This thesis is an investigation of external biosecurity and its application to risk-based surveillance approaches in the southern Ontario swine industry. In each of two datasets, the best number of groups to describe biosecurity practices was identified, resulting in two groups with high biosecurity standards and one group with low biosecurity standards. Multinomial logistic regression models identified herd density, herd size, and herd type among significant predictors of biosecurity group membership. A map of southern Ontario that can be used as a tool in the risk-based surveillance of contagious swine diseases was developed using geographic information about swine density, and the distribution of herds belonging to the high biosecurity groups. Finally, multiple correspondence analysis examined how individual biosecurity practices form strategies on sow farms. Some practices that are generally considered high-risk were closely associated with other practices that mitigate the risk, suggesting that evaluation of the overall strategy is essential for complete assessment of biosecurity. / The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (under the Emergency Management research theme); Ontario Pork; the Ontario Pork Industry Council's Swine Health Advisory Board; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada;

The purpose of this study was to explore how elderly people in Gävle cope with their life by using of Internet and what are their perceived benefits and barriers of the use of Internet. Qualitative methods were used with face-to-face interviews and email correspondence to gather the data. Six elderly people participated in this study. Coping theory was used to analyse the results. The results were divided into three parts. They were describing the use of Internet, benefits and barriers of using the Internet and reasons behind using the Internet and coping. Benefits include connectedness, gratification, usefulness, and active learning experience. Barriers include limitation, distrust and frustration. This paper used the coping theory to try to describe how these persons adjust the way of thinking and the way of behaving and how they use these strategies to cope with the daily life. It was found that Internet for elderly people is becoming more important nowadays and also it is significant to know how they think about the Internet.

This study analyses differences between student groups at Umeå University, Sweden, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. It analyses student study situations, students’ experience of the university environment, students’ exercise and sports activities, and connections between study and leisure-time activities. The study owes much to Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (English edition 1988), and his theories of cultural reproduction, social structures and habitus, and focuses on students from the subject areas teacher education, natural sciences, humanities and sports. Attention is also given to family backgrounds and female/male variance. The data were collected in 1994-1995, with the aid of 782 questionnaires and 64 interviews. The results show differences between students at the two universities in terms of study time, parents’ education and leisure activities and part-time jobs. Students in the studied groups, differ in many respects. The groups have distinct characteristics in terms of, for example, age and sex ratios. The students’ family backgrounds are also divergent, depending on which discipline the student belongs to. These variations between disciplines are found at both universities. Physical activities (action sports) are popular activities, at both universities. Women and men exercise in different ways, although they might have a similar social situation. The scientific methodology of Bourdieu is also discussed in the study. In sum, the results indicate that there are sub-fields within the university. Individuals with different conditions and habitus, to use Bourdieu’s terminology, inhabit these sub-fields.

The selected letters of George Ripley, 1828-1841, constitute an important source of information about New England Transcendentalism and its literary, philosophical, and political manifestations. These 36 letters from 1828 to 1841 chronicle Ripley's integral involvement in the most significant achievements of the Transcendentalists, translation of European literature, the various controversies with the Unitarian establishment, the formation of the Transcendental Club, and participation in the many reform movements of the period. Specifically, these letters detail Ripley's career as minister of Boston's Purchase Street Church, his missionary work for the American Unitarian Association, the production of his Specimens of Standard Foreign Literature, his relationships with many of the leading Transcendentalists, and his founding the experimental community, Brook Farm.Ripley's letters are presented here in fully edited form. Transcriptions were produced from photocopies of the original manuscripts, creating a genetic text which retains, as much as possible, the exact form of the handwritten letter. Each letter is fully annotated, and an index topeople, publications, and important ideas is provided. An extensive introductory essay outlines important events in Ripley's life and discusses the contribution the letters make both to an understanding of Ripley and to an important period in American letters. / Department of English

