Assuring Excellence, or Merely Reassuring - Policy and Practice in Promoting Mediator Quality

Mediation practice in the United States has grown substantially over the last two decades, as has the number of people offering to serve as mediators. This growth has led some to argue that competency standards are needed to protect consumers and promote the integrity of mediation processes. While professionals and researchers have tried over the past fifteen years or so to define what mediators do and better understand how to do it well, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs, roster administrators, and parties seeking neutrals have had to make day-to-day choices

Congress, the Executive Brand and the Dispute Resolution Process

This rapid, recent expansion in administrative proceedings and related litigation is not, of course, a unique or isolated phenomenon. It is part of a greatly increased reliance on our judiciary to decide all manner of social, political, and economic issues. Much of this litigation may be an inexorable result of complicated social and economic interactions, heightened resort to regulatory schemes to deal with environmental, health and safety, civil rights and welfare concerns, and other historical factors. However, the point has been reached where much of it is unnecessary, unproductive, and less than ideally suited for many of the conflicts involved. More and more administrative, business, regulatory, employment, benefit, and other decisions are being made by judicial officers pursuant to marginally relevant criteria in forums not always conducive to efficient decisionmaking.

SEIS: Insight’s Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure of Mars

By the end of 2018, 42 years after the landing of the two Viking seismometers on Mars, InSight will deploy onto Mars’ surface the SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure) instrument; a six-axes seismometer equipped with both a long-period three-axes Very Broad Band (VBB) instrument and a three-axes short-period (SP) instrument. These six sensors will cover a broad range of the seismic bandwidth, from 0.01 Hz to 50 Hz, with possible extension to longer periods. Data will be transmitted in the form of three continuous VBB components at 2 sample per second (sps), an estimation of the short period energy content from the SP at 1 sps and a continuous compound VBB/SP vertical axis at 10 sps. The continuous streams will be augmented by requested event data with sample rates from 20 to 100 sps. SEIS will improve upon the existing resolution of Viking’s Mars seismic monitoring by a factor of ∼2500 at 1 Hz and ∼200000 at 0.1 Hz. An additional major improvement is that, contrary to Viking, the seismometers will be deployed via a robotic arm directly onto Mars’ surface and will be protected against temperature and wind by highly efficient thermal and wind shielding. Based on existing knowledge of Mars, it is reasonable to infer a moment magnitude detection threshold of ∼3 at 40∘ epicentral distance and a potential to detect several tens of quakes and about five impacts per year. In this paper, we first describe the science goals of the experiment and the rationale used to define its requirements. We then provide a detailed description of the hardware, from the sensors to the deployment system and associated performance, including transfer functions of the seismic sensors and temperature sensors. We conclude by describing the experiment ground segment, including data processing services, outreach and education networks and provide a description of the format to be used for future data distribution