A medical journal's beta site: experimentation at NEJM

When continuous development becomes the norm on the social web, finding a way to put forward new development ideas to your audience and get their feedback at an early stage is the natural result. This article discusses how one major medical journal created a ‘beta’ site to support new online development and gather user feedback, speeding development initiatives and creating intrinsic value in the experimental environment. The goals of the site, organization of the teams, and practical and brand benefits are discussed.     

Measuring Socioeconomic Status at the School Level

Why is there an increased need for quantitative indicators of student socioeconomic status at the school level? What alternative approaches have been used to measure SES? Can principals accurately estimate the SES distribution of their student populations? How do their estimates correlate with other indexes o f family SES?     

Linking at the US National Library of Medicine

The development of services provided by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which dates back to 1836, is described. MEDLINE, a database of 10-plus million references and abstracts to the world's biomedical literature, was put on the World Wide Web for free searching in 1997 as a system called PubMed, whose use has grown to over 250 million searches per year. PubMed features a variety of links between MEDLINE references and related information – full-text journal articles, DNA sequence data, medical knowledge bases, etc. – at websites within and outside NLM. PubMed is a major component of a larger NLM system, Entrez, which integrates access to a number of genome-related databases with linking features similar to those of PubMed. The newest linked service, which became a reality in February 2000, is PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health's free repository for primary research reports in all the life sciences.     

Resilience of anthropometric data assembly strategies to imposed error

The aim of this study was to examine strategies for selecting a criterion value during anthropometric data assembly and their resilience to imposed error. Sixty-seven women aged 16-60 years were subjected to three separate series of measurements, which included six skinfolds and three girths. A random error term was added to the first of the three series of measurements to produce a pseudo-series containing error, termed the 'erroneous replicated series'. Five strategies were then used to determine the criterion value of each of the replication series: the first measurement, the mean of the first two measurements, the mean of all three measurements, the mean of the closest two measurements and the median of the three measurements. The technical error between the criterion values of the true and the flawed replication series for each of the selection strategies was calculated. We found that, for five of the skinfolds and all of the girths, the median value provided the smallest technical error of measurement between the criterion values for the true and erroneous replication series. We conclude that the strategy of selecting the median of three measurements is the most resilient to imposed error.     

The Nature of Teacher Leadership in Schools as Reciprocal Influences Between Teacher Leaders and Principals

As part of a comprehensive qualitative study of 6 schools noted for teacher leadership 28 respondents were interviewed. It was noted that teacher leadership often involved the mutual influence between teacher leaders and principals. These influences are discussed from the perspectives of each of the 6 schools and respondent status as teacher leader, teacher nominator, and administrator. Further to these influences, the data suggest relationships between teachers, teacher leaders, and principals, in these schools, which are reflective of 3 models of “leadership reciprocity” based on unique features found to be typical of these schools.