The Longitudinal Emergency Medical Technician Attributes and Demographics Study (LEADS) provides a representative sampling of EMTs throughout the United States. This study examines the relationship between instructor quality and National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians certification examination outcomes. Results show significant correlations, based on instructor quality on initial exa...

Cooperation between manufacturing and other functional groups is critical to improve the success of new products. However, integrating operations and development methodologies is often challenging due to conflicting priorities and organizational structures. Improving the quality of product development and the transition to manufacturing is not a new venture. Organizations have been incorporatin...

Software reuse is being pursued in an attempt to improve programmer productivity. The concept of reuse is to permit various work products of software development to be used on more than one project in order to amortize their development costs. Productivity is not the only advantage of reuse although it is the most widely publicized. By incorporating reusable components into a new product, the c...

Although there is increasing use of eco-labeling, conditions under which eco-labels can command price premiums are not fully understood. In this article, we demonstrate that the certification of environmental practices by a third party should be analyzed as a strategy distinct from—although related to—the disclosure of the eco-certification through a label posted on the product. By assessing ec...

The industrialization of software development induces several changes to the development process as software development becomes distributed over company borders. They cooperatively develop individual components that are later assembled to software systems. This division of responsibilities requires a stricter quality assurance and in fact, creates a setting where the certification of software ...

With the pervasive deployment of software in dependable systems used in everyday life, society is increasingly demanding that software used in critical systems must meet minimum safety, security and reliability standards. Certification is the procedure by which an authorized person or agency assesses and verifies characteristics of a system or product in accordance with established requirements...

Vital statistics are widely used to evaluate trends in health and illness, inform policy, and allocate resources among health priorities. Literature comparing autopsies to clinical death certification has shown that the clinical "cause of death" certification is inaccurate or incomplete in many cases. Short of increasing autopsies, however, these studies have proposed few improvements. Using th...

This paper presents a competence-focused assessment framework for evaluating project management certifications regarding their certification of success-relevant project manager competences. The framework’s goal is to provide an instrument to assess the quality of certification frameworks for project managers that organizations such as the International Project Management Association (IPMA) and ...

The conviction of Dr Harold Shipman for murdering 15 of his patients and the recent audit of his practice carried out by Professor Richard Baker, have raised many issues about the certification of death by doctors1. Inevitably, there have been calls for a radical overhaul of the system2. There are many problems with the certification and registration of death, and various proposals have been ma...