Neuromuscular (NM) fatigue can be defined as an exercise-induced decrease in skill-based performance and/or capacity that originates within the NM system (i.e. between activation of the primary motor cortex to the performance of the contractile apparatus (Bigland-Ritchie, 1981)) (Boyas & Guével, 2011). NM fatigue is a fundamental component of athlete training and competition, required for both optimal adaptation and performance. However, in the short-term, NM fatigue can decrease performance and increase injury risk, whilst its accumulation can produce long-term deleterious performance and health consequences. Consequently, athlete fatigue monitoring is recommended for precise management of athlete training adaptation and recovery practices. Regular NM function measurement is a key component of athlete fatigue monitoring; still the best means of assessing fatigue-induced effects on NM function is presently unclear. A broader understanding of the most suitable NM testing methods, and associated NM constructs, would therefore be of value to sport practitioners. As elaborated below, this dissertation aimed to first identify the most suitable NM function test, and then develop the testing technique to better determine the NM responses associated with acute fatigue, an accumulation of exercise stress (i.e. accumulated fatigue), and post-exercise recovery. A secondary aim was to provide a greater understanding of the NM responses elicited by fatiguing exercise. First, the suitability of four NM function tests (e.g. countermovement jump (CMJ), squat jump (SJ), drop jump (DJ), 20-m sprint (SPRINT)) for the regular measurement of NM fatigue was examined. Assessment of test repeatability (mean coefficient of variation for various measures of force, velocity, power, impulse and flight time; SPRINT: 1.2%; CMJ: 3.0%; SJ: 3.5%; DJ: 4.8%) and sensitivity to NM fatigue (substantial post-exercise changes observed up to; SPRINT: 0-hr post; SJ: 24-hr post; CMJ & DJ: 72-hr post) revealed the CMJ test to be the most suitable, with it highly repeatable and sensitive to fatigue-induced changes immediately following fatiguing exercise and during post-exercise recovery. Subsequent investigations further explored the use of CMJ testing for NM fatigue detection. Second, CMJ responses to acute NM fatigue and during post-exercise recovery were examined in recreational athletes. As part of this process, two analytic approaches, anticipated to decrease measurement error and improve test sensitivity through the examination of CMJ mechanics, were utilised. Fatiguing exercise resulted in a biphasic recovery profile. Immediate decreases were evident in most CMJ variables (i.e. small-to-moderate changes), followed by mechanical changes indicative of NM fatigue (i.e. small changes in CMJ time- and rate-based variables) at 72-hour. Observation of mechanical changes at 72-hour, supported the use of the two adopted CMJ analytic approaches. Third, the developed methodology was used with elite snowboard-cross athletes to examine fatigue- and training-induced changes in NM function. Compared to concentric CMJ variables (i.e. peak/mean power/force/velocity), mechanical CMJ changes were more marked following both the fatiguing protocol (ES: moderate-to-large vs. small-to-moderate) and the 19-week training block (large-to-extremely large vs. small-to-very large). The more apparent mechanical changes observed in this highly-trained population (vs. the recreational athletes in Chapter 3) indicated that CMJ mechanical analysis may be of particular value in athlete populations. Fourth, the CMJ testing techniques were used to examine NM changes associated with accumulated fatigue (i.e. an accumulation of exercise and/or non-exercise stress) in a highly-trained population. Alongside increased training loads and decreased wellness, substantial changes in CMJ mechanics (e.g. time to peak force, force at zero velocity) and jump outcome (e.g. flight time, peak displacement) were observed, thereby supporting the inclusion of mechanical CMJ assessment for the monitoring of accumulated NM fatigue effects. This series of investigations support the use of CMJ testing for athlete NM fatigue monitoring, and highlight that NM fatigue can manifest as alterations in the mechanical strategies used to accomplish a task. These changes appear evident in response to acute fatigue (Chapters 3 and 4), alongside increases in training load (Chapters 4 and 5) and during post-exercise recovery (Chapter 3). Practitioners should therefore incorporate analyses of CMJ mechanics to provide a more comprehensive assessment of fatigue- and training-induced changes in NM function. / Graduate / gatherco@uvic.ca

