Upper limb fractures are prevalent injuries. An essential element of fracture healing is to maintain the bones alignment. However there are lots of complications associated with traditional ways of treatment, such as compartment syndrome and stiffness due to immobility for long time. Also evaluation and observation of the limb under the casts for potential infections and skin issues are n...

A disentanglement puzzle consists of mechanically interlinked pieces, and the puzzle is solved by disentangling one piece from another set of pieces. A cast puzzle is a type of disentanglement puzzle, where each piece is a zinc die-casting alloy. In this paper, we consider the generalized cast puzzle problem whose input is the layout of a finite number of pieces (polyhedrons) in the 3-dimension...

Axion physics has received a boost with the recent claim of the PVLAS collaboration. Their results can be interpreted as due to a new axionlike particle but the CAST collaboration has not found trace of it. While the axionlike particle interpretation of the PVLAS signal is going to be probed by dedicated laboratory experiments, it is mandatory to find either alternatives to it or models in whic...

In a natural environment, cast shadows abound. Objects cast shadows both upon themselves and upon background surfaces. Previous research on the perception of 3-D shape from cast shadows has only examined the informativeness of shadows cast upon flat background surfaces. In outdoor environments, however, background surfaces often possess significant curvature (large rocks, trees, hills, etc.), a...

Septoku is a Sudoku variant invented by Bruce Oberg, played on a hexagonal grid of 37 cells. We show that up to rotations, reflections, and symbol permutations, there are only six valid Septoku boards. We show that the minimum number of starting seeds for a Septoku puzzle to have a unique solution is six. We generalize the puzzle to other board shapes, and devise a 6-seed puzzle on a star-shape...

A review of the status of axions and axion-like particles is given. Special attention is devoted to the recent results of the PVLAS collaboration, which are in conflict with the CAST data and with the astrophysical constraints. Solutions to the puzzle and the implications for new physics are discussed. The question of axion-like particles being dark matter is also addressed.

The pricing kernel puzzle concerns the locally increasing empirical pricing kernel, which is inconsistent with a risk-averse representative investor in a single period, single state variable setting. Some recent papers worry that the puzzle is caused simply by the mismatch of backward looking subjective and forward looking risk-neutral distributions of index returns. By using a novel test and f...

Developing human-centered agent architectures requires the integral consideration of architectural flexibility, teamwork adaptability, and context reasoning capability. With the integration of various forms of team intelligence including shared teamwork process and progress, dynamic context management and information dependency reasoning, and recognition-primed collaborative decision mechanism,...