Watching Czechs Look West

I prefer the way we live in my home of Krevitsonitze, the Czech factory computer engineer named Dzhenek told me. Together we flew toward Prague, conversing in broken English and pitiful Czech with the aid of a bilingual dictionary. Dzhenek was going home after four months spent in Pennsylvania, where he had been part of a team installing his Czech company\u27s first American export: a giant computer-directed lathe in a machine-tools factory

Nonprofit Interjurisdictionality

The federal system of dual sovereignties guarantees that most American legal regimes tolerate jurisdictional overlap between the enforcement authority of federal and state agencies. This Article explores interjurisdictional overlap in the context of nonprofit legal supervision. Notwithstanding the common assumption that states police mission while the IRS polices money, it is suggested here that the overlap has become much broader than generally has been supposed; that over a wide range of common misconduct among the preponderance of organizations in the nonprofit sector, either the Internal Revenue Service or state authorities could, if they wanted to and in no particular order, exercise statutory or common law authority to prosecute nonprofit charities, including their officers and directors. As a policy matter, this overlap has generally been viewed as positive by both state and federal officials, who can defer or shift the burden of supervision to avoid spending scarce resources, to avoid political difficulty, or for other reasons. In many cases, they can build on one another\u27s work, use the legal precedent established by one another\u27s litigation, or act in independent disregard of it. They can act first, second, or not at all. If legislation currently being considered becomes law, furthermore, it may become easier than ever for regulators to coordinate their activities and to share information; but the lines of authority will not (as a general matter) become more sharply drawn. This Article raises several disadvantages that result from the increasing breadth of overlap, including erratic and inconsistent growth in the law, unpredictable law enforcement, a lack of accountability and responsibility for supervision, and some confusion among nonprofit counselors and the organizations they advise. It offers some suggestions for new lines and for redelineating authority along historical lines

Substance Abuse at UCC Drafting Sessions

A few substance abusers start down the road to addiction with a single reckless experiment. Such was the case of Professor Doe , a consumer law specialist of my acquaintance. The entanglement of Professor Doe in the UCC drafting process began when he accepted what seemed like the harmless invitation of a friend to attend a single National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws ( NCCUSL ) drafting session in1990. Session after session followed. Soon he found himself in a descending spiral-attending study groups, legislative task forces, and conference programs being held in strange cities to debate a new or revised provision of some new or revised Article of the Uniform Commercial Code ( UCC ). In retrospect, it is apparent that Doe attended far more sessions than he ever thought he would-and far more than many Code experts and others in the legal profession now believe are prudent to maintain professional health and respectability.3 Doe conceded that each and every moment of these meetings was not glamorous or stimulating, but the cumulative effect was intoxicating. He was drawn into the orbit of the private legislatures, where he felt as though he had the power of a senator, or, at least, a senator\u27s aide. Doe experienced sensory highs as a result of his attendance at these sessions, but these sensations diminished in intensity as time passed. He told friends that with each new Revision project it became necessary to go deeper and deeper into his subject matter in pursuit of satiation. This became physically exhausting: the circulation of one revised draft after another-often with new alternative comments to previously redrafted alternative provisions, followed by debate that could last for a great many minutes, took its numbing toll. Doe exhausted more and more of his resources in efforts to replicate his initial ecstasy

Reasonable Behavior at the CFPB

The article focuses on deception in the marketplace and the role of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It cites the novel The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair which portrays the truth in mortgage and purchase agreement. It states that CFPB was tasked to improve honesty and the quality of information in the marketplace

Late Charges, Regular Billing, and Reasonable Consumers: A Rationale for a Late Payment Act

This article considers the reasonable behavior of consumers in relation to law and the policies that tolerate the assessment of late payment penalties, fees, and surcharges. Attention is trained principally on the inadequately-regulated cycle of creditor billing and debtor repayment practices, setting aside the problem of the magnitude of late fees. It is apparent from this study that the problems associated with late fee billing cycles cut a wide swath of recurring debt repayment—telephone, electricity, and water bills, for example—and, more importantly, this article argues that the variety of different demands on consumers interacts to magnify consumer difficulties. The article then identifies some common deficiencies in legal regimes that aid and abet those who send out bills, with attention to information-processing and other cognitive difficulties that arise from the late payment regime. It evaluates existing statutory and common-law causes of action through which consumers might hope to recover from billers who intentionally or recklessly diminish the likelihood that deadlines will be met, and, in light of deficiencies, proposes a Late Payment Act which could be adopted on a state- or nationwide basis to address key shortcomings

Workplace-based assessment: effects of rater expertise

Traditional psychometric approaches towards assessment tend to focus exclusively on quantitative properties of assessment outcomes. This may limit more meaningful educational approaches towards workplace-based assessment (WBA). Cognition-based models of WBA argue that assessment outcomes are determined by cognitive processes by raters which are very similar to reasoning, judgment and decision making in professional domains such as medicine. The present study explores cognitive processes that underlie judgment and decision making by raters when observing performance in the clinical workplace. It specifically focuses on how differences in rating experience influence information processing by raters. Verbal protocol analysis was used to investigate how experienced and non-experienced raters select and use observational data to arrive at judgments and decisions about trainees’ performance in the clinical workplace. Differences between experienced and non-experienced raters were assessed with respect to time spent on information analysis and representation of trainee performance; performance scores; and information processing––using qualitative-based quantitative analysis of verbal data. Results showed expert-novice differences in time needed for representation of trainee performance, depending on complexity of the rating task. Experts paid more attention to situation-specific cues in the assessment context and they generated (significantly) more interpretations and fewer literal descriptions of observed behaviors. There were no significant differences in rating scores. Overall, our findings seemed to be consistent with other findings on expertise research, supporting theories underlying cognition-based models of assessment in the clinical workplace. Implications for WBA are discussed

Psychometric properties of a generic, patient-centred palliative care outcome measure of symptom burden for people with progressive long term neurological conditions

Background There is no standard palliative care outcome measure for people with progressive long term neurological conditions (LTNC). This study aims to determine the psychometric properties of a new 8-item palliative care outcome scale of symptom burden (IPOS Neuro-S8) in this population. Data and Methods Data were merged from a Phase II palliative care intervention study in multiple sclerosis (MS) and a longitudinal observational study in idiopathic Parkinson's disease (IPD), multiple system atrophy (MSA) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). The IPOS Neuro-S8 was assessed for its data quality, score distribution, ceiling and floor effects, reliability, factor structure, convergent and discriminant validity, concurrent validity with generic (Palliative care Outcome Scale) and condition specific measures (Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale; Non-motor Symptoms Questionnaire; Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire), responsiveness and minimally clinically important difference. Results Of the 134 participants, MS patients had a mean Extended Disability Status Scale score 7.8 (SD = 1.0), patients with an IPD, MSA or PSP were in Hoehn & Yahr stage 3±5. The IPOS Neuro-S8 had high data quality (2% missing), mean score 8 (SD = 5; range 0±32), no ceiling effects, borderline floor effects, good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.7) and moderate test-retest reliability (intraclass coefficient = 0.6). The results supported a moderately correlated two-factor structure (Pearson's r = 0.5). It was moderately correlated with generic and condition specific measures (Pearson's r: 0.5±0.6). There was some evidence for discriminant validity in IPD, MSA and PSP (p = 0.020), and for good responsiveness and longitudinal construct validity. Conclusions IPOS Neuro-S8 shows acceptable to promising psychometric properties in common forms of progressive LTNCs. Future work needs to confirm these findings with larger samples and its usefulness in wider disease groups