INTRODUCTION The inefficacy of clinical skill education during the clerkship has been reported in several studies. The present study was conducted to evaluate the competency of medical students in performing several clinical skills through an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), aiming to evaluate the quality of the existing curriculum in the clerkship phase. MATERIAL AND METHODS...

The random generation of coherent solitary waves from incoherent waves in a medium with an instantaneous nonlinearity has been observed. One excites a propagating incoherent spin wave packet in a magnetic film strip and observes the random appearance of solitary wave pulses. These pulses are as coherent as traditional solitary waves, but with random timing and a random peak amplitude.

A trial is reported in which RAMC staff working in a dressing station and wearing full NBC Individual Protective Equipment (IPE), attempted to take pulse and blood pressure (BP) readings on casualties similarly clad. These basic parameters however, were obtained from only half the casualties, the time taken to obtain them was prohibitive and the blood pressures were inaccurate. Certain remedies...

Detailed measurements of finite-amplitude pulses radiated by plane and focused circular pistons in water are presented. Comparisons of time waveforms and frequency spectra, both on and off axis, are made with numerical calculations based on the nonlinear parabolic wave equation. Emphasis is on nonlinear distortion of amplitude- and frequency-modulated tone bursts. Use of short pulses enabled re...

Frontal asymmetry measured at rest using EEG is considered a stable marker of approach-avoidance behaviors and risk taking. We examined whether without salient cues of attention in the form of losses, predictability is reduced. Fifty-seven participants performed an experiential decision task in a gain-only, loss-only, and mixed (gains and losses) condition. Increased risk taking on the part of ...

Past empirical work suggests that aging is associated with decreases in risk taking. But are such effects universal? Life-history theory suggests that the link between age and risk taking is a function of specific reproductive strategies that can be more or less risky depending on the ecology. We assessed variation in the age-risk curve using World Values Survey data from 77 countries (N = 147,...

When comparing the average citation impact of research groups, universities and countries, field normalisation reduces the influence of discipline and time. Confidence intervals for these indicators can help with attempts to infer whether differences between sets of publications are due to chance factors. Although both bootstrapping and formulae have been proposed for these, their accuracy is u...

This study presents an abelian group approach to analyzing inconsistency in pairwise comparisons. A notion of an inconsistency indicator map on a group, taking values in an abelian linearly ordered group, is introduced. For it, metrics and generalized metrics are utilized. Every inconsistency indicator map generates both a metric on a group and an inconsistency indicator of an arbitrary pairwis...