This study explored how personal strivings constructs of Goal Conflict and Complementarity and primary appraisal dimensions of Motivational Relevance and Congruence (separately and in combination), related across time to immediate and long-term effects of a stressful transaction. The study was located within the transactional model of stress and integrated aspects of motivational theory, focusing on the theoretical position that within the stressful transaction the relationship between motivational factors and the individual response to an event is mediated by cognitive processes, including appraisal. Advances in transactional theory highlight the role of motivational factors (such as personal strivings) as linked to primary appraisal in the form of Motivational Relevance and Congruence. The utility of personal strivings in exploring the role of motivational factors in the stress process were highlighted. Despite an increasing theoretical focus on motivation and appraisal, research in the area is limited. Data was collected for the study through the administration of questionnaires to university students (N=152) prior to (time 1) and into (time 2) an examination period. The questionnaires used a range of self-report measures. Correlations, partial correlations and ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that Goal Complementarity and Conflict directly influenced primary appraisal processes but not affective and wellbeing outcomes. It was proposed that primary appraisal processes were the conduit through which the impact of Goal Complementarity and Conflict were expressed within the stressful transaction. The results also suggested the impact of anticipatory Motivational Relevance which seemed to imply a highly “loaded” event with negative affective and long-term consequences into the event. Subjects entering the event wit h an “optimistic” demeanour indicated by high anticipatory Congruence and positive affect had increased Congruence into the event with consequent amplified positive emotions and dampened negative effects. Subjects with high anticipatory Relevance and low Congruence across the event had relatively higher scores on negative outcomes. High anticipatory Relevance and Congruence was associated with negative immediate and long-term outcomes into the event. High Relevance Congruence was generally associated with a strong emotional response, which also elicited strong positive emotion as the event unfolded. Subjects with low Relevance did not seem to hold as strong an investment in the event and reported reduced emotions and symptomology. These findings were discussed in relation to the stress, appraisal and motivation literature and their limitations and implications were explored.

A área de gerenciamento de processos de negócio apresenta-se ativa e tem recebido atenção tanto da comunidade de pesquisa como da indústria. Uma das principais preocupações nessa área é a escolha da melhor abordagem para modelagem e implementação de processos de negócio. Atualmente, organizações possuem processos de negócio com complexas estruturas que são reavaliados e ajustados com frequência, exigindo flexibilidade das linguagens para modelagem de processos. Além disso, processos de negócio atuais também exigem ambientes para implementação capazes de garantir confiabilidade na execução de instâncias do processo modelado, especialmente em caso de falhas. Embora diversos modelos transacionais tenham sido propostos com o objetivo de garantir propriedades transacionais adaptadas ao contexto de processos de negócio, a implementação de processos transacionais ainda oferece um cenário com desafios teóricos e práticos. Neste trabalho apresentamos uma implementação da abordagem WED-flow para controle de processos transacionais. A WED-flow é uma abordagem que combina conceitos de modelos transacionais avançados, eventos e estados de dados com o objetivo principal de reduzir a complexidade no tratamento de exceções. A ferramenta de software desenvolvida é capaz de controlar a execução de instâncias de processos de negócio, permite a evolução incremental do modelo projetado e ainda disponibiliza a estrutura necessária para apoiar a implementação de mecanismos de recuperação para tratar interrupções em instâncias causadas por exceções. / Business processes management is an active area which have received increased attention from research and industry communities. A major concern is the selection of the best approach for modeling and implementing business processes. Nowadays, organizations have business processes with complex structures, which are reevaluated and adjusted frequently, requiring flexibility from modeling languages. In addition, current business processes also require implementation environments capable of ensuring execution reliability, especially in case of failures. Although several transactional models have been proposed in order to guarantee transactional properties adapted to the context of business processes, the implementation of transactional processes still offers a scenario with several theoretical and practical challenges. In this work, we present an implementation of WED-flow approach for controlling transactional processes. WED-flow is an approach which combines the concepts of advanced transactional models, events and data states for the purpose of reducing exception handling complexity. The developed software tool is able of controlling the execution of business processes instances, allows incremental evolution of the designed model and also provides the necessary structure to support recovery mechanisms implementation to handle instances interruptions caused by exceptions.

