Microdiets: love them or leave them?

Foreskins: leave them alone.

Continuing with only clinically indicated circumcisions, I occasionally used the foreskin as a flap to cover degloved digits (anchoring the hand to the thigh with sutures and strapping it for a few days) and also as a free skin graft and in hypospadias repair. The foreskin was used most dramatically in scrotal elephantiasis. Here the mass is lifted by assistants and a tourniquet is wound severa...

Adjustable sutures in strabismus surgery: why surgeons either love them or hate them after three decades.

Strabismus surgeons continually seek to achieve the best results from their surgery, which means stable motor alignment and sensory improvement with a minimum number of procedures. But the tables and algorithms that we employ for the number of muscles to be included in the surgery, and for the doses of surgery, are often not appropriate for difficult or unpredictable cases. The ability to modif...

Wear them, forget them.

Distributed Recommender Systems and the Network Topologies that Love Them

One approach to distributed recommender systems is to have users sample products at random and randomly query one another for the best item they have found. We have been considering refinements to this approach that take advantage of a communication network; users may share information only with their immediate neighbors, who either by design or by nature may have common interests. In the “mail...

Viewpoint Filling a cavity with photons , and watching them leave

The harmonic oscillator is one of the most fundamental systems in quantum mechanics. Equipped with its solution—one of the first that every physics student learns to calculate exactly—it is possible to describe realistic problems, from phonons in a crystal to the interaction of light with an atom. It is perhaps ironic, then, how challenging it is to actually prepare a pure harmonic oscillator s...