Information from injury data collections is widely used to formulate injury policy, evaluate injury prevention initiatives and to allocate resources to areas deemed a high priority. Obtaining quality data from injury surveillance is essential to ensure the appropriateness of these activities. This thesis seeks to develop a framework to assess the capacity of an injury data collection to perform injury surveillance and to use this framework to assess the capacity of both injury mortality and morbidity data collections in New South Wales (NSW) Australia to perform work-related or motor vehicle crash (MVC)-related injury surveillance. An Evaluation Framework for Injury Surveillance Systems (EFISS) was developed through a multi-staged process, using information from the literature to identify surveillance system characteristics, SMART criteria to assess the suitability of these characteristics to evaluate an injury data collection, and by obtaining feedback on the characteristics from a panel of surveillance experts using a two round modified Delphi study. At the conclusion of development, there were 18 characteristics, consisting of 5 data quality, 9 operational, and 4 practical characteristics, that were identified as important for inclusion within an EFISS. In addition, a rating system was created for the EFISS characteristics, based on available evidence and reasonable opinion. The evaluation of six injury data collections using the EFISS for their capacity to perform either work- or MVC-related injury surveillance illustrated the inability of any of the data collections to enumerate all cases of either work- or MVC-related injury mortality or morbidity in NSW or to capture all of the data considered necessary for work- or MVC-related injury surveillance. This evaluation has identified areas for improvement in all data collections and has demonstrated that for both work- and MVC-related injury surveillance that multiple collections should be reviewed to inform both work- and MVC-related policy development and injury prevention priority setting in NSW. The development of an EFISS has built upon existing evaluation guidelines for surveillance systems and provides an important step towards the creation of a framework specifically tailored to evaluate an injury data collection. Information obtained through an evaluation conducted using an EFISS would be useful for agencies responsible for injury data collections to identify where these collections could be improved to increase their usefulness for injury surveillance, and ultimately, for injury prevention.

This thesis summons a contemporary reading of George Orwell, evaluating his current role and function as novelist, essayist, and twentieth century cultural icon. The year 2003 marked the centenary of Eric Blair’s birth and proved a productive year for Blair (and Orwell) enthusiasts. After nearly three years of research, my journey through Orwell’s words and world(s) has undergone significant re-evaluation, taking me far beyond such an appropriate commemoration. In the tragic aftermath of 9/11 ¯ through Afghanistan and Iraq, Bali, Madrid, and London ¯ Orwell’s grimly dystopian vision acquires renewed significance for a new generation. Few writers (living or dead) are as enduringly newsworthy and malleable as George Orwell. The scope and diversity of his work ¯ the sheer volume of his letters, essays, and assorted journalism ¯ elicits a response from academics, journalists, critics and readers. My research, tempered by a ‘War’ on terror and a televisual Big Brother, shapes these responses at a time when 24-hour surveillance is viewed as the path to instant celebrity. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four provides unique insights into a highly pervasive and secretive regime, which in light of post 9/11 political trajectories is highly admonitory. These pathways and connections are produced in my research. I do not make easy links between past and present ¯ Eric and Tony Blair ¯ at the level of metaphor or simile. Indeed, the pages that follow traverse the digital archives and probe the rationale for mobilising Orwell in this time and place. I am focussed on writing a history and establishing a context calibrated to the fictional Oceania. This doctorate commenced as an investigation of George Orwell’s journalism and fiction one hundred years after his birth. At the outset of the candidature, the Twin Towers fell and new implications and interpretations of Orwell arose. My research demonstrates that the Oceania of Orwell’s imagining presents an evocative insight into the contemporary alliance forged by the Bush, Blair, and Howard triumvirate in its quest for world peace. Using Orwell as a guide, I move through theories of writing and politics, in the process uncovering capitalism’s inherently hostile and negligent attitude towards those who are materially less fortunate. I began my work convinced of Orwell’s relevance to cultural studies, particularly in understanding popular cultural writing and the need for social intervention. I concluded this process even more persuaded of my original intent, but shaped, sharpened and compensated by new events, insights, tragedies and Big Brothers. It is imperative for the future directives of cultural studies that critical, political, pedagogic and intellectual links with Orwell are (re-)formed, (re-)established and maintained. My text works in the spaces between cultural studies and cultural journalism, pondering the role and significance of the critical ¯ and dissenting ¯ intellectual. Memory, History, and Identity all circulate in Orwell’s prose. These concerns and questions have provided impetus and direction for this thesis. They have also shaped the research. Few expect Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia to materialise unchallenged from the pages of a book. The wielders of power are more capable and more subtle. Yet it is impossible to deny that the litany of lies and contempt central to Big Brother’s Oceania is reproducible by any administration assisted by a complicit media and a malleable citizenry. The emergence of such a phenomenon has been well documented in the post 9/11 United States. This thesis has arisen out of the miasma of hubris, lies