©2003 British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery doi:10.1302/0301-620X.85B4.14215 $2.00 J Bone Joint Surg [Br] 2003;85-B:469-77. The current state of knowledge of Dupuytren’s disease is rather like a complex jigsaw puzzle, many pieces of which have been gathered in many countries, but exactly where each fits into the finished puzzle is not clear. Some may not even belong to this partic...

BACKGROUND Neurocognitive disorders are an important societal challenge and the need for early prevention is increasingly recognized. Meta-analyses show beneficial effects of cognitive activities on cognition. However, high financial costs, low intrinsic motivation, logistic challenges of group-based activities, or the need to operate digital devices prevent their widespread application in clin...

In a recent work, Mossel and Ross considered the shotgun assembly problem for a random jigsaw puzzle. Their model consists of a puzzle an n×n grid, where each vertex is viewed as a center of a piece. They assume that each of the four edges adjacent to a vertex, is assigned one of q colors (corresponding to ”jigs”, or cut shapes) uniformly at random. Mossel and Ross asked: how large should q = q...

The jigsaw puzzle is a well known problem, which many encounter during childhood. Given a set of parts, one needs to reconstruct the original image. This problem is known to be NP-complete. In this paper I describe a greedy solver with several improvements. Before discussing the general idea and improvements, I will discuss some important known metrics that will help us clarify the solver algor...

Western medical practitioners often express scepticism about the role and validity of acupuncture as a therapeutic technique, despite the fact that it has been a part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practice for more than 2000 years. Their uncertainty reflects in part difficulties that have been experienced in providing convincing proof to support the wide-ranging claims made regarding th...