Paging: a Collection of Short Stories

Introduction: Paging is a series of thematically interconnected short stories that take place at a single fictional urban hospital center. The guiding questions that the stories explore are twofold: other than doctors and patients, what kinds of people spend their time in a hospital? And, what kind of place is the hospital for these people? Methods: The background research for Paging began by exploring written works of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir set in hospitals. After I had developed a set of guiding research questions, I spent the summer at a major hospital in New York City, where I was able to observe the people and employees that comprised the environment of an urban medical center. These observations were used draft fiction about the kinds of dilemmas various characters in a hospital might grapple with on a daily basis. Results: Paging is a series of three short stories that explore the lives of three different hospital employees at the same hospital center. The first story is about a medical assistant at an outpatient clinic who encounters an ethical dilemma that brings his personal life to work. The second is about a custodian who gets to know the patients of a hospital in a very different, but equally intimate, manner to the doctors and nurses who take care of the patients’ medical needs. The third is about a woman who assists in the distribution of organs that have been harvested for transplant. Discussion: We often think of the hospital as a place where patients go to seek care from doctors. In reality, the hospital is a far richer environment than this. Paging explores the other inhabitants of a hospital that allow it to be a bustling ecosystem, and offers stories from perspectives that are often overlooked

Short-term H{\alpha} line variations in Classical Be stars: 59 Cyg and OT Gem

We present the optical spectroscopic study of two Classical Be stars, 59 Cyg and OT Gem obtained over a period of few months in 2009. We detected a rare triple-peak H$\alpha$ emission phase in 59 Cyg and a rapid decrease in the emission strength of H$\alpha$ in OT Gem, which are used to understand their circumstellar disks. We find that 59 Cyg is likely to be rapid rotator, rotating at a fractional critical rotation of $\sim$ 0.80. The radius of the H$\alpha$ emission region for 59 Cyg is estimated to be $R_d/R_*$ $\sim$ 10.0, assuming a Keplerian disk, suggesting that it has a large disk. We classify stars which have shown triple-peaks into two groups and find that the triple-peak emission in 59 Cyg is similar to $\zeta$ Tau. OT Gem is found to have a fractional critical rotation of $\sim$ 0.30, suggesting that it is either a slow rotator or viewed in low inclination. In OT Gem, we observed a large reduction in the radius of the H$\alpha$ emission region from $\sim$ 6.9 to $\sim$ 1.7 in a period of three months, along with the reduction in the emission strength. Our observations suggest that the disk is lost from outside to inside during this disk loss phase in OT Gem.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1602.0293

Examining the decoupling hypothesis for India.

This paper examines the decoupling hypothesis for India. We analyse business cycle synchronisation between India and a set of industrial economies, particularly the United States, over the period 1992 to 2008. The evidence suggests that the Indian business cycle exhibits increasing co-movement with business cycles in industrial economies over this period. Indian business cycle synchronisation is stronger with industrial countries as a whole as opposed to the co-movement found with the US.

A Qualitative Assessment of Healthy Food Access in Navajo Nation

Background: The Navajo population experiences high rates of food insecurity, contributing to high rates of chronic disease. We conducted in-depth interviews with Navajo tribal members in order to understand food insecurity in this community and inform the design of an intervention to improve access to healthy foods. Methods: Thirty individuals were interviewed over a three-month period, including Chapter House officials, Community Health Representatives and heads of households living in the Crownpoint Service Unit in Navajo Nation. Data was coded, grouped into analytical categories and integrated into a thematic framework. Results: Food insecurity in Navajo Nation demonstrates variability at the structural, community, and individual and household levels. Income, transportation, vendors, Chapter Houses, social support and health literacy were the main factors contributing to participants’ access to healthy foods. Responses to food insecurity were explored through coping strategies as well as through food purchasing strategies such as price, proximity, shelf life, family preferences, and ease of preparation. Lastly, participants discussed their endorsement for a proposed intervention to increase access to healthy foods. Conclusion: Food insecurity in Navajo Nation is a complex issue, influenced by the dynamic relationship between determinants of individual behavior and the broader environmental context in which they are embedded. A community-based multi-level intervention is necessary in order to achieve sustainable improvement in access to healthy foods

