Performance monitors are needed to help measure and manage the quality of service of distributed applications. Different types of performance monitors exist, offering a wide variety of performance metrics. These metrics range from the so called "health metrics" that indicate whether certain components are alive to metrics that specify the exact resource usage and elapsed time of a specific user's transactions. The result of monitoring exercises can be used to build models for both capacity planning and tuning exercises. These models can require the collection of very detailed information. Application level instrumentation can provide such information, but generally causes high overheads.This thesis describes a prototype of an industrial de-facto standard application instrumentation framework named ARM 2.0 that gathers many performance metrics required for building, calibrating and validating predictive models. The approach can be used for on-line management or for building models of performance prototypes early in a system's development. Several important enhancements are added to the framework to provide better model building and problem solving capabilities. The thesis implements the concept of poly-abstract monitoring to collect the data needed to solve a problem at hand without imposing unnecessary overheads. The framework is tested for three different sample applications. A complete overhead study is carried out.
A re-assessment of Bronislaw Malinowski's two principal texts conceived during his fieldwork experience in the Trobriand Islands, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific and A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, will be attempted in light of James Clifford's contention that they are two halves of the same work, separated only by essentialist binary opposition codes (i.e., self/other, dominant/submissive, objective/subjective, public/private) that have dominated much of western modern philosophical discourse. This re-assessment will take the form of a postmodern critique of some of the fundamental epistemological tenets and assumptions underlying traditional western thought on which scientific Anthropology and its principal methodology, ethnography is based. Central to this re-assessment is the question of authority of ethnographic texts such as those of Malinowski: how can textual authority be re-imagined/re-read in light of these postmodern contentions? Hence, our attempt to utilize the method of collage to flatten authority.
The social movement(s) with which the midwives and their clients in Ontario have been connected since the late 1970's has tended to take an increasingly subordinate focus to that of licensing of midwifery as a profession. This thesis defines and characterizes both social movements and professions and draws a comparison of the two to reveal large differences in their goals, strategies, ethics, and participants. Using this comparison as a framework for discussion, it argues the midwives most eligible for integration into the health care system at time of legislation of the profession in Ontario were rooted in a sense of family and social movement ethics. The legislation project has created internal conflict and a growing need to distinguish between the Movement and the Professionalization/Legislation Project. The analysis is based on the popular and professional newsletters of the midwives, their clients, and the government legislation programs, video clips of workshops and news reports, and answers to a 35-page questionnaire sent to the midwives who had practised just before or just after the 1993 Bill to enact the midwifery legislation. Interviews or answers to the questionnaire were obtained from 41 of 89 midwives approached. A case is made for maintaining both the Movement and the Professionalization/Legislation Project. This would allow midwives to mainstream their services while remaining disengaged from the illusory elitism of professions, an elitism the midwives' and clients' Movement originally sought to avoid.