This study is about the school teachers’ positions in contemporary Swedish society. In order to grasp the social characteristics of their profession and its transformations it has been important to conduct thorough analyses of the recruitment of teacher students and the recruitment to the teaching professions. The explanations to the findings are mainly based on analyses of how different kinds of assets – such as for example cultural capital and educational capital – are distributed among the students and within the school teacher corps. The data material consists of individual based statistic of all teachers 1978–2008 and all students enrolled in higher education 1977–2009, and of interviews with teachers and students. Regarding theory and methods, the study belongs to the sociological tradition founded by Pierre Bourdieu, which means that capital, strategies and social space are key concepts. The statistical techniques employed comprise mainly of different variants of correspondence analysis as well as logistic regression. As shown in the first part of the thesis an increasing share of the teacher students possess small amounts of acquired school capital, as well as weak resources inherited from their parental home. This change has been especially noticeable within the programmes educating upper secondary school teachers. In the second part, the focus is on the social positions of those upper secondary teachers. The correspondence analyses indicate a cleavage within the profession based on the teachers’ qualification and merits. Teachers richer in educational capital tend to occupy more stable professional positions and are also overrepresented at schools where the pupils feature significant educational and social assets, which in turn further contributes to the density of educational capital. One of the main results is that school teachers have been exposed to two partly opposing processes during the past decades. On the one hand, there has been increasing homogeneity, namely convergences between the employment conditions of different categories of school teachers and between different teacher education programmes. On the other hand, the social divergences within the profession tend to widen. Those gaps have increased over time because of the more differentiated school system and changes in recruitment patterns.

We propose algorithms for organization of images in wide-area sparse-view datasets. In such datasets, if the images overlap in scene content, they are related by wide-baseline geometric transformations. The challenge is to identify these relations even if the images sparingly overlap in their content. The images in a dataset are then grouped into sets of related images with the relations captured in each set as a basal (minimal and foundational) graph structures. Images form the vertices in the graph structure and the edges define the geometric relations between the images. We use these basal graphs for geometric walkthroughs and detection of noisy location (GPS) and orientation (magnetometer) information that may be stored with each image. We have five algorithmic contributions. First, we propose an algorithm BLOGS (Balanced Local and Global Search) that uses a novel hybrid Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) strategy called 'hop-diffusion' for epipolar geometry estimation between a pair of wide-baseline images that is 10 times faster and more accurate than the state-of-the-art. Hops are global searches and diffusions are local searches. BLOGS is able to handle very wide-baseline views characteristic of wide-area sparse-view datasets. It also produces a geometric match score between an image pair. Second, we propose a photometric match score, the Cumulative Correspondence Score (CCS). The proposed photometric scores are fast approximations of the computationally expensive geometric scores. Third, we use the photometric scores and the geometric scores to find groups of related images and to organize them in the form of basal graph structures using a novel hybrid algorithm we call theCOnnected component DIscovery by Minimally Specifying an Expensive Graph (CODIMSEG). The objective of the algorithm is to minimize the number of geometric estimations and yield results similar to what would be achieved if all-pair geometric matching were done. We compared the performances of the CCS and CODIMSEG algorithms with GIST (means summary of an image) and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) based approaches. We found that CCS and CODIMSEG perform significantly better than GIST and k-NN respectively in identifying visually connected images. Our algorithm achieved more than 95% true positive rate at 0% false positive rate. Fourth, we propose a basal tree graph expansion algorithm to make the basal graphs denser for applications like geometric walk-throughs using the minimum Hamiltonian path algorithm and detection of noisy position (GPS) and orientation (magnetometer) tags. We propose two versions of geometric walkthroughs, one using minimum spanning tree based approximation of the minimum Hamiltonian path on the basal tree graphs and other using the Lin-Kernighan heuristic approximation on the expanded basal graph. Conversion of a non-linear tree structure to a linear path structure leads to discontinuities in path. The Lin-Kernighan algorithm on the expanded basal graphs is shown to be a better approach. Fifth, we propose a vision based geometric voting algorithm to detect noisy GPS and magnetometer tags using the basal graphs. This problem has never been addressed before to the best of our knowledge. We performed our experiments on the Nokia dataset (which has 243 images in the 'Lausanne' dataset and 105 images in the 'Demoset'), ArtQuad dataset (6514 images) and Oxford dataset (5063 images). All the three datasets are very different. Nokia dataset is a very wide-baseline sparse-view dataset. ArtQuad dataset is a wide-baseline dataset with denser views compared to the Nokia dataset. Both these datasets have GPS tagged images. Nokia dataset has magnetometer tags too. ArtQuad dataset has 348 images with the commercial GPS information as well as high precision differential GPS data which serves as ground truth for our noisy tag detection algorithm. Oxford dataset is a wide-baseline dataset with plenty of distracters that test the algorithm's capability to group images correctly. The larger datasets test the scalability of our algorithms. Visually inspected feature matches and image matches were used as ground truth in our experiments. All the experiments were done on a single PC.

Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This thesis focuses on changes in the value of educational capital over time. Taking as a point of departure Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a multidimensional social space, the thesis examines how this value is affected when educational assets—through the democratization of education—are becoming more widespread across this space (i.e. the population). The studies are based on datasets from Statistics Sweden, comprising the complete censuses of 1960 to 1990, LISA-registers, and registers of wealth and income. Different approaches are employed: the use of the Gini-coefficient to catch changes in the distribution of education; comparative models to investigate cohorts at different points in time; and specific multiple correspondence analysis to study the distribution of several assets simultaneously.  Three aspects are explored: the distributions, returns, and uses of education. Firstly, while there is a steady increase in the average number of years of schooling, there is a different pattern in the development of the distribution of education. Three phases were distinguished: one of increasing levels of inequality, one of decreasing inequality, and one in which the inequality levelled out. Secondly, the returns of education have diminished as far as economic gains are concerned, causing a fracture between different social generations, at the same time as the returns in a wider social sense have remained relatively stable. However, the relative stability hides crucial discrepancies. Groups with the lowest level of education are further marginalized and distances between ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ groups are growing. Thirdly, in their modes of using the educational system, there are glaring differences between the economic elite and the cultural elite, although both utilize prestigious educational institutions as sites of social reproduction. The fundamental difference consists in that exclusive educational strategies are not as necessary to the dominant fraction of the economic elite. Their children are able to choose more freely among the offers of higher education.  The paradoxical development of the value of education is that while the absolute value of educational capital has decreased in general, the differences in relative value persist.

This is a sociological study of the views of officers in the Swedish Army and its Amphibious Forces on tactics in Irregular Warfare (IW), in particular, Counterinsurgency (COIN). IW comprises struggles, where the military weaker part uses an indirect approach with smaller units and integrates the civilian and military dimensions in a violence spectrum including subversion, terrorism, Guerrilla Warfare and infantry actions. IW is the main armed warfare style in insurgencies. COIN is the combined political, military, economic, social and legal actions in counter insurgencies. Data has been collected by means of interviews with almost all (n =43) officers, who were either commanding battalions or rifle and manoeuvre companies while undergoing training for general warfare and international operations. The main theoretical and methodological inspiration is the traditional one for research on social fields, inaugurated by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The statistical technique used is Multiple Correspondence Analysis. As a background and context base, an inquiry inspired by the Begriffsgechichte (Conceptual History) tradition explores the genesis and development of understandings of the term Irregular Warfare. The research question is outlined as; “how can contemporary Swedish military thought on tactics in Irregular Warfare be characterized using descriptive patterns, mapped in relation to background factors and normative standards? The most significant findings are that there are two main opposing notions separating the officers’ views on tactics in Irregular Warfare: (1) a focus on larger, combat oriented and collectively operating military units versus smaller and larger, more intelligence oriented and dispersed operating units, and (2) a focus on military tasks and kinetic effects versus military and civilian tasks as well as “soft” effects. The distribution of these views can be presented as a two-dimensional space structured by the two axes. This space represents four categories of tactics, partly diverging from normative military standards for Counterinsurgency. This social space of standpoints shows different structural tendencies for background factors of social and cultural character, particularly dominant concerning military backgrounds, international mission experiences and civilian education. Compared to military standards for Counterinsurgency, the two tactical types characterized by a Regular Warfare mind-set stands out as counter-normative. Signs of creative thought on military practice and theory, as well as a still persistent Regular Warfare doxa are apparent. Power struggles might thus develop, effecting the transformation to a broadened warfare culture with an enhanced focus also on Irregular Warfare. The result does not support research results arguing for a convergence of military thought in the European transformation of Armed Forces. The main argument goes beyond tactics and suggests sociological analysis on reciprocal effects regarding strategy, operational art, tactics as well as leadership, concerning the mind-set and preferences for Regular, Irregular and Hybrid Warfare.