During the last eight years, interest in assessing the comparative performance of teachers, schools and educational policies has greatly increased in the USA, the UK and other countries. Particularly in the context of declining budgets for education, a serious concern for accountability and effectiveness of the school systerr1 has led to attempts to rate teachers, schools, education authorities...

In recent years a number of studies have attempted to rank drugs by a single measure of harmfulness as the basis for decisions about scheduling and classification. These efforts are fundamentally flawed, both conceptually and methodologically. The effort to provide a single measure masks the variety of non-comparable dimensions that are relevant, the fact that benefits are ignored for most, but...

Williams, Brannan and Lartigue (1987) (Clinical Vision Science, 1, 367-371) reported that poor readers took significantly longer to search letter arrays for a target than did good readers. In addition, they reported that blurring the letter arrays leads to faster search times for poor readers and a loss of the significant differences between the groups seen with unblurred displays. In a recent ...

BACKGROUND Accurate diagnosis by clinicians is the cornerstone of decision making for recommending clinical interventions. The current best evidence from research concerning diagnostic tests changes unpredictably as science advances. Both clinicians and researchers need dependable access to published evidence concerning diagnostic accuracy. Bibliographic databases such as EMBASE provide the mos...

There is too little engagement between community computing and human± computer interaction. In the future there should be more. Better integrating community computing and human ± computer interaction can help to make HCI richer and more comprehensive, conceptually and methodologically. It can help HCI to have more of an impact on society and on everyday collective life. Six examples are brie ̄y ...

In the paper, the objects, tasks, and a general procedure of the sociological analysis of Web search engine query logs are described and illustrated by a methodologically complete study of the cross-nation search image changes based on two-year spaced query logs of the national search audience.

We are grateful to colleagues in both our individual institutions and in the Spreading the Gains from Globalisation Network (particularly those participating in the Bellagio Workshop in September 2000) for discussions around many of the issues covered in this Handbook and also to Lest anyone feel overwhelmed by the depth of detail in this Handbook, especially with respect to the sections on met...

We introduce a simulation model of the port of Calais with a focus on the operation of immigration controls. Our aim is to compare the cost and benefits of different screening policies. Methodologically, we are trying to understand the limits of discrete event simulation of rare events. When will they become “too rare” for simulation to give meaningful results?