The global intent of this research was to confirm the validity of the interpolated twitch technique (ITT) to voluntary torque model (first study) and then to utilize this technique in developing definitive criterion measures enhancing the study of training strategies on central fatigue (second study) and velocity specific (third study) voluntary activation (VA) and force production outcomes. The first study assessed the contribution of non-stimulated synergists to the non-linearity of the ITT voluntary torque relationship for elbow flexion contraction. Since multiple synergist stimulation was found not to significantly improve the ITT to voluntary torque relationship, follow-up pilot work was conducted in which the quadriceps femoris was identified as a valid ITT test model muscle. The first training study investigated the effects of high volume, maximum voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC) resistance training of the quadriceps femoris on MVIC levels of force and VA prior to, during, and recovery from a standardized fatigue test protocol. Results showed significant increases in pre-fatigue MVIC VA and force, increases in resistance to early fatigue, but also increased overall rate of fatigue resulting in non-significant changes in total force volume and endurance time. Post-fatigue analysis showed significant training increases in rate and level of recovery for both MVIC VA and force production. The second training study investigated the effects of high resistance ramp versus ballistic type MVIC strength training of the quadriceps femoris on central adaptations in submaximal and maximal levels of MVIC VA and force production. Results showed similar ramp and ballistic group training increases in MVIC force and VA on both ramp and ballistic tests. Ballistic group, ballistic test change scores were significant but not for the ramp test, suggesting ballistic group test-training specificity. The ballistic group showed significant force increases on the submaximal 150ms ballistic test, while the ramp group showed non-significant training changes, further supporting test-training specificity for the ballistic group. Results support utility of the ITT and provide valuable information with regard to training and test-training specificity considerations.

Local twitch responses (LTRs) can be elicited by snapping palpation of myofascial trigger points (TrP) or TrP injections. Objective: To characterize the LTR elicited by TrP injection and snapping palpation on surface electromyography (sEMG) in subjects with myofascial pain in 14 female subjects. Methods: Surface EMG electrodes were placed around the TrP and a control site on the trapezius muscle. Then the following protocol was carried out: tension and contraction of the ipsilateral trapezius muscle, baseline resting activity (five minutes), snapping palpation of the TrP and the control sites, TrP injection, and final resting activity (five minutes). The following data were recorded: pain ratings, areas of referred pain, presence of LTR, and sEMG recordings. Results: During the TrP injection, the investigator found LTRs in only 36% of the subjects, while 64% of the subjects reported that they felt the LTR, and the sEMG recorded only one LTR in one subject. Despite the low percentage of LTRs elicited clinically (36%), a large number of subjects (71%) reported more than 50% immediate reduction in pain intensity after the TrP injection. Conclusion: The sEMG is unable to register the LTR elicited by snapping palpation and TrP injection.

The issue of sexism is arguably an important topic in modern society in several aspects of life. With the introduction of the Internet and communication over the Internet, additional potential sources of sexism have emerged. While there appears to have been a significant number of studies regarding sexism in cyberspace, Twitch.tv is a relatively new platform and seems yet to be properly explored. Therefore, while being limited in size, the present study aims to provide an introduction to Twitch.tv by performing a limited investigation of the extent of sexist behaviour and ideas expressed by users on the site, particularly against female streamers. To accomplish this, 30,000 lines of chat messages from six different chatrooms, three belonging to women and the remaining three to men, were examined for sexist behaviour, based on a variety of parameters such as differences in language complexity and instances of sexist remarks. The results suggested that several varieties of sexism existed on Twitch, and was directed at both men and women, where women seemed to be more heavily affected than men. The conclusion of the study is that Twitch does not seem to be a breath of fresh air in cyberspace as it appears to embody numerous sexist ideas. However, the author notes that Twitch could serve as a potentially useful source of data for future gender studies online.