Thesis advisor: Penny Hauser-Cram / This study is a secondary data analysis of data from the Early Intervention Collaborative Study (EICS) (Hauser-Cram, Warfield, Shonkoff, & Krauss, 2001), a longitudinal investigation of families who have children with developmental disabilities (DD) (i.e. Down syndrome, motor impairment, and developmental delay). The study investigated a transactional relation between child problem behavior and parenting stress during the early (ages 3 to 5 years) and middle childhood (ages 5 to 10 years) years. Parental planful problem solving coping and positive reappraisal coping and the helpfulness of social support were examined as moderators of the relation between child problem behavior and parenting stress from the ages 3 to 5 years. Child problem behavior and parents' levels of stress, coping strategies, and ratings of social support were collected during home visits with the families when children were 3, 5, and 10 years. Using hierarchical regression techniques a transactional relation was found between child problem behavior and parenting stress from ages 3 to 5 years for both mother-child and father-child dyads. A transactional relation was again found between these constructs from ages 5 to 10 years for only mother-child dyads. Maternal positive reappraisal coping significantly moderated the relation between child problem behavior and maternal parenting stress. Maternal report of the helpfulness of social support significantly moderated the relation between child behavior and parenting stress at both the early and middle childhood levels. The findings support the design of familial interventions. Interventions that promote adaptive coping strategies may be particularly helpful for families of children with DD who exhibit high levels of problem behavior. Finally, improving the helpfulness of current support systems may positively impact parents' stress who have children with developmental disabilities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

Com o intuito de tornarem-se mais eficientes, muitas organizações -- empresas, órgãos governamentais, centros de pesquisa, etc. -- optam pela utilização de ferramentas de software para apoiar a realização de seus processos. Uma opção que vem se tornando cada vez mais popular é a utilização de sistemas de Gestão de Processos de Negócio (GPN), que são ferramentas genéricas, ou seja, não são específicas a nenhuma organização, altamente configuráveis e ajustáveis às necessidades dos objetos de atuação de cada organização. Uma das principais responsabilidades de um sistema de GPN é prover mecanismos de tratamento de exceções à execução de instâncias de processos de negócio. Exceções, se forem ignoradas ou se não forem corretamente tratadas, podem causar o aborto da execução de instâncias e, dependendo da gravidade da situação, podem causar falhas em sistemas de GPN ou até mesmo em sistemas subjacentes (sistema operacional, sistema gerenciador de banco de dados, etc.). Sendo assim, mecanismos de tratamento de exceções têm por objetivo resolver a situação excepcional ou conter seus efeitos colaterais garantindo, ao menos, uma degradação controlada (graceful degradation) do sistema. Neste trabalho, estudamos algumas das principais deficiências de modelos atuais de tratamento de exceções, no contexto de sistemas de GPN, e apresentamos soluções baseadas em Modelos Transacionais Avançados para contorná-las. Isso é feito por meio do aprimoramento dos mecanismos de tratamento de exceções da abordagem de modelagem e gerenciamento de execução de processos de negócio WED-flow. Por fim, estendemos a ferramenta WED-tool, uma implementação da abordagem WED-flow, através do desenvolvimento de seu gerenciador de recuperação de falhas. / With the aim of becoming more efficient, many organizations -- companies, governmental entities, research centers, etc -- choose to use software tools for supporting the accomplishment of its processes. An option that becomes more popular is the usage of Business Process Management Systems (BPM), which are generic tools, that is, not specific to any organization and highly configurable to the domain needs of any organization. One of the main responsibilities of BPM Systems is to provide exception handling mechanisms for the execution of business process instances. Exceptions, if ignored or incorrectly handled, may induce the abortion of instance executions and, depending on the gravity of the situation, induce failures on BPM Systems or even on subjacent systems (operational system, database management systems, etc.). Thus, exception handling mechanisms aim to solve the exceptional situation or stopping its collateral effects by ensuring, at least, a graceful degradation to the system. In this work, we study some of the main deficiencies of present exception handling models -- in the context of BPM Systems -- and present solutions based on Advanced Transaction Models to bypass them. We do this through the improvement of exception handling mechanisms from WED-flow, a business process modelling and instance execution managing approach. Lastly, we extend the WED-tool, an implementation of WED-flow approach, through the development of its failure recovery manager.

