BACKGROUND Surgical education is evolving under the dual pressures of an enlarging body of knowledge required during residency and mounting work-hour restrictions. Changes in surgical residency training need to be based on available educational models and research to ensure successful training of surgeons. Experiential learning theory, developed by David Kolb, demonstrates the importance of ind...

BACKGROUND The traditional method of analysing continuous or ordinal risk factors by categorization or linear models may be improved. METHODS We propose an approach based on transformation and fractional polynomials which yields simple regression models with interpretable curves. We suggest a way of presenting the results from such models which involves tabulating the risks estimated from the...

Avian diversity is under increasing pressures. It is thus critical to understand the ecological variables that contribute to large scale spatial distribution of avian species diversity. Traditionally, studies have relied primarily on two-dimensional habitat structure to model broad scale species richness. Vegetation vertical structure is increasingly used at local scales. However, the spatial a...