We use many quantitative undergraduate metrics to help select our graduate students, but which of these usefully discriminate successful from underperforming students and which should be ignored? Almost everyone has his or her own pet theory of the most predictive criteria, but I hoped to address this question in a more unbiased manner. I conducted a retrospective analysis of the highest- and l...

Control charts are widely used in industrial processes as well as in health sciences and particularly for monitoring the performance of cardiac surgeon or a group of surgeons based on the preoperative risk of patients. Since the preoperative risk is a vague and nonprecise variable and the anesthesiologists after checking how many risk factors a patient has, determine the risk of mortality befor...

Think about any characteristic of people around you and you will immediately notice that they differ from each other. They differ not only in bodily features like height, skin colour, weight, vision and hearing ability etc. but also in the psychological attributes. In our everyday experience we find that people differ in their motivation, approach to problems, interest and ability to learn. The...

BACKGROUND The ala of the nose, with its particular texture and characteristics, poses both aesthetically and functionally intriguing challenges and is rather problematic regarding choices for reconstructive methods. Both flaps and grafts have been used to restore natural structure of nasal ala. The present study summarizes a ten-year experience of reconstructive surgery using small composite...