Scoring functions for protein docking and drug design

textPredicting the structure of complexes formed by two interacting proteins is an important problem in computation structural biology. Proteins perform many of their functions by binding to other proteins. The structure of protein-protein complexes provides atomic details about protein function and biochemical pathways, and can help in designing drugs that inhibit binding. Docking computationally models the structure of protein-protein complexes, given three-dimensional structures of the individual chains. Protein docking methods have two phases. In the first phase, a comprehensive, coarse search is performed for optimally docked models. In the second refinement and reranking phase, the models from the first phase are refined and reranked, with the expectation of extracting a small set of accurate models from the pool of thousands of models obtained from the first phase. In this thesis, new algorithms are developed for the refinement and reranking phase of docking. New scoring functions, or potentials, that rank models are developed. These potentials are learnt using large-scale machine learning methods based on mathematical programming. The procedure for learning these potentials involves examining hundreds of thousands of correct and incorrect models. In this thesis, hierarchical constraints were introduced into the learning algorithm. First, an atomic potential was developed using this learning procedure. A refinement procedure involving side-chain remodeling and conjugate gradient-based minimization was introduced. The refinement procedure combined with the atomic potential was shown to improve docking accuracy significantly. Second, a hydrogen bond potential, was developed. Molecular dynamics-based sampling combined with the hydrogen bond potential improved docking predictions. Third, mathematical programming compared favorably to SVMs and neural networks in terms of accuracy, training and test time for the task of designing potentials to rank docking models. The methods described in this thesis are implemented in the docking package DOCK/PIERR. DOCK/PIERR was shown to be among the best automated docking methods in community wide assessments. Finally, DOCK/PIERR was extended to predict membrane protein complexes. A membrane-based score was added to the reranking phase, and shown to improve the accuracy of docking. This docking algorithm for membrane proteins was used to study the dimers of amyloid precursor protein, implicated in Alzheimer's disease.R. DOCK/PIERR was shown to be among the best automated docking methods in community wide assessments. Finally, DOCK/PIERR was extended to predict membrane protein complexes. A membrane-based score was added to the reranking phase, and shown to improve the accuracy of docking. This docking algorithm for membrane proteins was used to study the dimers of amyloid precursor protein, implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.Computer Science

An efficient framework for privacy-preserving computations on encrypted IoT data

There are two fundamental expectations from Cloud-IoT applications using sensitive and personal data: data utility and user privacy. With the complex nature of cloud-IoT ecosystem, there is a growing concern about data utility at the cost of privacy. While the current state-of-the-art encryption schemes protect users’ privacy, they preclude meaningful computations on encrypted data. Thus, the question remains “how to help IoT device users benefit from cloud computing without compromising data confidentiality and user privacy”? Cloud service providers (CSP) can leverage Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes to deliver privacy-preserving services. However, there are limitations in directly adopting FHE-based solutions for real-world Cloud-IoT applications. Thus, to foster real-world adoption of FHE-based solutions, we propose a framework called Proxy re-ciphering as a service. It leverages existing schemes such as distributed proxy servers, threshold secret sharing, chameleon hash function and FHE to tailor a practical solution that enables long-term privacy-preserving cloud computations for IoT ecosystem. We also encourage CSPs to store minimal yet adequate information from processing the raw IoT device data. Furthermore, we explore a way for IoT devices to refresh their device keys after a key-compromise. To evaluate the framework, we first develop a testbed and measure the latencies with real-world ECG records from TELE ECG Database. We observe that i) although the distributed framework introduces computation and communication latencies, the security gains outweighs the latencies, ii) the throughput of the servers providing re-ciphering service can be greatly increased with pre-processing iii) with a key refresh scheme we can limit the upper bound on the attack window post a key-compromise. Finally, we analyze the security properties against major threats faced by Cloud-IoT ecosystem. We infer that Proxy re-ciphering as a service is a practical, secure, scalable and an easy-to-adopt framework for long-term privacy-preserving cloud computations for encrypted IoT data

Tunable Microstrip Filters for Modern Wireless Communications

Microwave filters are essential components for a large variety of modern communication systems. Filters engage in many recreating roles in RF and microwave applications. Forthcoming technologies like wireless communications are racing with RF and microwave filters in performance, physical and cost parameters. Developing technologies in materials and fabrications are defining new paths in filter designs. Tunable filters that are able to cover a number of different frequency bands are always on demand by the progressing communications technology. In this paper, Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) structure is studied and the novel configurations of periodic filters on dielectric materials that dynamically change their electromagnetic properties under a DC voltage bias are obtained and analysed. A tunable filter is designed using a dielectric material which produces tuning in the filter frequency. The research is carried on a single resonance element and experimented for tunability variations. S-parameter responses are obtained and analysed for the developed model through simulations. The filter with EBG structure showed tunability replacing the Liquid Crystal (LC) dielectric material is presented

Understanding Virtual Care Uptake in the Context of Clinical Audiology: An Implementation Evaluation Using the Normalization Process Theory

This study aimed to measure the systematic and theory-based implementation of virtual audiology care specific to innovative hearing aid follow-up appointments delivered by audiologists during the COVID-19 pandemic