David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge, has devised a novel way of weighing the benefits of one health resolution against another, using the concept of ‘microlives’. Instead of measuring habits such as red meat consumption in years lost from the average life, he calculates the effects of daily choices in small units of time, called microlives.

Spiegelhalter divided up the years remaining for a 35-year-old with a typical life span of 80 years into nearly a million 30-minute periods and defined each half-hour as one microlife. He then calculated how various habits may affect the microlives a person has left. more…

The website Scribd describes itself as the “world’s largest online library,  a place to read, publish, and share written documents.”

In March this year Peter Doshi, a post doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, sent the BMJ a link to a page displaying corresondence with the US Food and Drug Administration, urging it to investigate CellTexTherapeutics Corporation and RNL Bio.

Doshi wondered if the BMJ might be interested in launching a similar online campaign as part of its drive to persuade drug companies to publish the full data from clinical trials. more…

Eighteen months ago a colleague and I were looking at the online and print BMJ with a view to discovering the ratio of UK to international content. At the time planned changes to both the NHS in England and the US healthcare system were generating a lot of news, comment, and debate.

Colleagues were spending increasing amounts of time in the US, India, and elsewhere, attending conferences and participating in workshops, yielding in rise in article submissions from these countries. This was helped in part by the decision to recruit a European research editor, based in the Netherlands, to complement a similar post based in the US. We also have an education editor based in Sydney. more…

Video games have come under attack by the mainstream media in the past few weeks, with extensive coverage of Anders Breivik’s apparent use of first-person shooter games as training aids before the Utoya massacre. Conversely, health researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the positive attributes of certain computer games.

Depression

This week’s most popular BMJ article looks at SPARX; a new cognitive behavioural therapy based computer game for young people with depression.

Researchers from the University of Auckland found that adolescents suffering from depression can benefit just as much from specialised computer therapy as they do from one-to-one therapy with a clinician.

SPARX is an interactive 3D fantasy game, similar to World of Warcraft, where a single user undertakes a series of challenges to restore balance in a virtual world dominated by GNATs (Gloomy Negative Automatic Thoughts).

more…

The UK schools regulator Ofsted used to employ a team of people who sent questionnaires to parents if their children’s school was undergoing an inspection.

But last year the process was automated with the launch of Parent View, a website that allows parents to fill in the 12 questions online, and update it if their opinion of a school changes over time.

The site updates daily and a school’s results are publicly visible, so parents considering one for their children can find out what other parents think about the quality of teaching, discipline, leadership, track record on tackling bullying etc.

Parent View took less than three months to develop, including user testing. The team who built it on the Drupal open source platform were asked to deliver a secure and scalable website that could handle sudden peaks in traffic and levels of interaction. more…

Two friends of mine are about to buy a domiciliary care business, and over dinner the other week we discussed their website and how effective search engine optimisation can ensure it shows high in any Google search.

Before long we were lamenting Google’s business practices and commercial dominance, something I blogged about in late 2011. I had lots to say about this. Earlier that week I’d returned to work after a week’s holiday and learned that Google had de-indexed bmj.com, apparently without notice.

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In August 2011 more than 1700 developers converged on Croydon for the four-day DrupalCon, an event that brings together people and products united in their enthusiasm for a freely available open source software that’s powering an increasing number of websites across the world.

“Come for the software, stay for the community” boasts the Drupal UK website, adding “Drupal is free, flexible, robust and constantly being improved by hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world. Join us!” more…

Doctors in training are an important audience for the BMJ (they are our future readers) and our dedicated portal for junior doctors includes links to the latest articles, learning modules, case reports and forum discussions from doc2doc, BMJ Group’s clinical community.

The site is an unusual one in that it allows the end user to customise which content they see by opening a porfolio of “widgets” showing on the right hand side. These content widgets include the latest research articles from the BMJ and more than 30 specialist journals, and are selected each week by a junior doctor colleague.

There are also a series of widgets showing the latest educational content from across the Group. These include free modules from BMJ Learning, postgraduate exam questions from OnExamination, and one showing the latest Endgames (a BMJ interactive quiz section aimed at doctors in training). Endgames launched three years ago and typically includes anatomy and picture quizzes, statistical question, and a case report.There is also a widget showing latest case reports from the Group’s online Case Reports journal. more…

My blog about the iPad last month generated some interest, and this update outlines some of the feedback we’ve had to date. The move to make the app free to BMA members has generated some very positive reviews on the iTunes app store. We’d already had some nice comments about the app’s technical functionality, but the pricing issue led to a fair number of 1* ratings. more…

A chunk of our working week is now devoted to preparing the latest BMJ iPad edition so its appearance in the iTunes app store coincides with the thud of the print issue as it lands on subscribers’ mats. I thought I’d use this blog to explain how our processes have changed to accommodate our new product, and to gauge interest in seeing the BMJ on other e-reader/mobile devices.

But first, some history. The BMJ iPad app launched in early 2011. We are the first general medical journal on Apple’s tablet computer, and our focus was to respond to a wish from some international subscribers to get a sense of what the print issue looks like each week.We’ve been delighted with the feedback to date, particularly with the interest shown by BMA members. When we developed the app we assumed (wrongly, as it turned out), that interest from UK doctors would be limited. After all, most get the BMJ print and online as a BMA membership benefit. So our focus was getting the app live, rather than investigating ways of offering it free to members. The BMA is now offering it for free. You can find out more by reading these FAQs.

I’ve talked a lot about print, but our focus throughout was to make the app genuinely interactive, and it is this which takes up our time each week.

The print issue goes to press on Tuesdays, but many of the pages (research, practice, etc) are ready by Monday. So we meet to discuss what archive links to add to the iPad pages. These are the kind of connections we tend to make:

• If an article is already online it may have attracted some commments, so we often find an interesting one to link to,
• Other articles by the same author,
• Previous articles in a series,
• A relevant blog, podcast, or video,
• A discussion on doc2doc, BMJ Group’s global clinical community

On Wednesdays, after the print issue has gone to press, we select images for the iPad and ensure they are the right format and size for the device. We then insert all the links we identified on Monday via a content management system, and quality assure the finished product on a test server before getting the issue live by Friday. This usually entails ensuring that links work that images look OK. News, blogs, podcasts, and videos are updated via a live feed, so they bypass the above process, but an end users always sees the latest each time they log in via a web or wifi connection.

The whole process now runs pretty seamlessly, so I imagine we will very soon consider if we want the BMJ on other mobile/e-reader devices. The iPad project means we had to stall our discussions on iPhone apps, or ones for othe mobile platforms. How might we cut the content cake for a phone app? We could, for instance, launch separate ones for news, education, research, and comment. Or we could be more creative and combine content from across BMJ Group products, adopting a similar approach as we have for specialty portals (see my previous blog). Amazon’s Kindle often gets talked about. Perhaps that’s a logical next step for us. It would be great to get your feedback.

David Payne is editor, bmj.com