BACKGROUND To evaluate the feasibility of flexible ureteroscopy training by using isolated porcine kidneys and ureters in vitro. METHODS Twenty young urologists were randomly divided into four groups. Overall performance was assessed based on a global rating scale, pass/fail rating, total time to complete task, learning curve, incidence of trauma, and perforations. The effect of training was ...

Investment in stock market involves many decision rules and variables; hence investors are increasingly relying on ratings provided by rating agencies to guide their stock selections. However, do these stocks ratings have information value? Are rating agencies’ ratings valid? We research these questions by analyzing the performance of rating agencies. This study provides empirical evidence on t...

The current status of the agricultural sector in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is described, in the context of reforms undertaken during the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market-based one. Sectoral performance is analyzed, focussing especially on general trends in production, and emerging trading patterns. Five critical basic elements of reform are de...

Established in 1997, the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) provides consumers with a safety performance assessment for the majority of the most popular cars in Europe. Thanks to its rigorous crash tests, Euro NCAP has rapidly become an important driver safety improvement to new cars. After ten years of rating vehicles, Euro NCAP felt that a change was necessary to stay in tune w...

In England, so-called ‘league tables’ based upon examination results and test scores are published annually, ostensibly to inform parental choice of secondary schools. A crucial limitation of these tables is that the most recent published information is based on the current performance of a cohort of pupils who entered secondary schools several years earlier, whereas for choosing a school it is...

The main objective of the present work was to assess and compare the wave power resources in various offshore and nearshore areas. From this perspective, three different groups of coastal environments were considered: the western Iberian nearshore, islands and an enclosed environment with sea waves, respectively. Some of the most representative existent wave converters were evaluated in the ana...

We present a novel, quantitative view on the human athletic performance of individual runners. We obtain a predictor for running performance, a parsimonious model and a training state summary consisting of three numbers by application of modern validation techniques and recent advances in machine learning to the thepowerof10 database of British runners' performances (164,746 individuals, 1,417,...

In order to deal with free riding in P2P system, incentive mechanism or rating system is presented, and each user rating is computed by itself, which causes that some users exaggerate their ratings. In this paper, three aspects are developed for free riding and for improving service performance in P2P. First of all, it is useful to keep away fake rating that each user rating is calculated by th...

Many address lookup methods for an IP router have been recently proposed to improve a packet forwarding capability, but their performance prediction is very limited because of lack of considering actual traffic characteristics. It is necessary to consider actual traffic to predict more realistic performances on routers, specially in case of layers 3 and 4 switches whose performances are more in...