Medical Students’ First Male Urogenital Examination: Investigating the Effects of Instruction and Gender on Anxiety

Objectives: To investigate the effect that standardized instruction of the male urogenital examination had on the anxiety levels of students and to determine what influence, if any, the gender of the student had on this experience. Methods: One hundred thirty six second year medical students were asked to report their level of anxiety before and after participation in a small group teaching session on the male urogenital examination. We gathered both qualitative and quantitative information to better understand students’ anxiety surrounding this instruction. Results: Students had significantly lower state-anxiety scores following the instruction than before (F(1, 76)=102.353, p=.000, eta2=.574) and female students were more likely to have greater state-anxiety than male students (F=6.952, p=.010, eta2=.084). Ninety-nine percent of students reported that the teaching associates successfully reduced their anxiety. This decrease was attributed predominantly to the personal qualities of the teaching associates and to the format of the instruction. Conclusions: This study provides both quantitative and qualitative evidence that the use of male teaching associates to provide standardized instruction on the urogenital exam is effective at reducing students’ anxiety, particularly with regard to female students. Added standardized instruction may lead to increased confidence, skill, and future compliance with intimate physical exam screening practices

Memes And Advertising

This is a study on how the current trend of internet memes has come into play as a way of advertising. The study cover that of user-generated content as well as that of sponsored media in which the hopes is to go viral. For this study an internet survey was done in order to see how the public feels about memes as a form of advertising

Transportation noise pollution - Control and abatement

Control and abatement of transportation noise pollutio

Influence of inbreeding, age and growth rate of sows on sexual maturity, rate of ovulation, fertilization and embryonic survival

This report includes most of the material presented by the senior author as a Doctoral dissertation--P. [3].Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references (pages 39-40)

A service oriented virtual environment for complex system analysis: Preliminary report

Distributed virtual simulation is a capability that is increasing in demand within the automotive manufacturing industry. The distributed and networked approach to system level design and simulation stands to benefit from a unifying relational oriented modeling and simulation framework due to the large number of simulation technologies that must be integrated. This will also permit innovative use of existing independent simulations for increased concurrency in design and verification and validation. Through relational orientation, high level syntax and semantics for representing models and simulations have been developed for proof of concept analysis. This paper presents an approach to drive a process of analysis of the vehicle as a complex system through the combination of a relational trade-off analysis framework and a distributed simulation execution delivered through a service-oriented integration architecture. This promises to provide a rigorous, traceable and agile approach to early stage conceptual vehicle design and analysis

Takeover Risk and the Market for Corporate Control: The Experience of British Firms in the 1970s and 1980s

This paper investigates the determinants of takeovers in a large sample of UK quoted companies. We focus on the channels through which the market for corporate control monitors company performance and discretionary managerial behaviour. Our results indicate that the market for corporate control disciplines poorly performing companies, and that this effect is quantitatively important: a one standard deviation increase in profitability is associated with a fall in the conditional probability of takeover of over 20%. However, we find no evidence that firms without apparent profitable investment opportunities are more likely to be taken over if managers increase investment or reduce dividends, contrary to the predictions of the free cash-flow theory of takovers

Is Attack the Best form of Defence? A Competing Risks Analysis of Acquisition Activity in the UK

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate whether companies can use acquisition as a strategy to reduce their probability of takeover. A subsidiary issue is whether such a strategy has any impact on their subsequent probability of bankruptcy. The determinants of making an acquisition, being taken over, and bankruptcy are modelled within a competing risks framework using two large samples of UK manufacturing companies. Our results indicate that, ceteris paribus, companies which make acquisitions can significantly reduce their conditional probability of being taken over, largely through the impact that acquisition has on corporate size. In this sense, attack, through acquisition, is the best form of defence, against takeover

Confluent Orthogonal Drawings of Syntax Diagrams

We provide a pipeline for generating syntax diagrams (also called railroad diagrams) from context free grammars. Syntax diagrams are a graphical representation of a context free language, which we formalize abstractly as a set of mutually recursive nondeterministic finite automata and draw by combining elements from the confluent drawing, layered drawing, and smooth orthogonal drawing styles. Within our pipeline we introduce several heuristics that modify the grammar but preserve the language, improving the aesthetics of the final drawing.Comment: GD 201