Recently numerous emerging applications, ranging from on-line financial transactions, RFID based supply chain management, traffic monitoring to real-time object monitoring, generate high-volume event streams. To meet the needs of processing event data streams in real-time, Complex Event Processing technology (CEP) has been developed with the focus on detecting occurrences of particular composite patterns of events. By analyzing and constructing several real-world CEP applications, we found that CEP needs to be extended with advanced services beyond detecting pattern queries. We summarize these emerging needs in three orthogonal directions. First, for applications which require access to both streaming and stored data, we need to provide a clear semantics and efficient schedulers in the face of concurrent access and failures. Second, when a CEP system is deployed in a sensitive environment such as health care, we wish to mitigate possible privacy leaks. Third, when input events do not carry the identification of the object being monitored, we need to infer the probabilistic identification of events before feed them to a CEP engine. Therefore this dissertation discusses the construction of a framework for extending CEP to support these critical services. First, existing CEP technology is limited in its capability of reacting to opportunities and risks detected by pattern queries. We propose to tackle this unsolved problem by embedding active rule support within the CEP engine. The main challenge is to handle interactions between queries and reactions to queries in the high-volume stream execution. We hence introduce a novel stream-oriented transactional model along with a family of stream transaction scheduling algorithms that ensure the correctness of concurrent stream execution. And then we demonstrate the proposed technology by applying it to a real-world healthcare system and evaluate the stream transaction scheduling algorithms extensively using real-world workload. Second, we are the first to study the privacy implications of CEP systems. Specifically we consider how to suppress events on a stream to reduce the disclosure of sensitive patterns, while ensuring that nonsensitive patterns continue to be reported by the CEP engine. We formally define the problem of utility-maximizing event suppression for privacy preservation. We then design a suite of real-time solutions that eliminate private pattern matches while maximizing the overall utility. Our first solution optimally solves the problem at the event-type level. The second solution, at event-instance level, further optimizes the event-type level solution by exploiting runtime event distributions using advanced pattern match cardinality estimation techniques. Our experimental evaluation over both real-world and synthetic event streams shows that our algorithms are effective in maximizing utility yet still efficient enough to offer near real time system responsiveness. Third, we observe that in many real-world object monitoring applications where the CEP technology is adopted, not all sensed events carry the identification of the object whose action they report on, so called €œnon-ID-ed€� events. Such non-ID-ed events prevent us from performing object-based analytics, such as tracking, alerting and pattern matching. We propose a probabilistic inference framework to tackle this problem by inferring the missing object identification associated with an event. Specifically, as a foundation we design a time-varying graphic model to capture correspondences between sensed events and objects. Upon this model, we elaborate how to adapt the state-of-the-art Forward-backward inference algorithm to continuously infer probabilistic identifications for non-ID-ed events. More important, we propose a suite of strategies for optimizing the performance of inference. Our experimental results, using large-volume streams of a real-world health care application, demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed technology.

