High-performance athletes' (HPAs) engagement in proactive retirement preparation has become increasingly important for their well-being and quality of life during and after sport. As researchers continue to highlight the plethora of challenges underprepared HPAs face when retiring from sport, retirement support available to Canadian HPAs through Game Plan continues to be significantly underutilized (Game Plan, 2023). Researchers have identified environmental barriers as an influencing factor determining athletes' ability to access and utilize available forms of retirement support (Brassard et al., 2022). Current literature lacks the use of a holistic lens to identify the organizational factors that act as barriers and facilitators faced by athletes in this regard. An exploration with this lens could enhance our understanding of HPAs' ability to prepare for retirement by providing insights into the organizational interplay sport members have in facilitating a sport environment that enables, restricts, or hinders a HPA's ability to prepare for life after sport. Furthermore, a holistic lens can provide researchers with the necessary information to develop further frameworks and strategies to minimize athlete retirement barriers (Stambulova et al., 2020). The purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to address this gap through the following objectives: (a) examine how active and retired athletes utilized retirement support mechanisms, (b) explore high-performance sport members' perspectives and understanding of retirement support mechanisms, and (c) facilitate co-design sessions to innovate solution-driven prototypes to address sport members' athlete retirement needs. The methodologies of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems theory and Design Thinking were adopted to guide and facilitate this research. This dissertation is composed of three articles, each correlating with the research objectives. With the first research objective, a secondary data analysis was used to examine how athletes in the Canadian sport system were utilizing Game Plan's resources from 2019-2021. This examination provided insight into athletes' Game Plan usage discrepancies when drawing comparisons to the funding each National Sport Organization (NSO) earned, their league of competition (e.g., Para or Non-Para sport), and repeat uses of Game Plan's resources after an initial interaction. As a result of the findings from this examination, considerations are proposed for sport organizations who seek to improve their athlete engagement with Game Plan's retirement resources. The second objective was investigated through empathy interviews (Kelley & Kelley, 2013) conducted with active athletes, retired athletes, support personnel, and performance partners across the sport system. A total of 19 individuals were interviewed. Empathy interviews were used to create personas for each role. Findings from this exploration add to the literature by outlining the following empirical findings: (a) high-performance sport members have limited knowledge and understanding of accessible retirement resources, (b) sport organizations' cultures can present barriers or facilitators through direct and indirect messages to athletes, and (c) HPAs who proactively sought out support or had a good sport-life balance experienced fewer challenges adapting to life after sport. The third and final objective was supported via the Stanford d. school's five-step Design Thinking model: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This section of research consisted of a co-design session conducted with two groups of participants. In each session, participants were led through brainstorming cluster activities to define, ideate, design, and evaluate athlete retirement solution-driven prototypes. Sport members collaboratively designed the following three evidenced-based prototypes: (a) creating a new funding metrics system, (b) strengthening collaboration between NSOs and Game Plan, and (c) enhancing athlete retirement coach education. The Design Thinking process as well as the insights outlining why and how the adoption of each prototype can advance HPAs' ability to prepare for their lives after sport are discussed. This article is the first to adopt a Design Thinking approach to advance athlete retirement literature and aims to serve as a catalyst for researchers to adopt Design Thinking methods to further the field of sport performance psychology. The results of this doctoral dissertation research add empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to both the athlete retirement and Design Thinking literature.

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The availability of sophisticated machine tools, together with advanced cutting tool designs and high performance coatings has allowed machining to meet many challenges. A significant remaining challenge is the competitive milling of hardened steels at moderate to high cutting speeds. This is of particular importance for the die and mould making industry. Despite the necessity to achieve higher production rates and improved surface finish, cutting speeds above the range of 300-600 m/min are still not possible. This limitation is due to the combination of high mechanical, thermal and chemical interactions that are taking place on the tool surface during cutting. To address this situation, an extensive amount of research has been focused on developments associated with hard coatings such as nano-multilayered hard PVD coatings that exhibit novel mechanical and thermal properties. The development of methodologies for designing a cutting tool with a strong cutting edge micro-geometry has set guidelines for selecting proper cutting edge preparation for specific cutting applications. The results indicate that, the development of new hard coating designs is the most effective way to improve the service life of coated carbide tools for hard high speed milling applications. The developments of both robust and rigid substrate designs with adaptive cutting edge micro-geometries assist the cutting tool performance by favoring the surface adaptability of the deposited coating. The developments of different strategies for dry air cooling that provide a "soft-cool" environment seem to have a beneficial impact on cutting performance and tool life improvement. Dry air cooling is found to be more effective than chilled-air cooling and minimum-quantity-lubrication (MQL). Therefore, the utilization of a cutting environment tailored to meet the requirements of both the tool and the coating while providing sufficient air flow to remove chips from the cutting zone will complement the adaptability of the whole tool-workpiece-chip system. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

