Designing a Context-Sensitive Context Detection Service for Mobile Devices

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Amoeba, a context-sensitive context detection service for mobile devices. Amoeba exports an API that allows a client to express interest in one or more context types (activity, indoor/outdoor, and entry/exit to/from named regions), subscribe to specific modes within each context (e.g., "walking" or "running", but no other activity), and specify a response latency (i.e., how often the client is notified). Each context has a detector that returns its estimate of the mode. The detectors take both the desired subscriptions and the current context detection into account, adjusting both the types of sensors and the sampling rates to achieve high accuracy and low energy consumption. We have implemented Amoeba on Android. Experiments with Amoeba on 45+ hours of data show that our activity detector achieves an accuracy between 92% and 99%, outperforming previous proposals like UCLA* (59%), EEMSS (82%) and SociableSense (72%), while consuming 4 to 6× less energy

Mahimahi: A Lightweight Toolkit for Reproducible Web Measurement

This demo presents a measurement toolkit, Mahimahi, that records websites and replays them under emulated network conditions. Mahimahi is structured as a set of arbitrarily composable UNIX shells. It includes two shells to record and replay Web pages, RecordShell and ReplayShell, as well as two shells for network emulation, DelayShell and LinkShell. In addition, Mahimahi includes a corpus of recorded websites along with benchmark results and link traces (https://github.com/ravinet/sites). Mahimahi improves on prior record-and-replay frameworks in three ways. First, it preserves the multi-origin nature of Web pages, present in approximately 98% of the Alexa U.S. Top 500, when replaying. Second, Mahimahi isolates its own network traffic, allowing multiple instances to run concurrently with no impact on the host machine and collected measurements. Finally, Mahimahi is not inherently tied to browsers and can be used to evaluate many different applications. A demo of Mahimahi recording and replaying a Web page over an emulated link can be found at http://youtu.be/vytwDKBA-8s. The source code and instructions to use Mahimahi are available at http://mahimahi.mit.edu/

Protocol design contests

In fields like data mining and natural language processing, design contests have been successfully used to advance the state of the art. Such contests offer an opportunity to bring the excitement and challenges of protocol design---one of the core intellectual elements of research and practice in networked systems---to a broader group of potential contributors, whose ideas may prove important. Moreover, it may lead to an increase in the number of students, especially undergraduates or those learning via online courses, interested in pursuing a career in the field. We describe the creation of the infrastructure and our experience with a protocol design contest conducted in MIT's graduate Computer Networks class. This contest involved the design and evaluation of a congestion-control protocol for paths traversing cellular wireless networks. One key to the success of a design contest is an unambiguous, measurable objective to compare protocols. In practice, protocol design is the art of trading off conflicting goals with each other, but in this contest, we specified that the goal was to maximize \log(\mbox{throughput}/\mbox{delay}). This goal is a good match for applications such as video streaming or videoconferencing that care about high throughput and low interactive delays. Some students produced protocols whose performance was better than published protocols tackling similar goals. Furthermore, the convex hull of the set of all student protocols traced out a tradeoff curve in the throughput-delay space, providing useful insights into the entire space of possible protocols. We found that student protocols diverged in performance between the training and testing traces, indicating that some students had overtrained ("overfitted") their protocols to the training trace. Our conclusion is that, if designed properly, such contests could benefit networking research by making new proposals more easily reproducible and amenable to such "gamification," improve networked systems, and provide an avenue for outreach

QuicShell

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.19Title as it appears in MIT commencement exercises program, June 6, 2014: Designing a better transport protocol for the web. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 53-54).This work presents the first study of a new protocol, QUIC, on Web page performance. Our experiments test the HTTP/1.1, SPDY, and QUIC multiplexing protocols on the Alexa U.S. Top 500 websites, across 100+ network configurations of bandwidth and round-trip time (both static links and cellular networks). To do so, we design and implement QuicShell, a tool for measuring QUIC's Web page performance accurately and reproducibly. Using QuicShell, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of QUIC. Due to its design of stream multiplexing over UDP, QUIC outperforms its predecessors over low-bandwidth links and high-delay links by 10 - 60%. It also helps Web pages with small objects and HTTPS-enabled Web pages. To improve QUIC's performance on cellular networks, we implement the Sprout-EWMA congestion control protocol and find that it improves QUIC's performance by > 10% on high-delay links.by Somak R. Das.M. Eng