Många verksamheter representeras idag på internet i omodern stil vilket kan påverka besökarens uppfattning om verksamheten negativt. I detta arbete har en webbsida rekonstruerats. Webbsidan tillhör en förening med verksamhet inom gaming och esport. Rekonstruktionen är till för att ge besökare en klar bild av vad föreningens huvudverksamhet är och för att integrera streamingtjänsten Twitch för att ge besökare ytterligare en anledning att återbesöka sidan. Dessutom har laddningstiden för startsidan optimerats för att ge bättre besökupplevelse. Med hjälp av Redis och metoden Eager loading visar arbetet hur man kan sänka laddningstiden på en webbsida.

This study examines how Media Logic of YouTube and Twitch affects individual creators who works with creating content on the two platforms. It touches upon the different structures of Media Logic that exists over social media platforms and a little bit on how they have changed over the years. Most importantly it examines what a content creators work process and structure looks like and how that is affected by the different Media Logic structures. This subject is original since there is not previously made another likewise study around this particular subject. This not only makes it an exploratory study but more importantly starts the conversation about the subject. By writing about this subject, it gives creators a voice that could both help other creators in the future, but also make creators feel heard. In today’s society there is a lot of content creators on both platform and it’s a growing industry. So, when talking about their creative process and how the platforms in any way impacts that, it can open up for even more conversations such as how viewers perceive content differently depending on the platforms Media Logic of how creators perceive themselves on the platform. The study has an overall abductive approach and to gather the information, five semi-structured interviews took place. Within these interviews it was possible to get a preliminary insight into how a few content creators feel about their jobs and the platforms they use in their work. The collected data was gathered and analysed together with information collected about the platforms and theory of choice, Media Logic. It was then possible to reach a tentative conclusion. The results showed that even though the creators were not previously aware of Media Logic they all indirectly were affected by it. They could be affected through the way they choose to structure and plan their videos or in how they decided to express themselves online; all five of the content creators that participated in the study were in one way or another affected by the logics of the platforms YouTube and Twitch during their content creation process. In collecting this it created a stable ground for future researchers that wants to investigate the area.

abstract: Live streaming has risen to significant popularity in the recent past and largely this live streaming is a feature of existing social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. However, there does exist at least one social network entirely devoted to live streaming, and specifically the live streaming of video games, Twitch. This social network is unique for a number of reasons, not least because of its hyper-focus on live content and this uniqueness has challenges for social media researchers. Despite this uniqueness, almost no scientific work has been performed on this public social network. Thus, it is unclear what user interaction features present on other social networks exist on Twitch. Investigating the interactions between users and identifying which, if any, of the common user behaviors on social network exist on Twitch is an important step in understanding how Twitch fits in to the social media ecosystem. For example, there are users that have large followings on Twitch and amass a large number of viewers, but do those users exert influence over the behavior of other user the way that popular users on Twitter do? This task, however, will not be trivial. The same hyper-focus on live content that makes Twitch unique in the social network space invalidates many of the traditional approaches to social network analysis. Thus, new algorithms and techniques must be developed in order to tap this data source. In this thesis, a novel algorithm for finding games whose releases have made a significant impact on the network is described as well as a novel algorithm for detecting and identifying influential players of games. In addition, the Twitch network is described in detail along with the data that was collected in order to power the two previously described algorithms. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2019

<p>With the popularity of the gaming industry, game streaming appeared and became a global phenomenon with high participation in recent years. Game streaming platforms such as Twitch had millions of active users participated in the community by watching and chatting. Yet there was lack of investigation about how chat behaviors connected with the overall participation in game streaming community. This study aims to describe and analyze the roles taken on by viewers as they engaged in chat while watching game streaming and identify how these roles influenced participation. I designed a qualitative study with online observations on several Twitch channels streaming Overwatch. By analyzing the chatlogs collected, I identified four social roles among chatters: Lurker, Troll, Collaborator, and Moderator. A discourse analysis was applied to further investigate the interactions among these roles and how they shape the conversation in chatrooms. With these findings, I generated a four-role model that specific for chatters in Twitch personal channels. Limitations of this study and suggestions for future research were also provided.</p>