Esta tese aprofunda os estudos na área de formação de professores para educação básica na modalidade a distância, integrando a linha de pesquisa Ambientes Informatizados e Ensino a Distância do curso de Pós-graduação em Informática na Educaçao do CINTED/UFRGS. A Teoria da Distância Transacional estuda a distância pedagógica em ambiente virtual de aprendizagem. O objetivo é verificar como se comportam nos cursos os operadores conceituais que formam a base de compreensão deste estudo. São eles: o diálogo, a estrutura do curso e a autonomia do aluno. Estes três pilares sustentam a distância transacional para se investigar como se comportam nas disciplinas pedagógicas de cursos de licenciatura na modalidade a distância. Agrega-se a Teoria da Ação Dialógica que tem o potencial de aprofundar e enriquecer a abordagem sobre a Distância Transacional. Percorre-se brevemente o contexto histórico da Ead, os cursos de formação de professores no Brasil e o processo de escolarização da educação básica. A pesquisa é construída na triangulação analítica entre o conteúdo dos documentos referentes aos cursos e as disciplinas, o questionário assíncrono, o registro da observação no ambiente virtual de aprendizagem Netaula, o relatório de participação dos fóruns e os diálogos com a coordenação do curso de Pedagogia. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida em uma universidade particular de ensino superior da região Sul compreendendo em um estudo de caso O campo de pesquisa constitui-se de oito disciplinas pedagógicas, oferecidas do primeiro ao sétimo semestre, em sete cursos de licenciaturas, com destaque para o curso de Pedagogia, com todos os sujeitos envolvidos. Apresenta-se a voz dos agentes: alunos, os professores regentes e tutores virtuais a partir da análise dos questionários e dos fóruns das disciplinas. Os resultados mostram a relevância da aplicação da teoria da distância transacional na apreciação dos cursos de licenciatura na modalidade a distância para pensar o estreitamento da distância pedagógica nos cursos a distância. Isso implica no sentimento de pertencimento ao curso para os alunos, os professores regentes e os tutores virtuais. Destaca-se a relevância da estrutura do curso que mostra a interação mais expressiva do aluno com o conteúdo. E a importância do auto estudo e da autodisciplina para a consolidação da autonomia do aluno. / This thesis develop the studies in the area of teacher training for basic education in the distance modality, integrating the research line of Learning Management System and Distance Learning of post graduate course in informatics in education of CINTED/UFRGS. The theory of transactional distance investigate pedagogical distance in virtual learning environments. The main goal is to verify how conceptual operators make their own basis of comprehension for this study, which are: the dialogue, the structure of the course and the student autonomy. These tree pillars sustain the transactional distance to investigate how pedagogical disciplines of graduation courses behave in the distance modality. I added the dialogical action theory which has the potential to develop and enrich the approach of transactional theory. We analyze very briefly the history context of distance learning, the formation courses of professors in Brazil and the process of schooling of basic education. The research it`s built in the analytical triangulation between the content of the documents concerning the disciplines and the courses, the self-paced questionary, the observation register in the virtual learning environment Netaula, the report of the participation in the forums and the dialogues with the pedagogical course co-ordination. The research was developed in a private university of graduation teaching in the south region understanding a study of the case The rummage field it`s formed by eight pedagogical disciplines, offered from the first to the seventh semester in seven courses of graduation, and the most important for our research is the course of pedagogy with all the individuals involved. We present the voice of the agents: students, regent professors and virtual tutors starting from the review of the questionary and the discipline forums. The findings shows us relevance of the application of transactional distance theory for appreciation of graduation courses in distance modality, to analyze the decrease of pedagogical distance in the distance education courses. This implies in the feeling of belonging to the course for the students, the regent professors and the virtual tutors. The relevance of the structure of the course stands out, because it shows the most expressive interaction of the student with the content of the course. And the importance of self study and self discipline for the consolidation of the autonomy of the student.

