Thesis (Ph. D.)--Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Doolittle, W. Alan, Committee Chair ; Ferguson, Ian T., Committee Member ; Cressler, John D., Committee Member ; Dorsey, John F., Committee Member ; Carter, W. Brent, Committee Member.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is the primary global organization responsible for implementing rules against doping in sport. A central element of its mission is the requirement that elite athletes submit their whereabouts information for every day of the year to their relevant Anti-Doping Organization (ADO), in order to facilitate no advance notice out-of-competition doping testing. These requirements have attracted considerable criticism, including the claim that they invade elite athlete privacy in a legally or ethically unacceptable manner. The validity of these claims is threatened by the contestedness of the concept of privacy, which arises from the many different uses to which the concept is put, including in legal and philosophical contexts. Resolving this conceptual confusion requires taking an explicit position on various questions of philosophical methodology, themselves subject to contention. As an alternative to such abstraction, and particularly given the need for a philosophically defensible yet pragmatic policy application, I argue that privacy is best conceived of as the absence of certain contextually relevant harms to the person, which arise in relation to such underlying normative values as fairness between competing athletes. In the specific context of elite athlete whereabouts requirements, I maintain that privacy concerns arise principally in relation to surveillance, intrusion, and breaches of confidence. Of these, the first and second face legal difficulties in the UK, on the basis of European legislation concerning human rights and maximum working time. Ethical problems also arise due to WADAs undifferentiated application of the whereabouts requirements, which ignores the heterogeneity of different types of sports and their respective vulnerabilities to doping. I argue that WADAs whereabouts requirements ought therefore to be revised to (a) ensure that they do not conflict with established law, and (b) respect the very different sets of circumstances entailed by the heteroge­neous world of elite sports.

Doping and anti-doping research laboratories are crucial sites for the production and reproduction of gender in sports. Such labs have, over time, constructed a multiplicity of gender categories through which to view and assess doping practice, but nevertheless, they consistently work hard to reproduce binary, hegemonic sex and gender categories. As part of their reproduction of the binary, I argue that technomedical researchers police gender and negotiate ethics within their research by “ab-normalizing” athletes. Ab-normalization refers to a process, adjunct to normalization, whereby gendered and racialized categories of deviance, and the means of policing such categories, are produced. Likewise, these technomedical researchers developed means of authenticating the hormonal gender of athletes. Authentication is a form of ab-normalization that represents the kind of policing that anti-doping researchers perform. It refers to the technomedical processes that produce and legitimate these hormonal gender states. In order for technomedical researchers to do this work, they have had to negotiate ethical quandaries across different spaces. Such ethical negotiations have played an important role in shaping the direction, and thus gender possibilities, within this research. Specifically, I show how technomedical researchers often shifted ethical frames while performing their research, from a sports ethical frame to either an athletic performance research ethical frame or an anti-doping research ethical frame. The first of these is premised on notions of “fair play” while the second is guided by technomedical uncertainties regarding athletic performance and doping practices. The third ethical frame reconciles these two by producing “fair play” amongst competitors through the development of technomedical detection techniques that either catch or deter cheating athletes. This shifting of ethical frames highlights how these researchers were performing legitimate scientific research at the time and not the “immoral,” ethically dubious, research as it might appear to be from our current perspective. To clarify my theoretical points on gender and ethics, I draw upon two cases. The first case deals with blood doping, which requires the withdrawal and subsequent re-infusion of blood into an athlete. The second case examines endogenous steroid use, particularly, androgenic anabolic “naturally” occurring steroids. These hormones aid in muscle production and recovery. Blood doping and endogenous steroid use are two key practices of sports doping. By deconstructing the science surrounding these two practices, I offer an alternative account of the doping debates from the more familiar accounts that explain the doping debates as a “cat and mouse game” between anti-doping researchers and athletes within which “doping” is often presented as a straightforward immoral act for the athletes. By telling the story of how these technomedical researchers simultaneously produced gender categories, ethical categories, and technomedical processes, my alternative account positions these doping debates as competing, socio-historical, articulations of “fairness” bound to competing articulations of gender. I suggest that it is possible to re-imagine “fairness” from this alternative account. Specifically, we can imagine more equitable ways to allow the individuals that do not fit neatly into the binary gender system to compete “fairly” in sports. / Ph. D.

Zugl.: Bern, Univ., Diss., 2009

Universiẗat, Diss., 2006--Marburg.

Univ., Diss.--Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2003.

Diss., Christian Albrechts-Univ. Kiel, 2008/2009. / Literaturverz.