Aujourd'hui, de nombreux appareils sont capables de capturer des vidéos en Full HD et d'utiliser une connexion réseau pour accéder à Internet. La popularisation des dispositifs et les efforts continus pour améliorer la qualité du réseau ont apporté un environnement propice à l'essor de la diffusion en direct. De par la grande quantité de contenu généré par les utilisateurs, la diffusion de flux en direct présente de nouveaux défis. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à la distribution et au transcodage des systèmes de diffusion en direct. Pour étudier les différent aspects des systèmes de diffusion en direct nous avons besoin de les caractériser et d'évaluer les solutions proposées avec des traces pertinentes. Par conséquent, notre première contribution est un ensemble de données et son analyse, contenant trois mois de traces de deux services de streaming en direct. Ensuite, nous avons exploré et développé des solutions pour la distribution du contenu produit par ces platesformes. L'un des défis est l'hétérogénéité de popularité des flux. Ceci implique généralement un surdimensionnement des services et par conséquent un gaspillage de ressources. Enfin, nous nous sommes focalisés sur les difficultés posées par le transcodage des flux en direct. Les opérations de transcodage sont coûteuses en ressources CPU et sont des étapes clés pour le Streaming à Débit Adaptatif (SDA). Nous montrons que le SDA est capable de réduire le coût en bande passante pour la distribution et d'augmenter la qualité d'expérience des téléspectateurs en échange d'un coût en ressources CPU. Pour comprendre le compromis entre les avantages et les coûts, nous formulons deux problèmes de gestion. / Today many devices are capable to capture full HD videos and to use its network connection to access Internet. The popularization of devices and continuous efforts to increase network quality has brought a proper environment for the rise of live streaming. Associated to the large scale of Users Generated Content (UGC), live streaming presents new challenges. In this thesis we target the delivery and transcoding of live streaming systems.First, to study the aspects we target of live streaming systems we need to characterize them and evaluate the proposed solutions with relevant traces. Therefore our first contribution is a data set, and its analysis, containing three months traces of two UGC live streaming services.Second, we explored and developed solutions for the delivery of the content produced by these platforms. One of the challenges is the heterogeneity among streams popularity, which generally implies over-provisioning and consequently resource waste. We show that there is a trade-off between the number of servers involved to broadcast the streams and the bandwidth usage among the servers. We also stress the importance to predict streams popularity in order to efficiently place them on the servers.Lastly, we target the difficulties concerning transcoding of live streams. The transcoding operations over streams are computing consuming and are key operations on adaptive bit rate streaming. We show that adaptive streaming is able to reduce the delivery bandwidth cost and to increase viewer quality of experience at the cost of computing resources. We formulate two management problems to address the trade-off between benefits and costs.

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Studien analyserade nio intervjuer för att undersöka studenternas upplevelser och perspektiv på sina parasociala relationer. Med målet att dels undersöka den roll som parasociala relationer spelar i studenternas liv och hur de påverkar deras vänskapsrelationer och andra nära relationer, samt att analysera studenternas resonemang och perspektiv kring deras parasociala relationer för att förstå deras uppfattningar och känslor kring dessa interaktioner. Syftet är att ge en större förståelse för vilken roll de parasociala förhållandena har i studenternas liv och hur viktiga dessa relationer är för dem. Den kommer att bidra till en ökad förståelse för parasociala relationer och bidra till det socialpsykologiska och kommunikationsvetenskapliga området. Studiens frågeställningar är: Vilken roll spelar parasociala relationer i studenternas liv?, hur samspelar studenternas parasociala relationer med deras vänskapsrelationer och andra nära relationer?, och hur resonerar studenterna kring sina parasociala relationer? Resultaten visar att studenterna betraktar dessa relationer som tillfredsställande, värdefulla och skapare av en illusion av gemenskap. Istället för att omvandla parasociala relationer till verkliga interpersonella relationer strävar studenterna efter en fördjupad känsla av närhet inom den föreställda gemenskapen. Denna studie ger insikter i studenternas navigering av parasociala relationer och bidrar till en bättre förståelse av dessa relationers betydelse för individerna.