OBJECTIVE A commonly adhered to operating principle in occupational therapy clinics is that a person must exhibit 20 lb of grip strength before his or her hand is considered "functional." This study examined the relationship between hand and finger grip performances with the forces required to open common household containers. METHOD The grip and pinch strengths of 49 college students were ob...

We randomly allocated 60 consecutive patients with fractures of the waist of the scaphoid to percutaneous fixation with a cannulated Acutrak screw or immobilisation in a cast. The range of movement, the grip and pinch strength, the modified Green/O'Brien functional score, return to work and sports, and radiological evidence of union were evaluated at each follow-up visit. Patients were followed...

Self-similarity has been the paradigmatic picture for the pinch-off of a drop. Here we will show through high-speed imaging and boundary integral simulations that the inverse problem, the pinch-off of an air bubble in water, is not self-similar in a strict sense: A disk is quickly pulled through a water surface, leading to a giant, cylindrical void which after collapse creates an upward and a d...

The paper by Movileanu et al. (2001) in this issue of The Journal describes a test of the applicability of the substituted-cysteine-accessibility method (SCAM; Akabas et al., 1992; Akabas et al., 1994) to the problem of locating the narrowest region of a channel lumen. Movileanu et al. (2001) use unusually large sulfhydryldirected reagents to probe the wide bore channel formed by Staphylococcal...

We describe a heuristic search algorithm for generating optimal plans in a new class of decision problem, characterised by the incorporation of hidden state. The approach exploits the nature of the hidden state to reduce the state space by orders of magnitude. It then interleaves AO*-type heuristic expansion of the reduced space with forwards and backwards propagation phases to produce a soluti...