A whole industry of adjudication has developed, with fulltime assessors travelling the world with trundle wheels and stopwatches to verify claims.
State health clinics are certified by federal assessors.
Better, he says, for trained lay assessors to sit alongside judges.In this section The moment of truth Twelve clueless men Liberty's enfant terrible ReprintsIn small countries with a lively gossip network and active media, it is hard to find unbiased jurors, or to hide them from intimidation by violent gangsters.
The number of appeals against decisions by independent assessors that people are fit for work has quadrupled in two years, from 68,000 in 2009 to a projected 240,000 by the end of this financial year at a cost to the taxpayer of £80m.Some believe that the payment-by-results system itself is failing.
Under a law that came into force in 2005, some 50,000 "people's assessors" have been appointed in China to serve in trials for all but the most minor criminal offences.
ReprintsDr Grossmann and his colleagues removed age-related information from the transcripts, and also any clues to participants' nationalities, and then passed the edited versions to a group of assessors.
These assessors were trained to rate transcribed responses consistently, and had been tested to show that their ratings were statistically comparable with one another.The assessors scored participants' responses on a scale of one to three.
One researcher, who spent a decade observing how mothers look after young children in supermarkets, found that only 1% of children judged unattractive by independent assessors were safely secured in the seats of grocery carts.
Selected on merit and appointed for five years, Chinese assessors resemble English lay magistrates, likewise appointed for several years, rather than common-law jurors, who are usually chosen at random and serve for just one trial.
In 2003 the government gave itself the power to abolish juries in long and complex fraud trials, arguing that judges sitting alone or accompanied by expert "assessors" would be able to reach speedier, safer and cheaper verdicts.
In New Orleans in November they overwhelmingly approved the abolition of the ancient property-tax system, in which seven neighbourhood assessors would routinely undervalue the properties of their friends.
