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Discusses incorporating interactive multimedia into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Presents examples of interactive exhibits from other museums and suggests ideas for the Hall of Fame to pursue: simulations of batting, signal use, and umpiring; a quiz show; a visitor poll; CD-ROM software; and an interactive database. (Author/PEN)

Authors' contributions to medical articles cannot always be determined by the place of their names in a paper's author list. A total of 184 first authors of papers with four or more authors rated the contributions of the other authors to their scientific papers. The author listed first is traditionally considered to have conducted the majority of the research. The remaining authors are usually listed in descending order of contributions to the research. For example, the second author would theoretically have contributed more than the third. Among nonfirst authors there was wide inconsistency in their contributions to papers. Of the 184 authors who were reported to have contributed to only one substantial area of the research, 14% were second authors, 79% were middle authors and 7% were last authors. Twenty-six percent of all authors appeared to have made only a negligible contribution to the research. These authors appeared more frequently in papers with greater numbers of authors. Papers with many authors appear to reduce individual responsibility for research results.

In January 1992, the Physician Payment Review Commission held a conference to learn about the appropriateness of present uses of profiling of practice patterns, and to identify what will be required to realize the full potential of this technique in the future. The conference addressed the data needs of profiling, the development of valid and relevant profiles, the impact of profiles on medical practice, and controversies surrounding public access to profiling information and the uses to which profiling has been put. This paper, based in part on that conference, reviews the basic concepts that underlie profiling and describes the roles that profiling can play in quality improvement, assessment of provider performance, and utilization review. It uses case studies to illustrate the types of problems that have arisen in actual usage and discusses what will be required to resolve them. The final section describes the roles that profiling can play in achieving the goals of health care reform, and concludes with what is needed in data and infrastructure development to improve the quality and usefulness of profiling.