Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a serious neglected tropical disease that is endemic in 98 countries and presents a significant public health risk. The epidemiology of VL is complex. In the Americas, it is a zoonotic disease that is caused by a parasite and transmitted among humans and dogs through the bite of an infected sand fly vector. The infection also can be transmitted vertically from mother to child during pregnancy. Infected individuals can be classified as asymptomatic or symptomatic; both classes can transmit infection. In part due to its complexity, VL transmission dynamics are not fully understood. Stochastic compartmental epidemic models are a powerful set of tools that can be used to study these transmission dynamics. Past compartmental models for VL have been developed in a deterministic framework to accommodate complexity while remaining computationally tractable. In this work, we propose stochastic compartmental models for VL, which are simpler than their deterministic counterparts, but also have several advantages. Notably, this framework allows us to: (1) define a probability of infection transmission between two individuals, (2) obtain both parameter estimates and corresponding uncertainty measures, and (3) employ formal model comparisons. In this dissertation, we develop both population level and individual level Bayesian compartmental models to study both vector and vertical VL transmission dynamics. As part of this model development, we introduce a compartmental model that allows for two infectious classes. We also derive source specific reproductive numbers to quantify the contributions of different species and infectious classes to maintaining infection in a population. Finally, we propose a formal model comparison method for Bayesian models with high-dimensional discrete parameter spaces. These models, reproductive numbers, and model comparison method are explored in the context of simulations and real VL data from Brazil and the United States.

One of the problems which has intrigued English historians for over a hundred years is that of the position of the common man in early England. Was he a freeman working land held communally by the village, or was he a serf laboring upon the land of an overlord? Since this question of freedom is inextricably interwoven with landholding concepts the problem may also be stated another way: Did private property in land exist from the earliest times, or is that institution the result of centuries of appropriation by individuals of land originally belonging to the commmunity as a whole? In the late 19th century a group of English historians devoted themselves to the study of this problem. The conclusions they reached varied considerably. The purpose of this essay is to examine some of those conclusions and the suppositions upon which they rest and to attempt to find methodological and ideological differences which may account for the varied results. The study will focus upon Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925), legal historian and jurisprudential scholar, whose best known works are concerned with this subject. Toward the end of the 18th century there developed in Germany a theory of the beginnings of society, known as the Mark theory, which described those beginnings as an idyllic period when mankind lived together in free communities. English historians found this thesis much to their liking: it fitted well with English ideals of freedom and democracy, and it supported popular belief in a strong Germanic, rather than Roman, influence in the development of English institutions. Beginning with John M. Kemble' s Saxons in England in 1849, English historians almost to a man accepted the theory without critical examination of the authorities upon which it rested. In 1883 however, an amateur historian, Frederic Seebohm, in The English Villa Community challenged the Mark theory and asserted that the English common man was originally a serf laboring on an estate which strongly resembled the Roman villa. Paul Vinogradoff, a talented Russian working in England on early agrarian history, sought new proof to sustain the cause of the common free man. In Villainage in England (1892) he attempted to prove that the early villein was free both legally and economically. He was supported by Frederic Maitland in Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), who found in the Domesday survey proof of vestigial freedom, which he held could only mean that the once free villein had lost much of his liberty during the late Anglo-Saxon period, and that his subjection was completed by the Norman conquerors. William Ashley, in several works, supported Seebohm' s position, but did not always agree with him. All four historians were products of conservative background. There were, however, differences in the more intimate details of their social surroundings, differences of family, education, religion, and in the case of Vinogradoff, of national origin. Vinogradoff and Maitland came from economically secure families, who provided for them the best education available; they were religious agnostics; both were legal historians. Seebohm’s and Ashleys families were not affluent, and the education they obtained came primarily from their own efforts; both were devout members of evangelical faiths; Ashley was an economic historian and Seebohm's best works were in the field of early agrarian history. Each of these men read the sparse evidence available on the subject from a particular point of view. Vinogradoff and Maitland concluded that the early English peasant was free and that his fall from freedom to serfdom during the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods was due to a large extent to a misinterpretation of his legal status. Seebohm and Ashley held he had been a serf from the time of the Teutonic settlements, and that his legal rights were never as important as his economic position.

