This work discusses the field of genealogy, different types of records and data in them. The thesis describes the topic of comparison of data and record linkage. It further it also discusses the design and implementation of the resulting system. The developed system connects people from parish records to larger pedigrees. These are then stored in the form of a graph database. The success of the interconnection of records was tested on the provided data sets.

As the need for digital libraries, especially genealogical libraries, continues to rise, the need for efficient document image compression is becoming more and more apparent. In addition, because many digital library users access them from dial-up Internet connections, efficient strategies for compression and progressive transmission become essential to facilitate browsing operations. To meet this need, we developed a novel method for representing document images in a parametric form. Like other “hybrid" image compression operations, the Contour Encoded Compression and Transmission (CECAT) system first divides images into foreground and background layers. The emphasis of this thesis revolves around improving the compression of the bitonal foreground layer. The parametric vectorization approach put forth by the CECAT system compares favorably to current approaches to document image compression. Because many documents, specifically handwritten genealogical documents, contain a wide variety of shapes, fitting Bezier curves to connected component contours can provide better compression than current glyph library or other codebook compression methods. In addition to better compression, the CECAT system divides the image into layers and tiles that can be used as a progressive transmission strategy to support browsing operations.

Throughout the early 20th century, eugenics discourse came to colour many facets of social policy making across Canada. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways by which eugenics and the mental hygiene movement impacted the practice of child protection during the early 20th century. I argue that the construction and propagation of the term and classification of ‘feeble-mindedness’ was used by child protection workers to exclude an increasing number of children from both care and society. During this period, social workers were complicit in the sorting, classifying and segregating of children deemed ‘feeble-minded’ with the expressed purpose of eradicating certain classes of people from society and moreover the gene pool. Women shouldered the burden of the social reform movement, as they were considered both the solution to, and the cause, of social ills. Controlling women’s reproduction was seen as the best way to ensure ‘race betterment’. Women at the intersection of race, class and ability were often constructed as ‘feeble-minded’ and segregated for fear that they would reproduce ‘their kind’. Initially, the child protection system blatantly excluded those deemed ‘unworthy’ or ‘unreformable’. Under the rubric of eugenics, however, child protection’s role shifted and the system became complicit in the application of eugenic principle to child and family life and women’s reproduction under the auspice of ‘race betterment’ and nation building. Through this exploratory study, it is evident that the normative structures of child protection policy remain unchanged. Extricating children from troubled environments at the least possible cost continues to trump a more insightful look at how policy and resources should engage with structural concerns, such as poverty. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This study was made in an effort first, to determine the mode of transmission of the inheritance of a predisposition to cancer as revealed through the analyses of four separate human genealogies, and second, to make a comparative study of the genealogies to determine whether the mode of transmission is the same.

Thesis (Ph.D. (History)) -- University of Limpopo, 2018 / The purpose of this study was to investigate the genealogy and migration of the va ka Valoyi people of Limpopo Province, South Africa. Qualitative, narrative research was used to study the oral history of the va ka Valoyi to determine the origin, migration routes and the genealogy of the 20 (twenty) communities of the va ka Valoyi in Limpopo. Data collection was done using semi-structured questionnaires. An initial list of 20 (twenty) respondents was drawn and through Snowball Sampling, the list was increased as per referrals made by the 20 (twenty) respondents during their individual interviews. At the end of the research, 67 (sixty-seven) respondents had been interviewed and secondary sources also consulted. The study has reconstructed the history of the va ka Valoyi, which had not been written before and managed to fill some gaps in the history of their associate groups that historians had not been able to fill in the past. The findings revealed that all the 20 (twenty) communities of the va ka Valoyi in Limpopo are related and identified the various relationships among them. It also revealed how the va ka Valoyi are related to ancient dynasties of the Munhumutapa, Changamire and Torwa and how they reached the Limpopo Province. KEY CONCEPTS Genealogy; Migration; va ka Valoyi; Arrival in Limpopo Province; Oral history.

