Relations among job stressors, leadership style, emotional reactions to work,counterproductive work behavior (CWB), and autonomy were investigated. Participants representing a wide variety of jobs were surveyed. Results indicate that transactional leadership style is related to negative emotions and occurrence of CWB. Relationships between variables were mediated by emotions.

Transactional Analysis, or TA, has been used for more than four decades to enhance interpersonal relationships and promote personal growth through counselling and psychotherapy. It has been used to advantage in organisations, principally in the business world. It was thought at the outset of this study that TA could also be of benefit to schools.The aim of this study was to find out whether TA methods could be used in schools to improve student outcomes in science and mathematics, to enhance interpersonal relationships and to promote positive behaviour. The study trialled TA by using it with a group of at-risk students to discover whether its use would bring about positive change.A group of ten at-risk students became part of a mentoring programme, using TA. This programme focussed on the behaviour and academic progress of the students, and sought to empower them to make positive changes. This group referred to as the sample group, was compared with a control group. The Adult ego-state (thinking) was promoted in the students in order to shift their 'locus of control' from their Negative Adapted Child ego-state, the source of much non-productive, inappropriate and rebellious behaviour.The study upheld the reliability and validity of the questionnaires used, namely the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction, the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (School Form) and the Mooney Problem Checklist. The study prompted the construction of an informal test, the Ego-State Questionnaire, which proved to be informative.Poor attendance and school behaviour records were good indicators of a student's 'at-risk' status. At-risk students were found to be already achieving below their potential in science and mathematics at entry to secondary school.The mentoring programme ran for six months, and at the end of this the sample group had improved behavioural records and increased self ++ / esteem. Their number of perceived problems had dropped dramatically, and their academic results were improved.Interpersonal relationships between the sample group and their science teachers were better than the interpersonal relationships with their mathematics teachers, indicating a continued difficulty with abstract ideas at the end of the programme and a need to run such programmes over a longer time span. Interpersonal relationships did improve out of school with parents and peers. Clear preferences were indicated for what students preferred in the behaviours of their ideal teacher: understanding, helping/friendly, leadership and strict behaviours.Encouragement of Adult ego-state was shown to be an appropriate and productive approach to the improvement of academic and behavioural outcomes for at-risk students in science and mathematics. The study also showed that at-risk young people had a lower than average Nurturing Parent ego-state available to them.Teachers rated their TA101 course highly, and found that it gave them a fresh perspective on classroom difficulties. Both teachers and students benefited from the use of TA in this study.

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This research study takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, using critical discourse theory, transactional communication theory and cross-cultural theory to contribute insight into the experiences of alternative entry students as they strive to access and participate in higher education. The study seeks to determine how these students learn to persevere: how they construct their means of succeeding in the university culture. The methodological structure of the research comprises a collective case study design, encompassing critical ethnography, action research and reflexive approaches to guide a deeper understanding of the experiences of studying at a regional Australian university. The reflexive nature of the research facilitated the development of an original theoretical construct, the ‘deficit-discourse’ shift, which challenges higher education policy and practice, in particular, in relation to academics’ roles in making their discourses explicit and in collaborating with students to facilitate students’ perseverance and success. The research has also generated two models: the Framework for Student Engagement and Mastery and the Model for Student Success at University. The Framework re-conceptualises the university as a dynamic culture made up of a multiplicity of sub-cultures, each with its own literacy or discourse. The Framework recasts the first year experience as a journey, with students’ transition re-conceptualised as the processes of gaining familiarity with and negotiating these new literacies and discourses whereas perseverance is viewed as the processes of mastering and demonstrating them. The Model provides a three step practical strategy (incorporating reflective practice, socio-cultural practice and critical practice) for achieving this engagement: for empowering students to negotiate, master and demonstrate their mastery of the university culture’s multiple discourses. Together, the two models provide students with a means of succeeding in the new university culture.