Highly raised serum lipid levels in a child with autoimmune polyglandular syndrome type III A: A novel experience

Autoimmune polyglandular syndrome (APS) type III A refers to the coexistence of autoimmune thyroiditis and immune-mediated diabetes mellitus. Although diabetic lipemias in APS type III have been described in medical literature, the degree of metabolic derangements in our patient, especially in the lipid profile is an extremely rare scenario. In this case report, we share this valuable experience

Late onset rhabdomyolysis developing secondary to atorvastatin therapy in a coronary artery disease patient

Rhabdomyolysis, a clinical syndrome in which skeletal muscle damage and necrosis, is precipitated by multi-therapy is most frequently described during statin treatment. Rhabdomyolysis is a rare, but serious side-effect that may lead to renal failure and dangerous electrolyte abnormalities in patients. We report a case of rhabdomyolysis after 5 years of atorvastatin therapy in an elderly patient, in multi-treatment for coronary artery disease

Antiaging Properties of a Grape-Derived Antioxidant Are Regulated by Mitochondrial Balance of Fusion and Fission Leading to Mitophagy Triggered by a Signaling Network of Sirt1-Sirt3-Foxo3-PINK1-PARKIN

It was proposed that resveratrol, a polyphenolic antioxidant and a calorie restriction mimetic could promote longevity but subsequent studies could not prove this. The original proposal was based on the fact that a grape-derived antioxidant could activate the antiaging gene Sirt1. Most studies agree that indeed grape activates Sirt1, but a question remains whether Sirt1 is the cause or consequence of resveratrol treatment. Subsequently, mitochondrial Sirt3 was found to be activated. The present study on ischemic reperfusion (I/R) in rat hearts demonstrates that Foxo3a is activated subsequent to Sirt3 activation, which then activates PINK1. PINK1 potentiates activation of PARKIN leading to the activation of mitochondrial fission and mitophagy. Confocal microscopy conclusively shows the coexistence of Sirt3 with Foxo3a and Foxo3a with PINK1 and PARKIN. Mitophagy was demonstrated both by confocal microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Western blot analyses data are consistent with the results of confocal microscopy. It appears that the grape-derived antioxidant modifies the intracellular environment by changing the oxidizing milieu into a reducing milieu and upregulating intracellular glutathione, potentiates a signal transduction cascade consisting of Sirt1/Sirt3-Foxo3a-PINK1-PARKIN-mitochondrial fusion fission-mitophagy that leads to cardioprotection, and paves the way to an anti-aging environment

Quality of life among menopausal women: A community-based study in a rural area of West Bengal

Introduction: During menopausal transition, there is a lot of fluctuation in the hormone levels making the peri and postmenopausal women susceptible to various mental and physical disorders. There is considerably lack of awareness about the effects of the menopausal symptoms in women in India. Studies on issues relating to menopause, especially among rural women, are also lacking. With this background, the current study was carried out in a rural area of West Bengal with the objective to assess the quality of life (QOL) of peri-menopausal women. Methodology: The study was carried out among 100 peri and postmenopausal women (40–60 years) in Dearah village of West Bengal which is the rural field practice area of All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health during February–March 2014. The questionnaire used as study tool had two parts - Part 1: Sociodemographic characteristics. Part 2: About QOL due to menopausal symptoms based on four domains (vasomotor, psychosocial, physical, and sexual) using the 29-item Menopause-Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire. Results: Occurrence of vasomotor symptoms was average with 60% of them reporting hot flushes and 47% sweating. Most prevalent psychosocial symptoms reported were feeling of anxiety and nervousness (94%) and overall depression (88%). Physical symptoms were quite varying in occurrence with some symptoms such as feeling tired or worn out, decrease in physical strength and lack of energy occurring in 93% of the women to only 5% suffering from growth of facial hair. Overall sexual changes were reported among 49% who reported of avoiding intimacy with a partner and 26% complained of vaginal dryness. Conclusions: The results support that menopause causes both physical and psychiatric problems. Education, creating awareness and providing suitable intervention to improve their QOL are important which should be imparted to menopausal women at both individual and community level