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This thesis seeks to examine the nineteenth-century art collections and architectural style of the original buildings at the University of Sydney in order to demonstrate ways in which visual material may be employed to shape public perception of an institution. I shall argue that the architectural style of the original university buildings was specifically chosen with particular aims which extended beyond the mere establishment of a tertiary institution for the colony. I will also argue that the style shaped the character of the institution, contributed to the maintenance of law and order in the colony, linked the colony more firmly than hitherto to the mother country and provided social benefits for the founders of the institution. The instant history and character thus imposed upon the institution was reinforced by the assembly of a portrait collection in emulation of other collections of portraits at leading institutions of the colony and the mother country, including the Oxbridge universities. Once the building proclaimed that the institution was comparable with the great universities of the world, the subjects of the portraits at the university could be placed in the class of founders of a great historical institution, thus at the same time enhancing the reputation of the institution and the individuals. The construction of an indentity through visual images was extended by the benefactions of Sir Charles Nicholson, the principal donor of works of art to the university in the nineteenth century. I argue that his intentions in relation to his collections were didactic but were also concerned with the entrenchment of the imperial hegemony over the colony, and again with the enhancement of his personal repuatation. This analysis shows how, by a complex of personal ambition and aspiration for the colony, the style of the buildings and the art collections formed were used to establish the colony as civilized and the new university as a bastion of English tradition.

The celebrated Sherpas of Himalayan mountaineering, who lived in the rugged high-altitude environment of the Everest area of Nepal, lacked Western style medical services and so iconic New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary, 'hero' of Everest, built them a small hospital in 1966. He administered Khunde Hospital through the Himalayan Trust, but with substantial support, since the late-1970s, from the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation in Canada. Overseas medical volunteers assisted by local staff provided a range of outpatient and inpatient, curative and preventive services. The history of Khunde Hospital, therefore, provides a case study for the introduction of modern medicine, as Sherpas referred to Western or biomedicine, and for the implementation of an overseas aid project. In my analysis I have moved away from a binary, oppositional examination of a cross-cultural encounter and have situated Khunde Hospital in a conceptual device of 'worlds'. I argue that the hospital existed and operated simultaneously within multiple separate yet interconnected worlds, but do not privilege one discourse over another. These worlds work beyond culture, encompassing institutions, political structures and knowledge communities and were physical, social and intellectual spaces within which there were rules and norms of behaviour that structured action. In order to explore the histories of Khunde Hospital I set it within four distinct but overlapping worlds: that of Sir Edmund Hillary, the Sherpa, Western medicine and international aid. These are worlds that I have identified as being important for the questions I am looking at. My central discussion is the ongoing encounter between Sherpa beliefs and practices about sickness and modern medicine, particularly looking at the individual patient�s use and non-use of the hospital and how staff there responded. The response was neither a one-way diffusion of Western medical practice, nor a collision between the spirit-suffused system of the Sherpa and scientific biomedicine. People used the hospital for some things but not others, based on their perception as to whether the hospital was the effective, appropriate option to take. Over the years, the hospital and community became used to each other in a relationship that was in practice a coexistence of difference. Each acknowledged and could incorporate aspects of the other�s beliefs and practices when dealing with a person�s sickness, but remained separate. Using the conceptual device of worlds, however, suggests the need for this example of the introduction and spread of Western medicine to be grounded in a consideration of Hillary�s particular form of aid, the shifting discourse of international medical aid between the 1960s and the 1990s and the unique world of the Sherpa of Khumbu. All of these worlds influenced the provision of health care at and from Khunde Hospital in different ways, sometimes separately but often simultaneously, and at some times and for some issues more than others. People, place and relationships often had as much influence as - and sometimes more than - the medicine. If the key to understanding Khunde Hospital is the relationship between Sherpas and Hillary and the respect that began in a partnership on the mountains in the 1950s, then the multiple worlds of Khunde Hospital underscore the complexities of implementing Sherpa requests to build a hospital in their rugged home near the world�s highest mountain.

The legend of Governor Grey is a major feature of nineteenth century New Zealand historiography. This thesis seeks to understand Grey as a real person. Acknowledging the past as a strange and foreign place, it argues that Grey (and previous interpretations of him) can only be understood in context. The intellectual milieu of liberal Anglicanism and Victorian structures of imperial authority are crucial to understanding Grey�s policies of racial amalgamation. Focusing on Grey�s first governorship of New Zealand, 1845 - 1853, this thesis begins by exploring the imperial networks within which he operated. The members of Grey�s web gathered and shared information to further a range of different agendas - scientific, humanitarian, and political. Grey�s main focus was native civilisation. His ideas about race were informed by liberal Anglican theology, scientific investigation and personal experience. Grey believed in the unity and improvability of all mankind. His mission as governor was to elevate natives to a state of true equality with Europeans so that all could progress together still further up the scale of civilisation. This model formed the basis of Grey�s 1840 plan for civilising native peoples, in which he proposed a range of measures to promote racial amalgamation in Australia. Between 1845 and 1853 Grey implemented those measures in New Zealand. He used military force and British law to establish peace and enforce Crown authority. He used economic policies to encourage Maori integration in the colonial economy. He built schools and hospitals and enacted legislation to encourage the best features of British culture and limit the effects of its worst. He also augmented his power and encouraged amalgamation through personal relationships, official reports and the structures of colonial authority. Grey was driven by complex, sometimes contradictory motives including personal gain, economic imperatives and political pressures. His policies have had ongoing, often devastating effects, on Maori and on race relations in New Zealand. This thesis brings to light the ideas and attitudes which formed them. Grey understood himself as a Christian governor ordained to civilise Maori and join them with British settlers in accordance with God�s divine plan for improving humankind.

