风波迭起的明胶事件

4月9日,著名主持人赵普发微薄称：“不要再吃老酸奶和果冻,尤其是孩子,内幕很可怕,不细说。”经济观察报调查新闻部记者朱文强也在微博上爆料：其实这才是今年3.15晚会的重头,可惜片子没播。两条微博已经发出,转载量剧增,一时间老酸奶被推上了风口浪尖。     

Fifty years of impact factor: pros and cons

BACKGROUND: The Impact Factor (IF) was thought up 50 years ago, and it is currently the best available bibliometric index. Despite its shortcomings, the IF is widely used and offers, at present, the best simple tool to help libraries decide which journals to purchase. DISCUSSION: The use of the term "impact factor" has gradually evolved, especially in Europe, to include both journal and author impact. With this meaning, it has become the most used tool in evaluating scientific quality in decisions regarding funding and academic career. This ambiguity and use of IF to compare authors may be misleading. There is poor correlation between the citation frequency of a certain article and the IF of the journal in which it is published. There is a marked bias towards the English language journals compared with those in other languages. Even within the field of Occupational Medicine, the distribution of IF exhibits a wide spread between specialty subsets. CONCLUSION: The IF is a flawed measure of quality of academic staff performance. Searching for the highest IF is not equal to searching for the truth. There is still much work to be done to develop truly objective measures of scientific quality. Like all measures, the use of IF has to be tempered with knowledge of its limitations and common sense.     

The pros and cons of point-of-service plans

A relatively new addition to the growing list of managed care options, POS plans contain some of the cost control elements of HMOs. Yet they also allow enrollees some of the freedom of choice associated with PPOs.     

The pros and cons of modelling malaria transmission

The question is approached through three examples. Ross's model, although very simple and formulated a priori, yielded important epidemiological insights: the existence of a threshold contact rate (vectorial capacity); the decreasing sensitivity of the endemic level to changes in the contact rate, as the latter gets larger; the return to the same equilibrium endemic level, as long as the contact rate remains the same; the progressively decreasing impact of a given reduction in the contact rate until a new equilibrium is reached. The second example is Macdonald's model, in particular his sensitivity analysis; two constraints are pointed out: the weakest point, on which to concentrate control efforts, cannot be identified automatically by the sensitivity analysis; the calculation of the expected impact of an intervention commonly assumes too much uniformity (e.g. of human of vector behaviour) and this commonly leads to exaggerated expectations. The third example is the Garki model, briefly considered in terms of its assumptions, of its behaviour, of its actual utilization (only for teaching, so far), and of the cost of its development. Looking forward, three uses of models are discussed. It is suggested that, critically used, they have a place in training, in planning control and in research. With respect to their application to planning, it is argued that the need for new data is not necessarily great, also that some rather difficult direct measurements might be substituted by indirect measurements, a point illustrated by the expected relationships, following the Garki model, between different dimensions of "intensity" of malaria.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

The pros and cons of isolation and containment.

This paper is a review of isolation and containment models, policies and procedures. The arguments for and against various practices are outlined. The psychological effects of isolating patients in single rooms and new ideas for staff intervention are discussed. A modern, flexible approach is suggested.