In the Ode to Broken Things, Pablo Neruda tenders a powerful metaphor of existence.2 It is not difficult to recognize the unwinding of human life in the broken clock that was once “the secret thread of our weeks” and now, with its “blue guts” exposed and its “wide heart unsprung,” is the symbol of agony and death. The beginning and ending of life are embraced in a poem about simple and ordinary...

The task of coordinating hundreds of mobile robots in one of Kiva System’s warehouses presents many challenging multiagent resource allocation problems. The resources include things like inventory, open orders, small shelving units, and the robots themselves. The types of resources can be classified by whether they are consumable, recycled, or scheduled. Further, the global optimization problem...

“I have heard about a young boy (4 or 5 years old) in hungary with a serious spinal cord injury eight months ago: as of my information, his spinal cord has broken between his skull and C1 totally (he is ventilator-dependent). What kind of therapies do you think, are suitable a person like him? Can we hope in some research that will help him to improve his condition? Are there any special proble...

To the Editor: We would like to compliment Levine et al on their case report “Removal of a Broken Cannulated Tibial Nail: A Simple Intramedullary Technique” (J Orthop Trauma 2004;18:247– 249) and Steinberg et al on their technical trick “Removal of a Broken Distal Closed Section Intramedullary Nail: Report of a Case Using a Simple Method” (J Orthop Trauma 2004;18:233–235). The problem of a brok...

General solutions for closely spaced corotating helical vortices are obtained using a filament approach. For these vortex structures, symmetry is broken but maintain form of spatial periodicity. We show there exists moving frame where elements move along the structure without distorting it. Locally, behaves much like pair aligned with locally tangent flow. However, away from cores induced flow ...