Face, content, and construct validity were demonstrated in the use of a silicone renal tumor model in a cohort of surgeons of different training levels. Expert participants deemed the model useful and realistic. Surgeons of higher training levels performed better than less experienced surgeons in various study metrics, and improvements within individuals were observed over sequential trials. Future studies should aim to assess model predictive validity, namely, the association between model performance improvements and improvements in live surgery.

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Purpose. To quantify the quality of life (QoL) distress experienced by immediate family members of patients with urethral stricture via a questionnaire given prior to definitive urethroplasty. The emotional, social, and physical effects of urethral stricture disease on the QoL of family members have not been previously described. Materials and Methods. A questionnaire was administered prospectively to an immediate family member of 51 patients undergoing anterior urethroplasty by a single surgeon (SBB). The survey was comprised of twelve questions that addressed the emotional, social, and physical consequences experienced as a result of their loved one. Results. Of the 51 surveyed family members, most were female (92.2%), lived in the same household (86.3%), and slept in the same room as the patient (70.6%). Respondents experienced sleep disturbances (56.9%) and diminished social lives (43.1%). 82.4% felt stressed by the patient's surgical treatment, and 83.9% (26/31) felt that their intimacy was negatively impacted. Conclusions. Urethral stricture disease has a significant impact on the family members of those affected. These effects may last decades and include sleep disturbance, decreased social interactions, emotional stress, and impaired sexual intimacy. Treatment of urethral stricture disease should attempt to mitigate the impact of the disease on family members as well as the patient.

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Paraphrase evaluation is typically done either manually or through indirect, taskbased evaluation. We introduce an intrinsic evaluation PARADIGM which measures the goodness of paraphrase collections that are represented using synchronous grammars. We formulate two measures that evaluate these paraphrase grammars using gold standard sentential paraphrases drawn from a monolingual parallel corpus. The first measure calculates how often a paraphrase grammar is able to synchronously parse the sentence pairs in the corpus. The second measure enumerates paraphrase rules from the monolingual parallel corpus and calculates the overlap between this reference paraphrase collection and the paraphrase resource being evaluated. We demonstrate the use of these evaluation metrics on paraphrase collections derived from three different data types: multiple translations of classic French novels, comparable sentence pairs drawn from different newspapers, and bilingual parallel corpora. We show that PARADIGM correlates with human judgments more strongly than BLEU on a task-based evaluation of paraphrase quality.