A New 12-Puzzle

This puzzle is a continuation of the tribute to the magician Paul Swinford. The following 18 two-letter words use each of the 12 letters of PAUL SWINFORD exactly three times each. The words are to be placed on the nodes of the grid so that each hexagon and each of the three diagonals contain the 12 letters of our honoree\u27s name

Alice in Wonderland for G4G13

Each of the ten different letters in the title is used exactly three times to form the words in the circles. Martin Gardner\u27s famous work The Annotated Alice was first published in 1960 and we honor him in this essay

Octahedral Dice

All five Platonic solids have been used as random number generators in games involving chance with the cube being the most popular. Martin Gardenr, in his article on dice (MG 1977) remarks: Why cubical?... It is the easiest to make, its six sides accomodate a set of numbers neither too large nor too small, and it rolls easily enough but not too easily. Gardner adds that the octahedron has been the next most popular as a randomizer. We offer here several problems and games using octahedral dice. The first two are extensions from Gardner\u27s article. All answers will be given later

Pathways to Disability Income among Persons with Severe, Persistent Psychiatric Disorders

[Excerpt] Harsh skepticism pervades current public debate about who deserves public support and on what basis, particularly regarding the claims of individuals with disabling illness and injury. Heretofore, these claims were accepted, even reservedly, and the needs of such individuals were considered to be legitimate even when they were monitored closely. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) programs and their recipients have been among the most visible and vulnerable targets of increased scrutiny and shrinking public beneficence. In 1997, congressional legislation redefined SSI eligibility for children, sparked largely by concerns that children have been deployed to engage in a type of public begging by acting crazy in order to secure benefits for their families. Maladaptive behaviors was removed from the mental disorder listings, and the Social Security Administration (SSA) estimates that 135,000 children will lose their benefits after review. In March 1996, Congress eliminated SSI, SSDI, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits for persons whose drug addiction or alcoholism is a prominent cause of disability, and as a result 141,000 recipients have been terminated. The SSA also was ordered to begin another sweeping review of all recipients of disability income. SSA officials reportedly expect this process to produce a termination rate of 14 percent, resulting in an estimated 196,000 additional individuals who would cease to receive SSI and SSDI

Real-Time Automatic Fetal Brain Extraction in Fetal MRI by Deep Learning

Brain segmentation is a fundamental first step in neuroimage analysis. In the case of fetal MRI, it is particularly challenging and important due to the arbitrary orientation of the fetus, organs that surround the fetal head, and intermittent fetal motion. Several promising methods have been proposed but are limited in their performance in challenging cases and in real-time segmentation. We aimed to develop a fully automatic segmentation method that independently segments sections of the fetal brain in 2D fetal MRI slices in real-time. To this end, we developed and evaluated a deep fully convolutional neural network based on 2D U-net and autocontext, and compared it to two alternative fast methods based on 1) a voxelwise fully convolutional network and 2) a method based on SIFT features, random forest and conditional random field. We trained the networks with manual brain masks on 250 stacks of training images, and tested on 17 stacks of normal fetal brain images as well as 18 stacks of extremely challenging cases based on extreme motion, noise, and severely abnormal brain shape. Experimental results show that our U-net approach outperformed the other methods and achieved average Dice metrics of 96.52% and 78.83% in the normal and challenging test sets, respectively. With an unprecedented performance and a test run time of about 1 second, our network can be used to segment the fetal brain in real-time while fetal MRI slices are being acquired. This can enable real-time motion tracking, motion detection, and 3D reconstruction of fetal brain MRI.Comment: This work has been submitted to ISBI 201

Nanoscale assembly processes revealed in the nacroprismatic transition zone of Pinna nobilis mollusc shells

Intricate biomineralization processes in molluscs engineer hierarchical structures with meso-, nano-, and atomic architectures that give the final composite material exceptional mechanical strength and optical iridescence on the macroscale. This multiscale biological assembly inspires new synthetic routes to complex materials. Our investigation of the prism-nacre interface reveals nanoscale details governing the onset of nacre formation using high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy. A wedge polishing technique provides unprecedented, large-area specimens required to span the entire interface. Within this region, we find a transition from nanofibrillar aggregation to irregular early-nacre layers, to well-ordered mature nacre suggesting the assembly process is driven by aggregation of nanoparticles (~50-80 nm) within an organic matrix that arrange in fiber-like polycrystalline configurations. The particle number increases successively and, when critical packing is reached, they merge into early-nacre platelets. These results give new insights into nacre formation and particle-accretion mechanisms that may be common to many calcareous biominerals.Comment: 5 Figure

Folding of a donor–acceptor polyrotaxane by using noncovalent bonding interactions

Mechanically interlocked compounds, such as bistable catenanes and bistable rotaxanes, have been used to bring about actuation in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) and molecular electronic devices (MEDs). The elaboration of the structural features of such rotaxanes into macromolecular materials might allow the utilization of molecular motion to impact their bulk properties. We report here the synthesis and characterization of polymers that contain π electron-donating 1,5-dioxynaphthalene (DNP) units encircled by cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) (CBPQT4+), a π electron-accepting tetracationic cyclophane, synthesized by using the copper(I)-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC). The polyrotaxanes adopt a well defined “folded” secondary structure by virtue of the judicious design of two DNP-containing monomers with different binding affinities for CBPQT4+. This efficient approach to the preparation of polyrotaxanes, taken alongside the initial investigations of their chemical properties, sets the stage for the preparation of a previously undescribed class of macromolecular architectures

Selective and highly efficient dye scavenging by a pH-responsive molecular hydrogelator

A structurally simple low molecular weight hydrogelator derived from isophthalic acid forms robust pH-responsive hydrogels capable of highly efficient and selective dye adsorption

Novel critical point drying (CPD) based preparation and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging of protein specific molecularly imprinted polymers (HydroMIPs)

We report the transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging of a hydrogel-based molecularly imprinted polymer (HydroMIP) specific to the template molecule bovine haemoglobin (BHb). A novel critical point drying based sample preparation technique was employed to prepare the molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) samples in a manner that would facilitate the use of TEM to image the imprinted cavities, and provide an appropriate degree of both magnification and resolution to image polymer architecture in the <10 nm range. For the first time, polymer structure has been detailed that clearly displays molecularly imprinted cavities, ranging from 5-50 nm in size, that correlate (in terms of size) with the protein molecule employed as the imprinting template. The modified critical point drying sample preparation technique used may potentially play a key role in the imaging of all molecularly imprinted polymers, particularly those prepared in the aqueous phase

Modelling ground vibrations induced by harmonic loads

A finite-element model combining the frequency domain thin-layer method with paraxial boundary conditions to simulate the semi-infinite extent of a soil medium is presented in this paper. The combined numerical model is used to deal with harmonic vibrations of surface rigid foundations on non-horizontal soil profiles. The model can deal with soil media over rigid bedrock or significant depths of half-space. Structured finite elements are used to mesh simple geometry soil domains, whereas unstructured triangular mesh grids are employed to deal with complex geometry problems. Dynamic responses of homogeneous as well as layered soil profiles are simulated and validated against analytical and approximate solutions. Finally, the model is used to deal with surface ground vibration reduction, in which it is first validated against published results and then followed by an example involving a bridge