respectively, of the total number of enrolled learners obtain a certificate at the end of their courses. Still, most research concentrates on completion, ignoring the certification problem, and especially its financial aspects. Thus, the research described in the present thesis aimed to investigate paid certification in MOOCs, for the first time, in a comprehensive way, and as early as the first week of the course, by exploring its various levels. First, the latent correlation between learner activities and their paid certification decisions was examined by (1) statistically comparing the activities of non-paying learners with course purchasers and (2) predicting paid certification using different machine learning (ML) techniques. Our temporal (weekly) analysis showed statistical significance at various levels when comparing the activities of non-paying learners with those of the certificate purchasers across the five courses analysed. Furthermore, we used the learner’s activities (number of step accesses, attempts, correct and wrong answers, and time spent on learning steps) to build our paid certification predictor, which achieved promising balanced accuracies (BAs), ranging from 0.77 to 0.95. Having employed simple predictions based on a few clickstream variables, we then analysed more in-depth what other information can be extracted from MOOC interaction (namely discussion forums) for paid certification prediction. However, to better explore the learners’ discussion forums, we built, as an original contribution, MOOCSent, a cross- platform review-based sentiment classifier, using over 1.2 million MOOC sentiment-labelled reviews. MOOCSent addresses various limitations of the current sentiment classifiers including (1) using one single source of data (previous literature on sentiment classification in MOOCs was based on single platforms only, and hence less generalisable, with relatively low number of instances compared to our obtained dataset;) (2) lower model outputs, where most of the current models are based on 2-polar iii iv classifier (positive or negative only); (3) disregarding important sentiment indicators, such as emojis and emoticons, during text embedding; and (4) reporting average performance metrics only, preventing the evaluation of model performance at the level of class (sentiment). Finally, and with the help of MOOCSent, we used the learners’ discussion forums to predict paid certification after annotating learners’ comments and replies with the sentiment using MOOCSent. This multi-input model contains raw data (learner textual inputs), sentiment classification generated by MOOCSent, computed features (number of likes received for each textual input), and several features extracted from the texts (character counts, word counts, and part of speech (POS) tags for each textual instance). This experiment adopted various deep predictive approaches – specifically that allow multi-input architecture - to early (i.e., weekly) investigate if data obtained from MOOC learners’ interaction in discussion forums can predict learners’ purchase decisions (certification). Considering the staggeringly low rate of paid certification in MOOCs, this present thesis contributes to the knowledge and field of MOOC learner analytics with predicting paid certification, for the first time, at such a comprehensive (with data from over 200 thousand learners from 5 different discipline courses), actionable (analysing learners decision from the first week of the course) and longitudinal (with 23 runs from 2013 to 2017) scale. The present thesis contributes with (1) investigating various conventional and deep ML approaches for predicting paid certification in MOOCs using learner clickstreams (Chapter 5) and course discussion forums (Chapter 7), (2) building the largest MOOC sentiment classifier (MOOCSent) based on learners’ reviews of the courses from the leading MOOC platforms, namely Coursera, FutureLearn and Udemy, and handles emojis and emoticons using dedicated lexicons that contain over three thousand corresponding explanatory words/phrases, (3) proposing and developing, for the first time, multi-input model for predicting certification based on the data from discussion forums which synchronously processes the textual (comments and replies) and numerical (number of likes posted and received, sentiments) data from the forums, adapting the suitable classifier for each type of data as explained in detail in Chapter 7

Feasibility of a just-in-time inventory in a job-shop environment

The Oscar Mayer Machine Assembly and Parts Supply Assembly Inventory has been experiencing a great increase in holding value in the past years. No more resources are to be allotted to this inventory and the continued increase in holding value creates a situation of dead capital unable to be used elsewhere and unable to be depreciated. This inventory must be reduced and the feasibility of implementing a just-in-time inventory in order to accomplish this is the focus of the paper. The literature indicates that a full JIT implementation is impossible because of the custom engineering manufacturing environment of the inventory. Other more practical considerations such as inventory bloat and long lead times make staying with the present system just as unacceptable. Based on the parts usage and parts repeatability data and the aggregate inventory data, the recommendation is to accept and implement a partial JIT system including the principles of vendor relations, supplier certification, and employee involvement

Study of the costs and benefits of composite materials in advanced turbofan engines

Composite component designs were developed for a number of applicable engine parts and functions. The cost and weight of each detail component was determined and its effect on the total engine cost to the aircraft manufacturer was ascertained. The economic benefits of engine or nacelle composite or eutectic turbine alloy substitutions was then calculated. Two time periods of engine certification were considered for this investigation, namely 1979 and 1985. Two methods of applying composites to these engines were employed. The first method just considered replacing an existing metal part with a composite part with no other change to the engine. The other method involved major engine redesign so that more efficient composite designs could be employed. Utilization of polymeric composites wherever payoffs were available indicated that a total improvement in Direct Operating Cost (DOC) of 2.82 to 4.64 percent, depending on the engine considered, could be attained. In addition, the percent fuel saving ranged from 1.91 to 3.53 percent. The advantages of using advanced materials in the turbine are more difficult to quantify but could go as high as an improvement in DOC of 2.33 percent and a fuel savings of 2.62 percent. Typically, based on a fleet of one hundred aircraft, a percent savings in DOC represents a savings of four million dollars per year and a percent of fuel savings equals 23,000 cu m (7,000,000 gallons) per year