Les architectures multicœurs changent notre façon d'écrire des programmes. L'écriture de programmes concurrents est bien connue pour être difficile. Traditionnellement, l'utilisation de verrous (locks) permettant au code de s'exécuter en exclusion mutuelle, a été l'abstraction la plus largement utilisée pour l'écriture des programmes concurrents. Malheureusement, il est difficile d'écrire des programmes concurrents efficaces et corrects reposant sur des verrous. En outre, les verrous présentent d'autres problèmes, notamment celui du passage à l'échelle. Le concept de mémoire transactionnelle a été proposé comme une solution à ces difficultés. Les transactions peuvent être considérées comme une abstraction de haut niveau, ou une méthodologie pour l'écriture de programmes concurrents, ce qui permet au programmeur de pouvoir déclarer des sections de code devant être exécutés de façon atomique, sans avoir à se soucier des détails de synchronisation. Malheureusement, bien qu'assurément plus facile à utiliser que les verrous, la mémoire transactionnelle souffre encore de problèmes de performance et de facilité d'utilisation. En fait, de nombreux concepts relatifs à l'utilisation et à la sémantique des transactions n'ont pas encore des normes convenues. Cette thèse propose de nouvelles solutions permettant de faciliter l'utilisation des mémoires transactionellles. La thèse débute par un chapitre qui donne un bref aperçu de la mémoire transactionnelle logicielle (STM) ainsi qu'une discussion sur le problème de la facilité d'utilisation. Les contributions à la recherche sont ensuite divisées en quatre chapitres principaux, chacun proposant une approche différente afin de rendre les STMs plus facile à utiliser. / Multicore architectures are changing the way we write programs. Writing concurrent programs is well known to be difficult task. Traditionally, the use of locks allowing code to execute in mutual exclusion has been the most widely used abstraction to write concurrent programs. Unfortunately, using locks it is difficult to write correct concurrent programs that perform efficiently. Additionally, locks present other problems such as scalability issues. Transactional memory has been proposed as a possible promising solution to these difficulties of writing concurrent programs. Transactions can be viewed as a high level abstraction or methodology for writing concurrent programs, allowing the programmer to be able to declare what sections of his code should be executed atomically, without having to worry about synchronization details. Unfortunately, although arguably easier to use then locks, transactional memory still suffers from performance and ease of use problems. In fact many concepts surrounding the usage and semantics of transactions have no widely agreed upon standards. This thesis specifically focuses on these ease of use problems by discussing how previous research has dealt with them and proposing new solutions putting ease of use first. The thesis starts with a chapter giving a brief overview of software transactional memory (STM) as well as a discussion of the problem of ease of use that is focused on in the later chapters. The research contributions are then divided into four main chapters, each looking at different approaches working towards making transactional memory easier to use.

Com o intuito de tornarem-se mais eficientes, muitas organizações -- empresas, órgãos governamentais, centros de pesquisa, etc. -- optam pela utilização de ferramentas de software para apoiar a realização de seus processos. Uma opção que vem se tornando cada vez mais popular é a utilização de sistemas de Gestão de Processos de Negócio (GPN), que são ferramentas genéricas, ou seja, não são específicas a nenhuma organização, altamente configuráveis e ajustáveis às necessidades dos objetos de atuação de cada organização. Uma das principais responsabilidades de um sistema de GPN é prover mecanismos de tratamento de exceções à execução de instâncias de processos de negócio. Exceções, se forem ignoradas ou se não forem corretamente tratadas, podem causar o aborto da execução de instâncias e, dependendo da gravidade da situação, podem causar falhas em sistemas de GPN ou até mesmo em sistemas subjacentes (sistema operacional, sistema gerenciador de banco de dados, etc.). Sendo assim, mecanismos de tratamento de exceções têm por objetivo resolver a situação excepcional ou conter seus efeitos colaterais garantindo, ao menos, uma degradação controlada (graceful degradation) do sistema. Neste trabalho, estudamos algumas das principais deficiências de modelos atuais de tratamento de exceções, no contexto de sistemas de GPN, e apresentamos soluções baseadas em Modelos Transacionais Avançados para contorná-las. Isso é feito por meio do aprimoramento dos mecanismos de tratamento de exceções da abordagem de modelagem e gerenciamento de execução de processos de negócio WED-flow. Por fim, estendemos a ferramenta WED-tool, uma implementação da abordagem WED-flow, através do desenvolvimento de seu gerenciador de recuperação de falhas. / With the aim of becoming more efficient, many organizations -- companies, governmental entities, research centers, etc -- choose to use software tools for supporting the accomplishment of its processes. An option that becomes more popular is the usage of Business Process Management Systems (BPM), which are generic tools, that is, not specific to any organization and highly configurable to the domain needs of any organization. One of the main responsibilities of BPM Systems is to provide exception handling mechanisms for the execution of business process instances. Exceptions, if ignored or incorrectly handled, may induce the abortion of instance executions and, depending on the gravity of the situation, induce failures on BPM Systems or even on subjacent systems (operational system, database management systems, etc.). Thus, exception handling mechanisms aim to solve the exceptional situation or stopping its collateral effects by ensuring, at least, a graceful degradation to the system. In this work, we study some of the main deficiencies of present exception handling models -- in the context of BPM Systems -- and present solutions based on Advanced Transaction Models to bypass them. We do this through the improvement of exception handling mechanisms from WED-flow, a business process modelling and instance execution managing approach. Lastly, we extend the WED-tool, an implementation of WED-flow approach, through the development of its failure recovery manager.