During the past couple of years, genetic genealogy has been used as an instrument for law enforcement to identify and catch criminals of unsolved cases. The method has created an ethical discussion concerning individual integrity and the potential risks an implementation of a method like this could cause. The purpose of this essay is to examine this method from an ethical perspective and discuss aspects like personal integrity, legislation and in what way people who send in their DNA to genealogy companies can affect their genetic data. Five different DNA testing genealogy companies have been selected to study and discuss in this essay. By examining their terms of conditions and privacy policies, the study will investigate how these companies act regarding the potential use from law enforcement of their DNA-databases to solve crimes. Parts of the current ethical debate regarding the method will also be presented and discussed to show potential advantages and disadvantages using a method like this could lead to. The results from the study show that forensic genetic genealogy could have both its advantages and disadvantages. Using the method has shown to be successful in capturing perpetrators behind unsolved crimes but it has also led to innocent people getting involved into criminal investigations. There are multiple ethical aspects concerning the method and the results show that there is a lack of research about the method and these aspects. There is also a lack of legislation or other forms of regulations regarding the method. The conclusion that therefore has been made is that there needs to be more research made about the ethical aspects of the method and that there needs to be more regulations to avoid the disadvantages using the method potentially could bring.

This thesis suggests that Luce Irigaray's recent focus on spirituality in 'Luce Irigaray: key writings' makes explicit themes already suggested by her career-long insistence on the importance of sexual difference. It traces Irigaray's imagination of a dynamic, life-giving duality of sexual difference, suggesting that Irigaray's sexual difference displaces western philosophy's division between the natural and the spiritual; the earth and the sky; and mortals and the divine. In Irigaray's philosophy, cultivating sexual difference between men and women is the key to relinking the natural and the spiritual. This thesis calls this re-linking a religious task.Within this broad project, emphasis is placed on Irigaray's insistence that in order for sexual difference to be our redemption, women need to attend to creating a spiritual world appropriate to our own natural world. Indispensable to this project is the cultivation of a genealogy of mother-daughter relationships. This thesis explores this theme in Irigaray by discussing Drucilla Cornell's book, 'Legacies of dignity: between women and generations', as an Irigarayan genealogical exercise.This thesis also explores Irigaray's demand that western culture rethink its understanding of God. She suggests that we cultivate a sense of the divine as 'sensibly transcendent.' In order to highlight the distinction between Irigaray's divine and a monotheistic, transcendent God, this thesis turns to Patricia Huntington's article 'Contra Irigaray: the couple is not the middle term of the ethical whole.'The concluding chapter explores Irigaray's reworked notions of incarnation and salvation.Throughout these explorations, this thesis holds that Irigaray's re-integration of the natural and the spiritual will promote more ethical living -- with others, our selves, the earth and the divine.

This Thesis is a theoretical attempt to analyze the emergence of Autism as a discourse and, through it, the emergence of the Autistic Subjectivity. My primary aim is to create a kind of history of the different modes by which autistic persons become subjects. I am following a post-structuralist methodology, based on Michel Foucault’s work on the birth of psychiatry and institutions, his analysis of power relations, his ideas on the objectification and subjectification of the individual, and finally his notions of governmentality and bio-power. More specifically, I am making use of the Foucauldian techniques of Archaeology and Genealogy in order to investigate the birth of Autism through, the psychiatric discipline, psychoses, classificatory systems and the Asylum of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth century. Under the same methodological strand, I am treating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), in relation to Autism, as a disciplinary tool and as a discursive event. I present the existing knowledge on Autism and more specifically on the ‘impairment in social interaction’ and ‘in pragmatic language’. Finally, I attempt an analysis of Autism as a apparatus, through its episteme, mechanisms, and elements. I give an overview of the two main epistemologies on Autism, that of psychoanalysis and TOM (Theory of Mind) and I introduce the notions of bio-power and governmentality as drive mechanisms, which inform the elements of the apparatus and turn them into regulators of the autistic subjectivity. I am making an analysis of specific elements that I recognize as most important for the objectification and subjectification of the autistic individual; these are: autobiographies and educational institutions. Moreover, I discuss how through a continuum of truth discourses, strategies of intervention, and modes of objectification, the Autistic individual finds itself in a battle of modes of power, where it either consents to normalization or shields its ‘pathology P’ by disobedience and resistance. Finally, I argue that the deconstruction of existed discursive entities and their reconstruction upon a different epistemological basis leads to a rethink of Autism in terms of Education. What is needed is an emphasis to the notion of παιδεία (paideia), which aims to the creation of free and self-fulfilled human beings, rather than exclusively to the notion of εκπαί δευσις (ekpaideusis), that gives emphasis to the development of capabilities, and in the case of autistic children, to the creation of docile, marginalized bodies.

