In this paper, I seek to determine whether the current ban on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in professional sport is justified. I look at two of the most common categories of arguments in favor of the ban, which I term the Harm Category and The Nature of Sport Category, and ultimately determine that neither is strong enough to justify the current ban. I determine, however, that a third and less common category of arguments, which I term the Dehumanization Category, provides good reason to justify the ban by appealing to our intuitions about why the use of PEDs in professional sport is wrong.

Background: Sports have a significant impact on people all around the world. Although sport brings a lot of joy, a sense of togetherness, and pride, it also involves ethically difficult issues such as doping. Doping in sports is a growing global concern that jeopardizes sports ethics, values, and integrity (The World Anti-Doping Agency WADA, a). Previous research has mainly approached the topic by understanding athletes’ motivation behind the decision to dope. Hence, there is a growing need to understand athletes’ attitudes and beliefs towards clean sports. Aim: This study aimed to comprehensively understand athletes’ attitudes and beliefs on reaching the top without doping and their beliefs on whether doping affects the results of competitions at the national and international levels. Also, it was examined whether variables such as age, gender, testing history, and sports have any distinguished matter on athletes’ attitudes towards clean sports. Method: A cross-sectional mixed-methods study explored athletes' attitudes and beliefs on clean sports. A total of 73 tested athletes (response rate 14,4%) completed a web-based "Assessments of Doping Control and FINCIS Activities" -survey. Results: In this research, athletes’ age, gender, testing history, and sports did not show any significance concerning athletes' attitudes towards reaching the national and international tops without doping. In the open-ended questions, athletes expressed trust in national-level competitions but had more suspicions about international competitions. Conclusion: The results suggest that the athletes in this research reported positive attitudes and beliefs in competing clean. However, it is challenging to determine whether athletes feel that they need to answer “correctly” and according to the values of clean sports. Therefore, it is important to continue studying athletes’ attitudes and clean sports.

O Brasil é o segundo país no mundo em número de academias de ginástica, contando atualmente com cerca de 30 mil unidades. Apesar da transição no modelo de gestão e filosofia das academias do fitness para o wellness, muitas ainda propagam em seus ambientes o culto ao corpo magro e atlético, dietas sem fundamentação nutricional e consumo descontrolado de suplementos. Crescem as evidências de que uma parcela significativa dos frequentadores de academias desenvolve um comprometimento exacerbado à prática de exercícios físicos, gerando até uma dependência patológica. O objetivo foi determinar a associação entre dependência de exercício físico (DEF), consumo de suplementos e insatisfação da imagem corporal em frequentadores de academias. Para tanto foi empregada a Escala de Comprometimento com Exercício Físico (CEF) em uma amostra de 227 frequentadores, maiores de 19 anos, de ambos os sexo em três academias. Foi realizada entrevista individual com emprego de anamnese nutricional para determinar o perfil de consumo suplementar, avaliação antropométrica, da imagem corporal, do compromisso ao exercício físico assim como de participação na academia. A frequência de DEF nas academias foi de 66% e sendo que as chances estimadas deste ser consumidor de suplementos de 4,53. Os indivíduos dependentes de exercício físico são jovens, com maior chance de pertencer ao sexo masculino, frequentar a academia > 5 vezes por semana, consumir mais de um tipo de suplemento e praticar musculação. A frequência de insatisfação com a imagem corporal foi alta tanto entre homens (50,9%) como mulheres (78,4%). / Brazil is the second country in number of gym clubs, currently with about 30 thousand units. Despite the transition in the managing model and philosophy of gym clubs from fitness to wellness, many still disseminate the cult of a lean and athletic body, diets without nutritional basis, and uncontrolled consumption of supplements. We have growing evidence that a significant number of individuals going to gym clubs develop an exacerbated commitment to the practice of physical exercises, yielding even pathological dependence. The main goal of our work is to determine the association between exercise dependence (ED), supplements consumption, and dissatisfaction with body image between users of gym clubs. For this purpose we employed the Commitment Exercise Scale (CES) in a sample of 227 gym club users, over 19 years old, from both sexes, in three gym clubs. We used nutritional assesment to determine the profile of supplements consumption, and recorded anthropometrical and exercise engagement data. Frequency of ED in gym clubs was estimated to be 66% with odds ratio of 4.53 favoring supplements consumption. Dependent individuals are on average young, most probably males, attending the gym club more than 5 times a week, consumers of more than on type of supplement, and practitioners of body building. Frequency of body image dissatisfaction is high both between men (50.9%) and women (78.4%).

