OBJECTIVE To objectively assess whether the medical education environment across Pakistan was at an acceptable standard and to determine factors influencing its perception. METHODS The cross-sectional study was conducted from August to November 2012 at six undergraduate medical institutions across Pakistan. The Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM) inventory having five subscales...

Against a background of the theoretical basis for the contextual approach to medical education, this paper examines and supports the changes that are occurring in undergraduate medical education throughout the world, before putting up for discussion the suggestion that the changes have not gone far enough. Consideration is given to a model of apprenticeship learning within undergraduate medical...

BACKGROUND Leaders in medicine have called for transformative changes in healthcare to address systems challenges and improve the health of the public. The purpose of this study was to elicit the perspectives of students, faculty physicians and administrators regarding the knowledge and competencies necessary in an undergraduate leadership curriculum. METHODS A mixed-methods study was conduct...

The highly interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics has emerged as a powerful modern science. There has been a great demand for undergraduate- and graduate-level trained bioinformaticists in the industry as well in the academia. In order to address the needs for trained bioinformaticists, its curriculum must be offered at the undergraduate level, especially at four-year colleges, where a major...

BACKGROUND Tutorial-based assessment commonly used in problem-based learning (PBL) is thought to provide information about students which is different from that gathered with traditional assessment strategies such as multiple-choice questions or short-answer questions. Although multiple-observations within units in an undergraduate medical education curriculum foster more reliable scores, that ...

The exact solution of the asymmetric exclusion problem with firstand scond-class particles is presented. In this model the particles (size 1) of both classes are located at lattice points, and diffuse with equal asymmetric rates, but particles in the first class do not distinguish those in the second class from holes (empty sites). We generalize and solve exactly this model by considering molec...

k-Adic formulations (for groups of objects of size k) of a variety of 2adic similarity coefficients (for pairs of objects) for binary (presence/absence) data are presented. The formulations are not functions of 2-adic similarity coefficients. Instead, the main objective of the the paper is to present k-adic formulations that reflect certain basic characteristics of, and have a similar interpret...

We examine the general conditions for the existence of the complex structure intrinsic in the Gupta-Bleuler quantization method for the specific case of mixed first and second class fermionic constraints in an arbitrary space-time dimension. The cases d = 3 and 10 are shown to be of prime importance. The explicit solution for d = 10 is presented.

We show that, for a stationary version of Hammersley’s process, with Poisson sources on the positive x-axis and Poisson sinks on the positive y-axis, the variance of the length of a longest weakly North–East path L(t, t) from (0,0) to (t, t) is equal to 2E(t −X(t))+, where X(t) is the location of a second class particle at time t . This implies that both E(t −X(t))+ and the variance of L(t, t) ...

We show that after mapping each element of a set of second class constraints to the surface of the other ones, half of them form a subset of abelian first class constraints. The explicit form of the map is obtained considering the most general Poisson structure. We also introduce a proper redefinition of second class constraints that makes their algebra symplectic. ∗e-mail: [email protected]