<p>In this report a comparison is made between four frequently encountered resampling algorithms for particle filters. A theoretical framework is introduced to be able to understand and explain the differences between the resampling algorithms. This facilitates a comparison of the algorithms based on resampling quality and on computational complexity. Using extensive Monte Carlo simulations the theoretical results are verified. It is found that systematic resampling is favourable, both in resampling quality and computational complexity.</p>

Ce mémoire porte sur l'estimation de paramètres dans des modèles de propagation des épidémies dans le temps. On considère le cas d'une population fermée dans laquelle chacun des individus est soit susceptible, soit infecté, soit retiré (S-I-R). Un individu est dit infecté lorsqu'il est atteint d'une maladie infectieuse et qu'il est contagieux. Un individu qui n'a pas encore été infecté est dit susceptible, alors qu'un individu qui a été atteint par la maladie et qui n'est plus infecté est dit retiré (immunisé ou décédé). Un paramètre important dans ce type de modèles est le taux de reproduction R0, qui s'interprète comme le nombre moyen d'individus à qui un individu infecté transmet la maladie, au début de l'épidémie. Plus la valeur de R0 > 1 est grande, plus l'épidémie est importante. On propose d'abord deux modèles stochastiques pour l'évolution d'une épidémie en se basant sur un modèle déterministe classique, le modèle SIR de Kermack et McKendrick (1927). Les modèles tiennent compte du type de données disponibles en pratique. Par la suite, on étudie une nouvelle méthode d'estimation de R0 et on construit un intervalle de confiance asymptotique pour R0. Finalement, on présente des résultats obtenus en appliquant la méthode d'estimation de R0 sur des données simulées à l'aide des modèles proposés. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : modèle SIR de propagation d'une épidémie, taux de reproduction R0, estimation, processus de naissance ct de mort non homogène, processus de Poisson non homogène.

Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, medieval writers provide us with the opportunity to gain insight into the sociocultural conventions associated with these spaces in the late medieval period. By building our understanding of medieval horticulture through an examination of historical texts, we position ourselves to achieve a greater understanding into the formation of contemporary cultivated literary landscapes and their attendant conventional codes. This study provides a map of current medieval garden interpretation, assessing the shape and validity of recent literary criticism of this field. With a focus on the hortus conclusus (the walled pleasure garden) and arboricultural spaces (including hunting and pleasure parks), this study provides an historicist reinterpretation of horticultural landscapes in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, furthering our understanding of the authors’ use of such conventionally-coded spaces in these canonical romances.

In this project, I use Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Charles Dickens to trace the emergence of what I call a poetics of private life. I argue that a literature of individualized, interior domesticity developed in response to the effacement of the Scottish Enlightenment and its local specificity at a time of British assimilation. In the eighteenth century, metropolitan Scotland, buoyed by hopes of cultural and economic renewal, developed and popularized antiquarian studies of local folk culture and theories of history positing telic models of societal development. Such concepts and practices were the intellectual fruits of the universities, learned societies, and philosophical circles that typified Scotland's heavily institutionalized Enlightenment. In the wake of the Act of Union, a new literature emerged, one exchanging models of universal human progress for narratives of private life. This arc coincides with Scott's renunciation of regional, historically inflected Scottish poetry in favor of three-volume fiction and Wordsworth's corresponding need to develop an increasingly autobiographical (and generically "British") Romanticism. These dual developments would significantly alter the shape of British literature for Scott's novelistic successors such as Dickens. Thus, this dissertation resituates the emergence of British Romanticism and the nineteenth-century three-volume novel both historically and geographically, within a narrative beginning in the eighteenth century, with Scotland's assimilation into an increasingly urban, homogenous Britain.