Credential, defined

It s all educational. Sure, Merck would treat doctors to nice hotels and dinners, but it always included credentialed speakers and solid scientific information, this argument goes. The scientific value of the meetings had to have preeminence, insists Boyd Clarke. (The former executive who spent more than 15 years at Merck notes that I avoided islands as venues.) And it s true—depending on how education is defined. Almost every event includes some shop talk, even if it s just a few minutes listening to the rep push his or her new product between periods at a hockey game. 

The accumulation of scientific knowledge is an additive process in which short steps of progress are created out of techniques and concepts already in existence. In this manner, a scientist will propose theories to the relevant community with the knowledge, and stoic acceptance, that these facts will be re-examined and redefined by a number of subsequent investigators. .. In science, facts arise only as a result of collective acceptance. .. good science is defined by consensus, not by credentials. The scientific community rightly treats new theories with skepticism, an attitude which does not reflect on the proponent of the theory but on the training of the scientific community. 

Collaborative drug therapy management is most successful when the nature of the collaborative arrangement, the competencies and credentialing required, and the quality assurance checks that will be used to assess performance are defined at the outset in each specific setting. 

Defining appropriate expertise is even more complex. The FDA informally recognizes the expertise and hence the credentials of some individuals, but does not provide any formal certification. This recognition seems to be based on a combination of experience, academic credentials (in computer systems, regulation, and laboratory management), and general familiarity. (The more often an investigator successfully reviews a laboratory audited by a specific validator the... 

In its most simple form, a PKI is a system for publishing the public key values used in public key cryptography. There are two basic operations common to all PKIs. Certification is the process of binding a public key value to an individual, organization, or other entity or even to some other piece of information, such as a permission or credential. On the other hand, validation is the process of verifying that a certificate is still valid. How these two operations are implemented is the basic defining characteristic of all PKIs. 

This fits in with a pattern - that can be identified in a number of countries - whereby the state defines various categories of technical worker based on the abstract-practical continuum. This increases the degree of hierarchy in technical labor, so that the workforce becomes stratified by credentials and mode of entry into the technical workforce and a direct correspondence emerges between the the type of qualification possessed and the engineer s position in the division of labour (Meiksins and Smith 1996, p. 240). This leads to a more fragmented occupational community for engineering. 

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