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Memory forensics (or memory analysis) is a relatively new approach to digital forensics that deals exclusively with the acquisition and analysis of volatile system memory. Because each function performed by an operating system must utilize system memory, analysis of this memory can often lead to a treasure trove of useful information for forensic analysts and incident responders. Today’s forensic investigators are often subject to large case backlogs, and incident responders must be able to quickly identify the source and cause of security breaches. In both these cases time is a critical factor. Unfortunately, today’s memory analysis tools can take many minutes or even hours to perform even simple analysis tasks. This problem will only become more prevalent as RAM prices continue to drop and systems with very large amounts of RAM become more common. Due to the volatile nature of data resident in system RAM it is also desirable for investigators to be able to access non-volatile copies of system RAM that may exist on a device’s hard drive. Such copies are often created by operating systems when a system is being suspended and placed into a power safe mode. This dissertation presents work on improving the speed of memory analysis and the access to non-volatile copies of system RAM. Specifically, we propose a novel memory analysis framework that can provide access to valuable artifacts orders of magnitude faster than existing tools. We also propose two new analysis techniques that can provide faster and more resilient access to important forensic artifacts. Further, we present the first analysis of the hibernation file format used in modern versions of Windows. This work allows access to evidence in non-volatile copies of system RAM that were not previously able to be analyzed. Finally, we propose future enhancements to our memory analysis framework that should address limitations with the current design. Taken together, this dissertation represents substantial work towards advancing the field of memory forensics.

M. Tech. (Biomedical technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Science), Vaal University of Technology / Approximately 1% of the world’s population has epilepsy, the second most common neurological disorder after stroke. In South Africa almost 1 in every 100 people has epilepsy, affecting all ages. Levetiracetam (LEV), marketed as Keppra® is an anticonvulsant drug used in the treatment of epilepsy. The daily dosage is 500 mg twice daily with a maximum of 3000 mg. The therapeutic range of LEV is between 12-46 μg/ml. Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) should be considered for LEV in patients with poor seizure control or long term treatment. TDM depends on accurate drug concentration measurements. In order to provide an accurate measurement, the High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed, compared with a commercially available kit, and the stability of the samples was investigated. Ethical approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Medical), VUT (Ethics reference number: 2015024.4). The study was conducted from January to October 2015. This study involved three groups of volunteers who gave written consent. The first group were fifteen healthy MTech students in the Biomedical Technology Department at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). Their blood samples were used for the analytical validation of the method and for the stability studies over a 4 weeks period. The second group were six patients from Pathcare Laboratories in Potchefstroom, Klerksdorp and Vereeniging who used Levetiracetam. Their blood samples were used to investigate the influence of different collection tubes as well as the handling and storage of samples on the LEV concentration. The third group were forty four patients from Pathcare Laboratories, Cape Town. Their blood samples were transported to Clinical Pharmacokinetic Laboratory (CPL) for routine therapeutic drug monitoring analysis of LEV and used to compare the newly developed HPLC method and the Commercial kit. The HPLC method was successfully developed and validated to determine LEV in human plasma/serum samples. The calibration curves showed good linearity (r2 = 0,999) over the concentration range of 1 – 60 μg/ml. Accuracy, mean extraction recovery, lower limit of detection (LLOD) and lower limit of quantification (LLOQ) were 98-112%, 97,15% (±1,57), 0,5 and 1,0 μg/ml respectively, in plasma standards. The method was shown to be simple and fast, reproducible and effective for routine laboratory analyses in the future. The agreement between the newly developed method and the ClinRep® HPLC complete commercial kit was the same and there was a statistical significant correlation between the two methods (average r=0.999; p-value < 0.0001, F-test with a true value =0). The method was much cheaper than the commercial kit, used less sample (100 μl) and had a longer running time (15 minutes) to ensure no endogenous interference. The costs of the developed method was 71-82% lower than the three commercial kits available in South Africa. Stability experiments were performed to evaluate the stability of LEV in human plasma/serum, simulating the same conditions which occurred during study samples’ analyses. The % RSD was lower than 5% under all the conditions: freeze, fridge, room temperature and auto sampler over the 4 week period. The results showed that both LEV and the I.S (internal standard) were stable in human serum/plasma under all these conditions. The influence of five different collection tubes, Gold (SST Gel), Red, Purple (EDTA)Green (Heparin) and Blue (Sodium Citrate) was investigated. In two patients, decreased levels were observed in tubes containing blue (sodium citrate) and Green (Heparin). The decrease was not statistically significant. This is an important observation and is an indication that anticoagulants may cause some problems due to drug-protein binding and interference in the matrix effect. A cost effective and reliable HPLC-method with minimal sample preparation time for the routine determination of LEV in plasma/serum samples was developed. It was also shown that the plasma/serum samples were stable at different temperatures over a time period. The only collection tubes that may interfere with the concentrations were the Green (Heparin) and Blue (Sodium Citrate) tubes.