In dynamic pointcut-advice join point models of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), join points are typically selected and advised independently of each other. That is, the relationships between join points are not considered in join point selection and advice. But these inter-relationships are key to the designation and advice of arbitrary pieces of code when modularizing concerns such as exception handling and synchronization. Without a mechanism for associating join points, one must instead refactor (if possible) into one method the two or more related join points that are to be advised together. In practice, join points are often not independent. Instead, they form part of a higher-level operation that implements the intent of the developer (e.g. managing a resource). This relationship should be made more explicit. We extend the dynamic pointcut-advice join point model to make possible the designation, reication, and advice of interrelated join points. The Transactional Pointcut (transcut), which is a realization of this extended model, is a special join point designator that selects sets of interrelated join points. Each match of a transcut is a set of join points that are related through control ow, dataow, or both. This allows transcuts to dene new types of join points (pieces of computation) by capturing the key points of a computation and to provide effective access for their manipulation (i.e. advice). Essentially, transcuts almost eliminate the need for refactoring to expose join points, which is shown by others to have a signicant negative effect on software quality. The transcut construct was implemented as an extension to the AspectJ language and integrated into the AspectBench compiler. We used transcuts to modularize the concern of exception handling in two real-world software systems. The results show that transcuts are effective in designating target join points without unnecessary refactorings, even when the target code is written obliviously to the potential aspectization.

This thesis is a part of a project, “Interactive Learning in Distance Education”, funded by The Swedish Research Council. The overall purpose was, from adult distance learners’ perspective, to describe, analyse and understand factors influencing studies and interactive learning in asynchronous computer-mediated learning environments. Da¬ta were collected in 2003; from 62 students (56 women and six men) attending an undergraduate and a supplementary distance cour¬se within the teacher training program. The study was based on questionnaires, diaries, portfolios, interviews and transcriptions of students’ postings to the computer conferences FirstClass and Web¬Board, respectively. The courses included campus meetings and individual studies accompanied by study guides containing reading instructions, timetables and individual as well as group-related assign¬ments. Asynchronous text-based, computer-mediated commu¬nication (CMC) was used for dialogue among the participants. The results indicate that difficulties to combine studies with commitments in the students’ everyday lives and lack of familiarity with higher education and computer mediated distance education constituted learning obstacles. Almost everyone emphasised the importance of communicaion with peer students for feeling satisfied in the study and learning situation. They appreciated the asynchronous text-based CMC because it increased the flexibility of the studies. The students´ online behaviour and statements also indicate feelings of social presence and solidarity with peer learners, despite using a medium with relatively low capacity to convey social cues. Female and male students described similar difficulties of combining family, work and study. Women sho¬wed lower self-esteem in terms of computer skills and coping with their studies. They highlighted the social importance of the studygroup to a higher extent than the men did. The ideal course design in terms of structure, dialogue and autonomy altered depending on students´ perceptions of benefits. They wanted flexibility and autonomy to be able to combine the studies with commitments in their everyday life, at the same time they appreciated elements of structure and governance in situations when these involved saving of time. The communication in the computer conferences was extensive but the analysis of the learners’ contributions provides little evidence of effective collaborative learning activities. Several reasons to this were discussed, e.g. students´ lack of time and knowledge to form functioning learning communities, as well as insufficient course design to promote and support collaborative distance learning. It was concluded that there is a gap between teachers' ambitions to create an interactive learning environment on the one hand, and students´ skills, attitudes to collaboration and need to share their time between studies and other commitments on the other. Also, teachers´ ambitions to develop distance education aiming at collaboration and interactive learning are often hampered by their limited skills and time frames to design and implement such courses. / Interactive Learning in Distance Education

The study examines the relationship between project leadership styles and success when affected by pressures such as time, project type, complexity and cultural diversity. The research examines the two well-known leadership approaches of transformational- and transactional leadership, and argues that transactional leadership, which has less focus on the leader-follower relationship, is more suitable and successful in projects with limited time. The transformational leadership style, which has more focus on vision and relationship between the followers takes time to build, and is therefore more successful for long-term projects. In order to examine this, a questionnaire was developed and sent out to 56 project leaders around the world. Findings indicate that time in projects have a negative effect on project success, and that both transformational and transactional leadership style has a dampening effect on this negative relationship, hence increasing the success. Furthermore, the study finds strong correlation between the two leadership styles, indicating that these should not be seen as two different attitudes, as leaders can show behaviors from both the transformational and transactional leadership style, possibly explaining the similar dampening effect. No further significant moderating effects were found in the variables project type, complexity and the project’s cultural diversity.

