Background: Clinical examinations increasingly consist of composite tests to assess all aspects of the curriculum recommended by the General Medical Council.
Setting: A final undergraduate medical school examination for 214 students.
Aim: To estimate the overall reliability of a composite…

Although South America lost more megafaunal genera than any other continent during the Late-Quaternary Extinction event (LQE), little is known about the chronology, causes or dynamics of these extinctions, especially in the northern part of the continent. Fossil deposits in…

This study investigates an approach of knowledge discovery and data mining in insufficient databases. An application of Computational Taxonomy analysis demonstrates that the approach is effective in such a data mining process. The approach is characterized by the use of…

We study the Jupiter family comet (JFC) population assumed to come from the Scattered Disk and transferred to the Jupiter’s zone through gravitational interactions with the Jovian planets. We shall define as JFCs those with orbital periods P<20yr and Tisserand…

This paper addresses the problem of contour line extraction from scanned topographic maps in poor condition. A novel method is developed, using knowledge of cartography and graphics to extract contours by removing other layers which overlay the contours, and reconstructing…

Previous work in software product lines showed an increment of up to 10 times in productivity and product quality [SEI Prod_Line]; because of this, the software product line approach is critical for the success of a development project including a…

It is commonly acknowledged that we need to accept and handle uncertainty when reasoning with real world data. The most profoundly studied measure of uncertainty is the probability. However, the general feeling is that probability cannot express all types of…

In this paper, we present an approach to student's evaluation in a well-defined domain based on a semantic network. A similarity matrix based on the semantic memory structure of humans is used to build a semantic distance model in order…

The chemical composition of the essential oils from leaves and stems of Eugenia sulcata Spring ex Mart., obtained by hydrodistillation, was analyzed by GC-MS and quantified by CG-FID. In all, 37 components were identified and sesquiterpenes represented the largest fraction…

Collaborative systems are becoming a widely used tool particularly among professional communities and research groups. They provide a suitable context for distributed people working on the same subject to concentrate their work in a shared place to which everyone has…