MT-WAVE: Profiling multi-tier web applications

The web is evolving: what was once primarily used for sharing static content has now evolved into a platform for rich client-side applications. These applications do not run exclusively on the client; while the client is responsible for presentation and some processing, there is a significant amount of processing and persistence that happens server-side. This has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is that the user’s data is accessible from anywhere. It doesn’t matter which device you sign into a web application from, everything you’ve been working on is instantly accessible. The largest disadvantage is that large numbers of servers are required to support a growing user base; unlike traditional client applications, an organization making a web application needs to provision compute and storage resources for each expected user. This infrastructure is designed in tiers that are responsible for different aspects of the application, and these tiers may not even be run by the same organization. As these systems grow in complexity, it becomes progressively more challenging to identify and solve performance problems. While there are many measures of software system performance, web application users only care about response latency. This “fingertip-to-eyeball performance” is the only metric that users directly perceive: when a button is clicked in a web application, how long does it take for the desired action to complete? MT-WAVE is a system for solving fingertip-to-eyeball performance problems in web applications. The system is designed for doing multi-tier tracing: each piece of the application is instrumented, execution traces are collected, and the system merges these traces into a single coherent snapshot of system latency at every tier. To ensure that user-perceived latency is accurately captured, the tracing begins in the web browser. The application developer then uses the MT-WAVE Visualization System to explore the execution traces to first identify which system is causing the largest amount of latency, and then zooms in on the specific function calls in that tier to find optimization candidates. After fixing an identified problem, the system is used to verify that the changes had the intended effect. This optimization methodology and toolset is explained through a series of case studies that identify and solve performance problems in open-source and commercial applications. These case studies demonstrate both the utility of the MT-WAVE system and the unintuitive nature of system optimization

Ageing, Cognition and Dementia in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples: A Life Cycle Approach

Dementia is emerging as a global phenomenon, although it is predominantly defined in the literature as a, ‘Western diagnostic category’. There is general acceptance that ‘Culture’, namely, values, practices and beliefs, play an important role in understanding dementia, from uncovering risk factors for the disease, in particular, the interplay of environmental and genetic factors (Burchard, Ziv et al. 2003), to influencing what has been described as, “help-seeking behaviours”, across different populations (Dilworth-Anderson and Gibson 2002). In Aboriginal communities, both in Australia and other comparative societies, what we know about the nature and extent of dementia, and of its sub-types, is still in its infancy, as is knowledge about the experiences, perceptions and meaning of dementia for Aboriginal people, the causes of, and risk factors for cognitive decline, and the need for and provision of dementia services (Pollitt 1997; Jervis and Manson 2002; LoGiudice, Smith et al. 2006). This Report is a review of the literature to-date on dementia in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. We reviewed the research in comparable Indigenous communities internationally as well as dementia research in non-Indigenous populations, both nationally and internationally, to illuminate cognitive development, growth and decline across the life-cycle and its application to the ‘brain health’ of Indigenous Australians. The Review was conducted over a three year period between late 2006 and 2009

Disability at the periphery: legal theory, disability and criminal law

© 2015 Griffith University. This special issue of the Griffith Law Review is dedicated to an examination of the relationships and intersections between disability, criminal law and legal theory. Despite the centrality of disability to the doctrines, operation and reform of criminal law, disability continues to inhabit a marginal location in legal theoretical engagement with criminal law. This special issue proceeds from a contestation of disability as an individual, medical condition and instead explores disability's social, political and cultural contexts. This kind of approach directs critical attention to questioning many aspects of the relationships between disability and criminal law which have otherwise been taken for granted or overlooked in legal scholarship. These aspects include the differential treatment of people with disability by criminal law, the impact of core legal concepts such as capacity on criminal legal treatment of people with disability, and the role of disability in ordering and legitimising criminal law. It is hoped that the special issue will contribute to the shifting of disability from its peripheral location in legal theoretical scholarship much more to the centre of critical and political engagement with criminal law