In this thesis, we study parallelization of multiplayer games using software Transactional Memory (STM) support. We show that STM provides not only ease of programming, but also better scalability than achievable with state-of-the-art lock-based programming for this realistic high impact application. We evaluate and compare two parallel implementations of a simplified version (named SynQuake) of the popular game Quake. While in STM SynQuake support for maintaining consistency of each potentially complex game action is automatic, conservative locking of surrounding objects within a bounding-box for the duration of the game action is inherently needed in lock-based SynQuake. This leads to higher scalability of STM SynQuake versus lock-based SynQuake due to increased false sharing in the latter. Task assignment to threads has a second-order effect on scalability of STM-SynQuake, impacting the application's true sharing patterns. We show that a locality-aware task assignment provides the best trade-off between load balancing and conflict reduction.

Packet processing is the enabling technology of networked information systems such as the Internet and is usually performed with fixed-function custom-made ASIC chips. As communication protocols evolve rapidly, there is increasing interest in adapting features of the processing over time and, since software is the preferred way of expressing complex computation, we are interested in finding a platform to execute packet processing software with the best possible throughput. Because FPGAs are widely used in network equipment and they can implement processors, we are motivated to investigate executing software directly on the FPGAs. Off-the-shelf soft processors on FPGA fabric are currently geared towards performing embedded sequential tasks and, in contrast, network processing is most often inherently parallel between packet flows, if not between each individual packet. Our goal is to allow multiple threads of execution in an FPGA to reach a higher aggregate throughput than commercially available shared-memory soft multi-processors via improvements to the underlying soft processor architecture. We study a number of processor pipeline organizations to identify which ones can scale to a larger number of execution threads and find that tuning multithreaded pipelines can provide compact cores with high throughput. We then perform a design space exploration of multicore soft systems, compare single-threaded and multithreaded designs to identify scalability limits and develop processor architectures allowing threads to execute with as little architectural stalls as possible: in particular with instruction replay and static hazard detection mechanisms. To further reduce the wait times, we allow threads to speculatively execute by leveraging transactional memory. Our multithreaded multiprocessor along with our compilation and simulation framework makes the FPGA easy to use for an average programmer who can write an application as a single thread of computation with coarse-grained synchronization around shared data structures. Comparing with multithreaded processors using lock-based synchronization, we measure up to 57\% additional throughput with the use of transactional-memory-based synchronization. Given our applications, gigabit interfaces and 125 MHz system clock rate, our results suggest that soft processors can process packets in software at high throughput and low latency, while capitalizing on the FPGAs already available in network equipment.

Transactional memory (TM) systems have gained considerable popularity in the last decade driven by the increased demand for tools that ease parallel programming. TM eliminates the need for user-locks that protect accesses to shared data. It offers performance close to that of fine-grain locking with the programming simplicity of coarse-grain locking. Today’s TM systems implement the two-phase-locking (2PL) algorithm which aborts transactions every time a conflict occurs. 2PL is a simple algorithm that provides fast transactional operations. However, it limits concurrency in applications with high contention because it increases the rate of aborts. We propose the use of a more relaxed concurrency control algorithm to provide better concurrency. This algorithm is based on the conflict-serializability (CS) model. Unlike 2PL, it allows some transactions to commit successfully even when they make conflicting accesses. We implement this algorithm both in a software TM system as well as in a simulator of a hardware TM system. Our evaluation using TM benchmarks shows that the algorithm improves the performance of applications with long transactions and high abort rates. Performance is improved by up to 299% in the software TM, and up to 66% in the hardware simulator. We argue that these improvements come with little additional complexity and require no changes to the transactional programming model. This makes our implementation feasible