High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) has been employed as an analytical tool for the purification and separation of nucleic acids. A Nucleogen DEAE 4000-10 weak anion exchange column, prepacked with modified silica gels, was used to purify and separate a number of Escherichia coli plasmids. Plasmid DNAs were extracted by the alkaline lysis method. The cleared lysate was injected directly onto the Nucleogen column, and the peaks were collected, desalted and analysed by gel electrophoresis. On the chromatogram, the pBR322 formed a distinctive peak at 27 minutes and partial separation was made for the E. coli V517 plasmids. Plasmid pBR322 showed a clear band without any detectable contamination on agarose gel. This purified plasmid DNA is biologically active for enzymatic reaction commonly used in genetic engineering techniques.

Future supercomputers will require application developers to expose much more parallelism than current applications expose. In order to assist application developers in structuring their applications such that this is possible, new programming models and libraries are emerging, the many-task runtimes, to allow for the expression of orders of magnitude more parallelism than currently existing models. This dissertation describes the challenges that these emerging many-task runtimes will place on performance analysis, and proposes deep integration between runtimes and performance tools as a means of producing correct, insightful, and actionable performance results. I show how tool-runtime integration can be used to aid programmer understanding of performance characteristics and to provide online performance feedback to the runtime for Unified Parallel C (UPC), High Performance ParalleX (HPX), Apache Spark, the Open Community Runtime, and the OpenMP runtime.

Cohesion is essential for team harmony and performance. It is universally sought in sport teams. The benefits have been extensively studied and are a requirement of team success. Counter to wide held belief, cohesion is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon. This thesis aimed to develop more understanding of the potential disadvantages or costs of high cohesion in sport teams to fill a significant gap in the literature. Study 1 examined the extent and nature of these costs. Athletes perceived similar costs. Fourteen categories of costs were identified with perceived pressures and communication issues demonstrated to be strongly significant. Study 2 was framed in narrative theory to explore costs experienced over the life-span career of a retired professional motor sport co-driver. The most significant costs experienced were pressure to perform and pressure to conform. The key influencing factors were a performance narrative along with what was identified as a new narrative type, the team performance narrative. Study 3 utilised the lens of narrative theory to explore when and where costs were not experienced by a current elite motorsport sport driver and his team. Buffers were indicated. Study 4 was a case study of a high performing team where across the entire season team cohesion was high but performance wasn’t reciprocated accordingly. High cohesion produced costs of conformity and normative influence, rigid demands and methods with narrow goal focus, communication issues and pressure to perform. These costs are all inter-related and interacted to have a negative impact on performance. This thesis raises awareness of the potential costs of high cohesion in sport teams and, by offering a new model – the Cohesion Costs’ Reduction Model - for identifying strategies to minimise these potential costs, aims to improve individual wellbeing in a team and improve team performance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Pennsylvania State University, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references.