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This thesis describes and analyses the ways in which employees in two front line call centre settings report their experience of qualitative and quantitative monitoring in the workplace, and its impact on their work and work life. I conducted ethnographically informed fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews, in two financial service call centre sites. Emerging from the rich descriptions participants shared about their work life, identity and accountability stood out as key themes. The sites, which use similar methods of monitoring and performance measurement, had quite different management strategies in place which affected staff perceptions of identity and accountability. I modified an activity theory framework to create a model of organisational, professional and peer identities and accountabilities, and to examine the ways these connect, interact, and sometimes disconnect, with one another. Call centres are contentious workplaces in the literature, generating ongoing debate about the extent to which electronic monitoring is effective as a method of control and about the way monitoring and surveillance affects workers. Using this framework allows me to look at common call centre issues, such as the quality/quantity dichotomy, through a different and potentially helpful lens, one that is novel in the call centre literature. My findings suggest that when the various facets of identities and accountabilities are poorly aligned, workers are forced to prioritize one over the other, often to the detriment of both. In the financial service call centres I studied, workers often chose to prioritize professional and peer identity over organisational accountability when organisational requirements were strongly felt to conflict with the ways in which a professional banker should behave towards customers and colleagues. Workers made these choices despite clearly understanding the potential consequences to themselves in terms of achieving performance metric targets and supervisory approval. Conceptualizing call centre workers’ responses to monitoring and measurement from an identity and accountability perspective offers new insights into the reasons why financial service call centre workers are often dissatisfied or frustrated with standard call centre measurement practices, leading to potential practical solutions.

This thesis describes and analyses the ways in which employees in two front line call centre settings report their experience of qualitative and quantitative monitoring in the workplace, and its impact on their work and work life. I conducted ethnographically informed fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews, in two financial service call centre sites. Emerging from the rich descriptions participants shared about their work life, identity and accountability stood out as key themes. The sites, which use similar methods of monitoring and performance measurement, had quite different management strategies in place which affected staff perceptions of identity and accountability. I modified an activity theory framework to create a model of organisational, professional and peer identities and accountabilities, and to examine the ways these connect, interact, and sometimes disconnect, with one another. Call centres are contentious workplaces in the literature, generating ongoing debate about the extent to which electronic monitoring is effective as a method of control and about the way monitoring and surveillance affects workers. Using this framework allows me to look at common call centre issues, such as the quality/quantity dichotomy, through a different and potentially helpful lens, one that is novel in the call centre literature. My findings suggest that when the various facets of identities and accountabilities are poorly aligned, workers are forced to prioritize one over the other, often to the detriment of both. In the financial service call centres I studied, workers often chose to prioritize professional and peer identity over organisational accountability when organisational requirements were strongly felt to conflict with the ways in which a professional banker should behave towards customers and colleagues. Workers made these choices despite clearly understanding the potential consequences to themselves in terms of achieving performance metric targets and supervisory approval. Conceptualizing call centre workers’ responses to monitoring and measurement from an identity and accountability perspective offers new insights into the reasons why financial service call centre workers are often dissatisfied or frustrated with standard call centre measurement practices, leading to potential practical solutions.

Walking is an essential task important to recovery after stroke. However, there is a limited understanding regarding the characteristics of walking in in-patients with stroke. The objectives of this thesis were to: 1) develop an instrument capable of acquiring temporal characteristics of everyday walking; 2) investigate the quantity and control of everyday walking; and 3) profile the task-specific link between walking and cardiorespiratory response. In study 1 we developed and validated a wireless monitoring system (ABLE system). Study 2 revealed low quantities of everyday walking (4816 steps; SD 3247) characterized by short bout durations (59.8s; SD 23.4) and asymmetric walking. In study 3 we observed a modest task-related response in HR(19.4% HRR); however, the intensity and duration of everyday walking did not approach the guidelines for aerobic benefit. Monitoring in-patient walking can help guide clinical decision making in developing methods to maximize recovery after stroke.

In dynamic domains, the state of the world may change in unexpected ways during the generation or execution of plans. Regardless of the cause of such changes, they raise the question of whether they interfere with ongoing planning efforts. Unexpected changes during plan generation may invalidate the current planning effort, while discrepancies between expected and actual state of the world during execution may render the executing plan invalid or sub-optimal, with respect to previously identified planning objectives. In this thesis we develop a general monitoring technique that can be used during both plan generation and plan execution to determine the relevance of unexpected changes and which supports recovery. This way, time intensive replanning from scratch in the new and unexpected state can often be avoided. The technique can be applied to a variety of objectives, including monitoring the optimality of plans, rather then just their validity. Intuitively, the technique operates in two steps: during planning the plan is annotated with additional information that is relevant to the achievement of the objective; then, when an unexpected change occurs, this information is used to determine the relevance of the discrepancy with respect to the objective. We substantiate the claim of broad applicability of this relevance-based technique by developing four concrete applications: generating optimal plans despite frequent, unexpected changes to the initial state of the world, monitoring plan optimality during execution, monitoring the execution of near-optimal policies in stochastic domains, and monitoring the generation and execution of plans with procedural hard constraints. In all cases, we use the formal notion of regression to identify what is relevant for achieving the objective. We prove the soundness of these concrete approaches and present empirical results demonstrating that in some contexts orders of magnitude speed-ups can be gained by our technique compared to replanning from scratch.

