Faculty Bibliography

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said that failed to resolve the issue of leadership. ''Under the president's plan,'' Mrs. Clinton said, ''we still don't know who is accountable within our federal government.'' ''In the Northwest, we have 42,000 travelers going and coming from Asia every week,'' Ms. [Mary Selecky] said. ''We don't want to have to deal in an isolated way with a plane carrying potentially infected people.'' ''They gave us a list of work that they expect us to do,'' Ms. Selecky said, ''but they've only given us a little bit of one-time money. We need a sustained effort.''

The goals include helping make sure that ''people aren't coming and going from a workplace at the same time'' and generally to ''encourage people to stay at home'' if they have any sense they are infected, the official said. ''The main purpose of this implementation plan is to say, 'Department X, you need to be doing the following,' '' he said. The nation's borders would almost certainly not be closed, the draft summary says, because the virus would enter the country anyway, enforcement would be difficult, and such an action would ''present foreign affairs complications and have significant negative social and economic consequences.''

The publication process is complex. Many factors can allow error, even fraud, to slip through. They include economic pressures for journals to avoid investigating suspected errors; the desire to avoid displeasing the authors and the experts who review manuscripts; and the fear that angry scientists will withhold the manuscripts that are the lifeline of the journals, putting them out of business.By promoting the sanctity of peer review and using it to justify a number of their actions in recent years, journals have added to their enormous power. A widespread belief among nonscientists is that journal editors and their reviewers check authors' research firsthand and even repeat the research. In fact, journal editors do not routinely examine authors' scientific notebooks. Instead, they rely on peer reviewers' criticisms, which are based on the information submitted by the authors. The public and many scientists tend to overlook the journals' economic benefits that stem from linking their embargo policies to peer review. Some journals are owned by private for-profit companies, while others are owned by professional societies that rely on income from the journals. The costs of running journals are low because authors and reviewers are generally not paid

Dr. [Jean A. Bernard], a pioneering French hematologist who diagnosed the cancer that the shah of Iran kept secret for many years, and that ultimately sent him to an American hospital in a chain of events that led to the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979-81, died at his home in Paris on April 17. He was 98

Dr. Jean A. Bernard, a pioneering French hematologist who diagnosed the cancer that the shah of Iran kept secret for many years, and that ultimately sent him to an American hospital in a chain of events that led to the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979-81, died at his home in Paris on April 17. He was 98. The shah was deposed in the Iranian revolution of 1978 and fled to exile in Mexico. When his cancer worsened in 1979, President Carter allowed him to enter the United States for treatment at New York Hospital in Manhattan. A few days later, a group of Iranians seized the American Embassy in Tehran, holding 52 staff members hostage for more than 14 months, until January 1981

BACKGROUND: Residents must master complex skills to care for culturally and linguistically diverse patients. METHODS: As part of an annual 10-station, standardized patient (SP) examination, medical residents interacted with a 50-year-old reserved, Bengali-speaking woman (SP) with a positive fecal occult blood accompanied by her bilingual brother (standardized interpreter (SI)). While the resident addressed the need for a colonoscopy, the SI did not translate word for word unless directed to, questioned medical terms, and was reluctant to tell the SP frightening information. The SP/SI, faculty observers, and the resident assessed the performance. RESULTS: Seventy-six residents participated. Mean faculty ratings (9-point scale) were as follows: overall 6.0, communication 6.0, knowledge 6.3. Mean SP/SI ratings (3.1, range 1.9 to 3.9) correlated with faculty ratings (overall r=.719, communication r=.639, knowledge r=.457, all P<.01). Internal reliability as measured by Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the 20 item instrument was 0.91. Poor performance on this station was associated with poor performance on other stations. Eighty-nine percent of residents stated that the educational value was moderate to high. CONCLUSION: We reliably assessed residents communication skills conducting a common clinical task across a significant language barrier. This medical education innovation provides the first steps to measuring interpreter facilitated skills in residency training

TALKING WITH DOCTORS By David Newman. 199 pp. Hillsdale, NJ., Analytic Press, 2006. $32.50. ISBN 0-88163-446-8

This paper investigates the possibility of using the motion of a patient's anterior surface in combination with a motion model to compensate for internal respiratory motion during tracked biopsies. Position data from two electromagnetically tracked sensors, one placed on the patient's sternum, the other incorporated into a biopsy needle, were acquired during a liver biopsy. The data were used to evaluate the correlation between the position measurements of the two sensors and to derive an affine motion model to assess respiratory motion compensation for image-guided interventional procedures. The correlation reached up to 94% for ranges of steady respiration. The residual motion of the internal sensor after compensation is reduced by a factor of approximately four.

The media have begun beating the stuffing out of another drug, Ambien, as they show pictures of drowsy sleepwalkers cooking or stuffing themselves at the refrigerator in the middle of the night, or write stories about the risks to motor vehicle operators. The fact is, the vast majority of the author's patients experience no side effects whatsoever. In fact, Ambien is so well tolerated and effective that it has changed the way doctors treat insomnia. Medical misinformation of this kind helps neither doctors nor their patients