Memória Transacional tem se demonstrado um paradigma promissor na implementação de aplicações concorrentes sob memória compartilhada que busquem evitar um modelo de sincronização baseado em locks. Em vez de sujeitar a execução a um acesso exclusivo com base no valor de um lock que é compartilhado por threads concorrentes, uma aplicação sob Memória Transacional tenta executar seções críticas de modo otimista, desfazendo as modificações no caso de um conflito de acesso à memória. Entretanto, apesar de a abordagem baseada em locks ter adquirido um número significativo de ferramentas automatizadas para a depuração, profiling e otimização automatizados (por ser uma das técnicas de sincronização mais antigas e mais bem pesquisadas), o campo da Memória Transacional ainda é comparativamente recente, e programadores frequentemente precisam adaptar manualmente suas aplicações transacionais ao encontrar problemas de eficiência. Este trabalho propõe um sistema no qual o profiling de código em uma implementação de Memória Transacional simulada é utilizado para caracterizar uma aplicação transacional, formando a base para uma parametrização automatizada do respectivo sistema especulativo para uma execução eficiente do código em questão. Também é proposta uma abordagem de escalonamento de threads guiado por profiling em uma implementação de Memória Transacional baseada em software, usando dados coletados pelo profiler para prever a probabilidade de conflitos e determinar que thread escalonar com base nesta previsão. São apresentados os resultados de experimentos sob ambas as abordagens. / Transactional Memory has shown itself to be a promising paradigm for the implementation of shared-memory concurrent applications that eschew a lock-based model of data synchronization. Rather than conditioning exclusive access on the value of a lock that is shared across concurrent threads, Transactional Memory attempts to execute critical sections optimistically, rolling back the modifications in the event of a data access conflict. However, while the lock-based approach has acquired a significant body of debugging, profiling and automated optimization tools (as one of the oldest and most researched synchronization techniques), the field of Transactional Memory is still comparably recent, and programmers are usually tasked with an unguided manual tuning of their transactional applications when facing efficiency problems. We propose a system in which code profiling in a simulated hardware implementation of Transactional Memory is used to characterize a transactional application, which forms the basis for the automated tuning of the underlying speculative system for the efficient execution of that particular application. We also propose a profile-guided approach to the scheduling of threads in a software-based implementation of Transactional Memory, using collected data to predict the likelihood of conflicts and determine what thread to schedule based on this prediction. We present the results achieved under both designs.

abstract: The purpose of this action research study was to measure the transactional distance of computer science students who participated in an online virtual community after completing a college preparation program. Using data and results generated from previous cycles of research I developed and moderated an online virtual community designed to lessen transactional distance using a sequential exploratory mixed-methods research design. This study addressed the following research questions: 1. How and to what extent will participation in a virtual community influence the transactional distance between students and course content? 2. How and to what extent will participation in a virtual community influence the transactional distance between students and their instructors/teaching assistants? 3. How and to what extent will participation in a virtual community influence the transactional distance between students and other students in the same courses? The participants for this action research study included approximately 200 students enrolled in six online sections of an entry level computer programing course from various locations around the world. Also participating in the community were the online instructors who taught the course, teaching assistants, advisors, and the action researcher. Using the sociocultural, transactional distance, self-determination, and adult learning theories as a framework, the virtual community provided occasions for students and instructional team members to share experiences and support each other academically and socially. The community was designed to enable students to give and receive frequent feedback, increase autonomy and their sense of belonging, and provide additional opportunities for them to learn from each other. Through a descriptive analysis of the transactional distance survey results, I was able to determine that transactional distance between students and their teachers, and students the course content slightly increased, while the transactional distance between students and their classmates somewhat decreased. There was also an increase in average final grade and pass rate and a decrease in student withdrawal rate. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2018