O Brasil é o segundo país no mundo em número de academias de ginástica, contando atualmente com cerca de 30 mil unidades. Apesar da transição no modelo de gestão e filosofia das academias do fitness para o wellness, muitas ainda propagam em seus ambientes o culto ao corpo magro e atlético, dietas sem fundamentação nutricional e consumo descontrolado de suplementos. Crescem as evidências de que uma parcela significativa dos frequentadores de academias desenvolve um comprometimento exacerbado à prática de exercícios físicos, gerando até uma dependência patológica. O objetivo foi determinar a associação entre dependência de exercício físico (DEF), consumo de suplementos e insatisfação da imagem corporal em frequentadores de academias. Para tanto foi empregada a Escala de Comprometimento com Exercício Físico (CEF) em uma amostra de 227 frequentadores, maiores de 19 anos, de ambos os sexo em três academias. Foi realizada entrevista individual com emprego de anamnese nutricional para determinar o perfil de consumo suplementar, avaliação antropométrica, da imagem corporal, do compromisso ao exercício físico assim como de participação na academia. A frequência de DEF nas academias foi de 66% e sendo que as chances estimadas deste ser consumidor de suplementos de 4,53. Os indivíduos dependentes de exercício físico são jovens, com maior chance de pertencer ao sexo masculino, frequentar a academia > 5 vezes por semana, consumir mais de um tipo de suplemento e praticar musculação. A frequência de insatisfação com a imagem corporal foi alta tanto entre homens (50,9%) como mulheres (78,4%). / Brazil is the second country in number of gym clubs, currently with about 30 thousand units. Despite the transition in the managing model and philosophy of gym clubs from fitness to wellness, many still disseminate the cult of a lean and athletic body, diets without nutritional basis, and uncontrolled consumption of supplements. We have growing evidence that a significant number of individuals going to gym clubs develop an exacerbated commitment to the practice of physical exercises, yielding even pathological dependence. The main goal of our work is to determine the association between exercise dependence (ED), supplements consumption, and dissatisfaction with body image between users of gym clubs. For this purpose we employed the Commitment Exercise Scale (CES) in a sample of 227 gym club users, over 19 years old, from both sexes, in three gym clubs. We used nutritional assesment to determine the profile of supplements consumption, and recorded anthropometrical and exercise engagement data. Frequency of ED in gym clubs was estimated to be 66% with odds ratio of 4.53 favoring supplements consumption. Dependent individuals are on average young, most probably males, attending the gym club more than 5 times a week, consumers of more than on type of supplement, and practitioners of body building. Frequency of body image dissatisfaction is high both between men (50.9%) and women (78.4%).

Eleven years ago Cisco introduced three types of applications on the same converged network and named it AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data). In spite of the initial interest and hype surrounding AVVID, the feature was and still is unable to confront problems such as: data priority, load balancing and network congestion. The work in this report addressed these issues within the network. Different Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) methods: routing protocols, Cisco IOS QoS (including LLQ, LFI and Header Compression), Path Control and Cisco Performance Routing (PfR) were all tested to see which feature would work best at enhancing network performance. A practical network was created in which these features were carefully implemented one after another. In every step, the results were observed and recorded and if necessary repeated in order to check their validity. The results for RTT (Round Trip Time) and MOS (Mean Opinion Score) showed that in comparison to Path Control and Cisco IOS QoS (Quality of Service) mechanisms, Cisco PfR was able to generate routes on the fly during times of network congestion. This cannot be achieved with the use of Cisco QoS and Path Control which makes Cisco Performance Routing a far more superior feature. Although the focus of the work was VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) data, it is possible to construct a network with any application as Cisco PfR is able to reroute data. Cisco PfR is an easily accessible IOS feature which, once implemented, requires very little updating and maintenance.

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With a new United States Army initiative to exploit commercially developed information technology, there is a heightened interest in using Internet protocols over the military's geosynchronous satellite links. TCP is the dominant Internet protocol used for reliable data exchange, but its own design limits performance when used over long delay network links such as satellites. Initially this research set out to compare TCP with another proposed protocol, the Satellite Transport Protocol (STP). However through a series of tests, we found that STP does not fulfill its claims of increased throughput over TCP and uncovered a flaw in STP's founding research. In addition, this thesis proposes and demonstrates novel performance enhancing techniques that significantly improve transport protocol throughput.