1,720,954 research outputs found
Measuring the Work of the Federal District Courts
Full text linkThe federal district court system is one of the largest and most impactful organizations in the United States. The nation’s ninety-four district courts resolve hundreds of thousands of cases, large and small, each year. Yet surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to measuring the work of the federal district courts—a vitally important task. It’s important because it affects substantive law; judges routinely decide the merits of issues based on how busy they think they and other judges are. It’s important because the law relaxes procedural protections—such as the Speedy Trial Act’s seventy-day deadline to bring criminal defendants to trial—if a court is perceived to be exceptionally busy. And, perhaps most directly, it’s important to the operation of the district courts; we can’t allocate judicial resources where they are most needed if we can’t accurately assess each district’s workload. The problem of judicial resource allocation is particularly acute today because the number of district court judgeships has remained stagnant for over two decades, the longest period in this country’s history. The backlog of new judgeships to be created provides all the more reason that we accurately measure the workload of the district courts.
This Paper identifies problems with—and proposes improvements to—the way in which the federal courts measure their workload. For the last fifty years, the federal courts have used a system of case weights to measure their work. The system is simple: each type of case (patent, antitrust, etc.) gets a numerical weight, and the weights of all cases filed in a district are added together to determine the workload of that district. Through an exhaustive empirical analysis—spanning tens of thousands of cases, hundreds of thousands of pages of judicial opinions, and millions of docket entries—I find that the current system of case weights may significantly mismeasure court workload. Because the current system assigns a single, static weight (e.g., 4.72) to all cases of a particular type (e.g., patent cases) it assumes that cases of that type take, on average, the same amount of judicial work in every district court. But I find that patent case workload varies significantly between districts. I further analyze some of the most common types of cases in the federal courts (product liability cases and two types of civil rights cases) and find that they, too, exhibit significant district-todistrict variation in case workload. My results suggest that the current system overestimates the workload in some districts and underestimates it in others.
This Paper’s theoretical contributions are anchored in these empirical results. The Paper is the first to pose—and the first to attempt to answer—a fundamental question: what should we be measuring when we measure a court’s work? I consider three distinct ways of conceptualizing judicial workload based on: tasks (e.g., number of cases resolved), outputs (e.g., number of pages of opinions issued), or resources (e.g., judge time). I categorize existing workload metrics into one of these categories. And I explain why, for courtadministration purposes, a resource-based metric (specifically, one based on the amount of time judges spend on cases) is better than other potential metrics.
Building on this analysis, the Paper proposes a more accurate measure of workload that is just as easily administrable. Instead of the current system, which relies on an estimate of a case’s workload based solely on the case’s type (i.e., a static case weight), I propose measuring workload dynamically using evidence of actual work performed for each case. More specifically, I suggest calculating a dynamic weight for each case using, with minor modification, the same information the federal courts already use to calculate static case weights. My proposal addresses the issue identified in this Article and improves the way we measure the work of the federal district courts
Improved software verification through program path-based analysis
Full text linkThis thesis describes the generation and use of program invariants to improve software reliability. It introduces PRECIS, a technique for automatic invariant generation based on program path guided clustering. The invariants
generated by PRECIS can be directly used by programmers for regression testing and improved code documentation. The generated invariants can also be used as part of hardware error detectors, by checking variables key to program output. PREAMBL, a bug localization technique, is introduced as away of providing increased utility to the generated invariants in diagnosing post-release bugs.
The benefi ts of these uses of the generated invariants are shown through experiments. The high control-flow coverage of generated invariants is demonstrated for the Siemens benchmark suite, and higher quality is indicated when compared with Daikon, a prior technique. Fault injection experiments show high error detection coverage for several types of manifested errors. Results for PREAMBL show higher scoring for localized paths than previous approaches.Item withdrawn by Mark Zulauf ([email protected]) on 2012-12-12T16:55:22Z
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University of Illinois Theses & Dissertations (ID: 1)
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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