Le présent travail de recherche développe l’hypothèse selon laquelle la réflexion de Nietzsche sur la musique soulève un problème spécifique, le problème de la musique, en le subordonnant à une problématique générale qui gouverne l’ensemble de son questionnement philosophique, la problématique de la culture. Il a pour enjeu de montrer de quelle manière les textes sur la musique distribués tout au long de l’oeuvre de Nietzsche contribuent à l’élaboration et à la réalisation du programme philosophique destiné à répondre à cette problématique originale, qui fait du philosophe un « médecin de la culture ». La méthode mise en oeuvre consiste à lire dans leur intégralité et dans leur contexte la plupart des textes retenus, afin de restituer simultanément leur cohérence interne et leur fonction dans l’oeuvre de Nietzsche. Le plan s’efforce de suivre le leitmotiv de la thèse : la première partie retrace l'hypothèse, la méthode et l'enjeu du questionnement de Nietzsche à partir des textes programmatiques dans lesquels il expose sa pratique philosophique, en essayantd’expliquer la logique d'écriture qui lui est propre ; la deuxième partie étudie l’application de cette hypothèse et de cette méthode à l’art et à l’esthétique à partir des textes qui synthétisent les principaux résultats de ses analyses, en essayant de préciser leur enjeu déterminant pour l’expérience de pensée de Nietzsche ; la troisième partie propose un commentaire suivi et détaillé d’un large choix de textes consacrés à la musique, en essayant de démontrer leur inscription dans le programme opératoire du « médecin de la culture ». / This research work develops the hypothesis that Nietzsche's thinking on music raises a specific problem, the problem of music, by subordinating it to a general issue that governs his whole philosophical questioning, the issue of culture. The purpose of the thesis is to show how Nietzsche's texts on music, throughout his works, participate in the development and achievement of the philosophical program designed to respond to that original issue, which makes the philosopher a "physician of culture". The implemented method consists in reading most of the selected texts in their entirety and context, in order to render simultaneously their proper consistency and their function into Nietzsche’s works. The outline strives to follow the leitmotiv of the thesis: the first part sets out the hypothesis, method and goal of Nietzsche’s questioning by reading the programmatic texts in which he describes his philosophical practice and tries to explain his own logic ofwriting ; the second part studies the application of this hypothesis and method to both art and aesthetic by reading texts that summarize its main results and tries to specify the defining valence of this analyses for Nietzsche’s experience of thinking ; the third part offers a comprehensive and detailed commentary of a wide selection of texts dedicated to music and tries to demonstrate their inscription into the operating program of a "physician of culture”.