This graduation theses occupy by the doping problem specify how the students of a sports grammar school, i.e. future professional sportsmen, are familiarized with the issue of doping, and what attitudes to doping they assume, what their experience with doping is, etc. I contect of this four hypotheses were set in. Hypothesis 1, the students of the chosen sports grammar school believe that if professional sportsmen use drugs recreationally, they use most frequently alcohol, nicotine and marijuana, in this sequence, was confirmed. Hypothesis 2, the students of the chosen sports grammar school believe that doping is most frequently present in the sports disciplines like cycling, athletics and body building, in this sequence, was not confirmed. Hypothesis 3, at least 50% of the questioned students of the chosen sports grammar school use some drug recreationally, most frequently nicotine and alcohol, was confirmed. Hypotheses 4, more than 50% of the questioned students of the chosen sports grammar school, have never used any drug as sports doping, was confirmed. So it can be concluded that the information of potential top sportsmen is at a good level.

Diss. / Ed. commerciale de la thèse de Neuchâtel 2008, parue sous le titre: La protection des données médicales des sportifs professionnels. Originaltitel: La protection des données médicales des sportifs professionnels: au sein d'une équipe & dans le cadre de la lutte contre le dopage, Titre de la thèse. Originaltitel: La protection des données médicales des sportifs professionnels. Bibliogr. Index.

Les fibres optiques dont on façonne la réponse spectrale incorporent des ions luminescents, des ions de terres rares (TR), dans des nanoparticules (NP) formées in situ dans un verre de silice par séparation de phase. Cette ingénierie nécessite de comprendre le lien entre la composition des NP et l’environnement des TR.En Dynamique Moléculaire, les potentiels interatomiques existants pèchent à reproduire la séparation de phase observée expérimentalement. Le mélange xMgO-(1-x)SiO2 présente un domaine où coexistent deux phases mixtes, riche en Mg ou en Si. Une telle séparation de phase ne se modélise qu’avec un potentiel interatomique prenant en compte la ionicité des liaisons, réalisé ici par l’ajustement des charges des Oxygène selon l’environnement local. Ce modèle adaptatif, transférable, permet de suivre pour la 1ère fois la formation de NP amorphes de quelques nm. Mixtes et riches en Mg, elles se séparent d’une matrice riche en Si.Le dopage TR (Er3+ ou Eu3+) montre que leur voisinage dépend de la taille des NP les contenant : plus les NP sont grosses, plus les fractions de TR et de Mg augmentent. Ce voisinage riche en Mg permet à ces TR d’augmenter leur coordinence en Oxygène et elles n’ont plus besoin de s’agréger entre elles pour satisfaire cette tendance naturelle.Une simulation de l’étirage à chaud d’un verre de silice confirme l’existence d’une anisotropie dans la fibre optique, venant de l’orientation persistante des petits anneaux de silice, et se manifeste par une anisotropie élastique. Les effets que ces conditions extrêmes induisent sur les NP seront étudiés ultérieurement.La mise en œuvre d'un modèle de champ cristallin corrélera les modifications de l'environnement des TR avec leur réponse spectrale. / Optical fibers with tailored spectral response are doped with luminescent ions, rare-earth ions (re), embedded in nanoparticles (np) formed in situ in silica glass through a phase separation process. This engineering requires to understand the relation between the np composition and the re environment. In molecular dynamics, the existing interatomic potentials fail to reproduce the phase separation as experimentally observed. The system xmgo-(1-x)sio2 exhibits a domain inside of which two mixed phases coexist, mg-rich either si-rich. Such a phase separation can only be modeled by an interatomic potential that takes into account bond ionicity, and the transferability isEnabled here by the adaptation of oxygen charges according to the local environment. This adaptive model allows for the 1st time to track the formation of amorphous np of few nanometers. Mixed and mg-rich, they separate from a si-rich matrix. The re doping (er3+ or eu3+) shows that re environment depends on the size of the containing np: the bigger it is, the more the proportions of embedded re and mg increase. Thus, this mg-rich environment enables re ions to increase their oxygen coordination and to no more aggregate to each other to satisfy this natural trend. A simulation of the high-temperature drawing of silica-glass confirms the existence of an anisotropy in optical fiber, explained by the persistent orientation that small silica rings acquire in this fiber, and manifests itself by an elastic anisotropy. The nontrivial effects induced on np by these extreme conditions of temperature and stress can be studied later. The crystal-field model can be used to correlate the changes of the re environment with their spectral response.