Theories of age-related memory decline debate whether the problem lies at the level of encoding or consciously accessing information at the level of retrieval. Deficits at encoding may be due to the inability to bind relations among objects. The present research implements eye movement monitoring into an associative memory task to explore age-related memory at encoding and retrieval. Eye movements of older and younger adults are compared. Three solitary items were presented during the study phase, and test responses were whether the spatial relation of these objects to one another was intact or manipulated when subsequently presented all together. Observed differences at the level of encoding in addition to the level of retrieval clarifies that there is not a deficit in consciously accessing encoded representations. Further, differences in relational binding at the level of encoding were observed, which supports the association deficit theory of memory and aging.

Software systems are growing rapidly in size and complexity, and becoming more and more difficult and expensive to maintain exclusively by human operators. These systems are expected to be highly available, and failure in these systems is expensive. To meet availability and performance requirements within budget, automated and efficient approaches for systems monitoring are highly desirable. Autonomic computing is an effort in this direction, which promises systems that self-monitor, thus alleviating the burden of detailed operation oversight from human administrators. In particular, a solution is to develop automated monitoring systems that continuously collect monitoring data from target systems, analyze the data, detect errors and diagnose faults automatically. In this dissertation, we survey work based on management metrics and describe the common features of these current solutions. Based on observations of the advantages and drawbacks of these solutions, we present a general solution framework in four separate steps: metric modeling, system-health signature generation, system-state checking, and fault localization. Within our framework, we present two specific solutions for error detection and fault diagnosis in the system, one based on improved linear-regression modeling and the second based on summarizing the system state by an informationtheoretic measurement. We evaluate our monitoring solutions with fault-injection experiments in a J2EE benchmark and show the effectiveness and efficiency of our solutions.

Run-time verification is a technique to reason about a program correctness. Given a set of desirable properties and a program trace from the inspected program as an input, the monitor module verifies that properties hold on this trace. As this process is taking place at a run time, one of the major drawbacks of run-time verification is the execution overhead caused by a monitoring activity. In this thesis, we intend to minimize this overhead by presenting a collection of parallel verification algorithms. The algorithms verify properties correctness in a parallel fashion, decreasing the verification time by dispersion of computationally intensive calculations over multiple cores (first level of parallelism). We designed the algorithms with the intention to exploit a data-level parallelism, thus specifically suitable to run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), although can be utilized on multi-core platforms as well. Running the inspected program and the monitor module on separate platforms (second level of parallelism) results in several advantages: minimization of interference between the monitor and the program, faster processing for non-trivial computations, and even significant reduction in power consumption (when the monitor is running on GPU). This work also aims to provide a solution to automated run-time verification of C programs by implementing the aforementioned set of algorithms in the monitoring tool called GPU-based online and offline Monitoring Framework (GooMF). The ultimate goal of GooMF is to supply developers with an easy-to-use and flexible verification API that requires minimal knowledge of formal languages and techniques.

The purpose of the present research was to examine the predictive validity of curriculum-embedded mastery-check measures (CEMs) for kindergarten students in Tier 2 intervention. Two studies examined the predictive validity, parsimony, and changing role of CEMs using a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework. Study 1 examined the ability of CEMs gathered throughout the kindergarten year to predict end-of-kindergarten latent reading outcomes. Study 2 examined the ability of kindergarten CEMs to predict end-of-first and end-of-second grade latent reading outcomes. Study 1 used SEM with two latent outcomes (i.e., phonemic and decoding) composed of diverse measures of early reading skills gathered at the end of kindergarten. Findings indicated moderate to large effects, as measured by variance explained, for CEMs on predicting phonemic and decoding outcomes. For CEMs gathered at four time points throughout the kindergarten year, a parsimonious set of subtests emerged. In addition, the role of CEMs changed throughout the year as predictors reaching statistical significance were increasingly difficult. Findings indicated that an increased amount of variance could be explained on the outcomes measures as the year progressed. Study 2 used one latent reading outcome factor gathered at the end of first and second grades. Findings for the end of first grade indicated that parsimonious sets of predictors from CEMs administered at three times during the kindergarten year predicted end-of-first grade outcomes. Additionally, the role of indicators changed during the year and the amount of variance explained increased from the first to third CEM. Results for the end of second grade indicated the variance explained on the outcome measure increased from the first CEM to the third CEM. When considering near-significant results, a pattern emerged demonstrating parsimonious subsets of indicators that changed during the kindergarten year. Findings from both studies provided support for the predictive validity of CEMs gathered during kindergarten for students in Tier 2 intervention. Results from both studies demonstrated statistically significant subsets of predictors that emerged and changed during the kindergarten year congruent with reading development, which can be useful for informing educational decisions.