Gastrenterites virais em cães são doenças transmissíveis infecciosas com importância para a saúde animal, como as causadas por Parvovírus canino e Coronavírus canino (CCoV) e saúde pública, como no caso dos rotavírus. Rotavírus em cães são encontrados com baixa freqüência, tanto em cães com diarréia quanto sadios, mas sua importância como reservatório para a rotavirose humana já é conhecido. O CCoV, pertencente ao grupo 1 do gênero Coronavirus, ocorre sob a forma dos genótipos I e II, amplamente distribuídos mundialmente e implicados em diarréia moderada, mas podendo levar a elevada letalidade no caso de patótipos altamente patogênicos. No Brasil, a ocorrência de rotavírus do sorogrupo A em cães é um fato conhecido, mas, no caso do CCoV, existe, até o momento, apenas uma investigação relatando sua ocorrência, sem dados de diversidade molecular. A presente investigação teve por objetivos avaliar o papel de cães jovens com enterite sintomática, bem como sadios, como reservatórios de rotavírus, estudar a freqüência de ocorrência de Coronavírus canino (CCoV) em amostras fecais destes animais e estudar a diversidade molecular das amostras de CCoV encontradas. Para tato foram colhidas 100 amostras fecais de cães não vacinados, entre 1 e 180 dias de idade entre 2007 e 2008, sendo 50 com diarréia e 50 sem diarréia no momento da colheita, nos Municípios de São Paulo, São Bernardo do Campo, Santo André, São Caetano do Sul, Taboão da Serra, Itapecerica da Serra e uma aldeia indígena em Parelheiros. Às amostras foi aplicada a técnica de eletroforese em gel de poliacrilamida (PAGE) para a detecção de rotavírus e uma RT-PCR dirigida ao gene da proteína de membrana M do CCoV (nucleotídeos 337 a 746) para a detecção deste vírus, sendo os fragmentos detectados submetidos a seqüenciamento de DNA. As seqüencias obtidas, traduzidas em aminoácidos, foram utilizadas para a construção de uma árvore genealógica enraizada de distância com o algoritmo Neighbor-Joning e modelo de Poisson com 100 repetições de bootstrap. Nenhuma das amostras resultou positiva para rotavirus, enquanto que 47 foram positivas para CCoV, com freqüência significativamente superior nos animais com diarréia. Vinte e dois dos 47 fragmentos de DNA obtidos resultaram em seqüências viáveis de DNA, sendo 12 classificadas como CCoV Tipo I e 10 como Tipo II, tendo sido encontrada uma sublinhagem exclusivamente brasileira para o Tipo II. Em relação à amostra vacinal de CCoV submetida ao seqüenciamento de DNA, a maior identidade ocorreu com o grupo Tipo II sublinhagem 01, com um valor de 100%, seguido de 97,2% para o Tipo II sublinhagem 02 (a linhagem brasileira) e 93,2% para o Tipo I. Sugere-se que a diversidade de CCoV encontrada seja derivada da elevada freqüência de ocorrência deste vírus, o que pode aumentar a probabilidade de divergências e de possíveis falhas vacinais por diferenças entre a amostra vacinal (Tipo II) e as amostras de campo (Tipos I e II), e, dessa forma, a vacina não diminuiria a transmissão e novas linhagens de CCoV emergiriam. Conclui-se que cães jovens com enterite sintomática, bem como sadios, não tiveram papel como reservatório para rotavírus, considerando-se a região geográfica e o período de colheita de amostras. O CCoV ocorreu com uma freqüência de 47% na população canina estudada, com freqüência estatisticamente significativamente superior naqueles com diarréia do que naqueles sem diarréia. Finalmente, amostras brasileiras de CCoV, com base em seqüenciamento parcial do gene codificador da proteína de membrana M, ocorrem tanto como tipo I quanto II, sendo que, para o tipo II, há uma lihangem tipicamente brasileira. / Viral canine gastroenteritis is infectious transmissible diseases with importance for animal health, as those caused by Canine parvovirus and Canine coronavirus (CCoV) and public health, as in the case of rotavirus. Canine rotavirus occurs at low frequencies, both in diarrheic and health dogs, but the importance of dog as reservoirs for human rotaviruses is known. CCoV belongs to group 1 of the genus Coronavirus and occurs as genotypes I and II, worldwide distributed and implicated in mild diarrhea, but high pathogenic types might lead to high lethality. In Brazil, the occurrence of serogroup A rotavirus in dogs is already known but, in the case of CCoV, theres a single report on the occurrence of this virus, with no data on its molecular diversity. The aims of the present investigation were to evaluate the roles of diarrheic and health young dogs as reservoirs of rotavirus, to study the occurrence of CCoV in these animals and to assess the molecular diversity of the strains found. One hundred fecal samples were collected from unvaccinated dogs between 2007 and 2008 (50 with diarrhea and 50 health dogs) in the Municipalities of São Paulo, São Bernardo do Campo, Santo André, São Caetano do Sul, Taboão da Serra, Itapecerica da Serra and in an indian community in Parelheiros. The samples were submitted to polyacrilamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) for rotavirus detection and to an RT-PCR targeted to the membrane M protein gene (nucleotides 337 to 746) of CCoV for the detection of this virus; amplicons were then submitted to DNA sequencing and the putative amino acids sequences were used to build a rooted distance genealogic tree with the Neighbor-Joinng algorithm and he Poisson correction with 1,000 bootstrap replicates. No sample was positive to rotavirus, while 47 out of the 100 samples were positive for CCoV, with a statistically significative higher frequency for the dogs with diarrhea. Twenty-two out of the 47 ampicons resulted in viable sequences, being 12 classified as CCoV Type II and 10 as Type I; besides, and exclusively Brazilian sub lineage was found for Type II. Regarding the vaccine strain, the highest identity was found to Type II sub linage 02 (10%), followed by 97.2% for Type II sub linage II (the Brazilian sub linage) and 93.2% for Type I. Its suggested that the high diversity for CCoV detected is a consequence of the high frequency of occurrence of this virus, what might increase the probability of the emergence of divergence and possible vaccine failures due to differences amongst the vaccine strain (Type II) and field strains (Types I and II) and thus vaccination would not decrease the transmission and new lineages would emerge. It can be concluded that both health and diarrheic young dogs have played no role as reservoirs for rotavirus taking into account the geographic area and the time of samples collection. CCoV ocurred at a frequecy of 47%, with a higher frequency in the diarreic animals. Finally, Brazilian strains of CCoV, based on partial M gene sequences, occur as both type I and II, while, for Type II, a typical Brazilian lineage was described.