and contempt framing and surrounding Mr. Bush’s war on terror. My purpose ¯ not unlike Orwell’s in Nineteen Eighty-Four ¯ is to warn, not judge or berate. Orwell understood political rhetoric. He was not a prophet but a journalist who interpreted the nuances and temptations of excessive power. He had witnessed the extraordinary ‘death’ of history in Spain, and thereafter he raised his pen to combat intellectual hypocrisy and dishonesty wherever he found it. Under Orwell’s tutelage, plain words pierce, probe and unsettle. They are sharp cutting instruments, fully capable of transcending time. How else are we to explain his enduring popularity as a writer? This thesis offers a critical and interpretative homage to George Orwell, a man who recognised the beauty of well chosen words, who loved and appreciated their enduring complexity and power. A framing structure has been chosen that places Orwell in close relation to poverty, class and politics, war and journalism. Individual chapter headings (and their contents) exploit Orwell’s unique response to the significant talking points of his era. After resolving to write professionally, Orwell starved and struggled in Paris, and frequented ‘doss houses’ in and around London. I track these wanderings in chapter one. He studied the effects of the Depression and unemployment in Yorkshire and Lancashire (chapter two), and fought and was wounded in Spain (chapter three). Thereafter he turned to political writing and journalism (chapter four). What he failed to anticipate was a post war Britain overwhelmed by despondency and dissolved by internal devolution (chapter five). His concluding apocalyptic discharge, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was directed at the higher echelons of institutional power and corporate corruption in Britain, America, and Europe, which I explore in chapter six. The world has changed significantly since Orwell (and J. B. Priestley) went in search of England’s faltering ‘pulse’ in the 1930s. Englishness and traditional working class values have distorted and shifted in unexpected ways. These transformations are partly the result of war and the loss of empire. They are also a response to American cultural and economic hegemony, the privatisation of industry, offshore investments, the emergence of the European Economic Community, and the burgeoning global economy. George Orwell matters, even after this scale of change because he faced his own prejudices on the page and developed a writing style that enabled him to challenge the accepted orthodoxies and hypocrisies of his era. This is evident when returning to his essays and journalism, fifty-five years after his death. He possessed the ability to make readers feel uncomfortable, raising topics and concerns that we would rather not discuss. Denounced as a traitor by the pre-1956 unreconstructed left and feted as a hero by the self-congratulatory right, Orwell resists labelling and easy categorization. We owe him a considerable debt for exposing the likely directions of unchecked political ambition, and this insight should not be treated lightly. As I read him, Orwell was the last man in Europe, ‘the canary in the mine.’ He is a literary world heritage site of considerable iconic appeal and international significance. He is an outsider’s ‘outsider’ perpetually facing inwards, and we need him now.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 46 p.; also contains graphics. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Visual surveillance in dynamic scenes, especially for human activities, is one of the current challenging research topics in computer vision. It is a key technology to fight against terrorism and crime to ensure public safety. The motivation of this thesis is to design an efficient human visual tracking system for video surveillance deployed in complex environments. In video surveillance, detection of moving objects is the first step to analyze the video streams. And motion segmentation is one of popular approaches to do it. In this thesis, we propose a motion segmentation method to overcome the problem of motion blurring. The task of human tracking is key to the effective use of more advanced technologies, like activity recognition and behavior understanding. However, human tracking routines often fail either due to human's arbitrary movements or occlusions by other objects. To overcome human's arbitrary movement, we propose a new Silhouette Chain Shift model for human detection and tracking. To track human under occlusions, firstly each frame is represented by a scene energy which consists of all the moving objects. Then the process of tracking is converted to a process of minimizing the proposed scene energy. Findings from the thesis contribute to improve the performance of human visual tracking system and therefore improve security in areas under surveillance. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis is about government surveillance technology in relation to the value of trust in society. The 2006 EU Data Retention Directive is used as an example of surveillance technology that invades privacy for the sake of security. I will show that trust enables cooperation and morality in society, and ask in what way the Directive relates to these values. The focus lies upon the relation of trust between government and citizens. I will argue that the Directive fails to recognize the value of trust in relation to cooperation and morality in society, because it fails to respect its citizens, and therefore has a bad influence on the climate of trust.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore public health surveillance from a surveillance studies perspective. The public health system in Ontario, Canada, provides an ideal setting for such exploration, especially because of initiatives that have been undertaken in the wake of the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Post-SARS, local public health practice in Ontario has been increasingly overtaken by a system-wide imperative that seeks to transform surveillance through investment in large-scale, information technology (IT). By critiquing the dominant conception of information in social scientific, public health and medical care discourse, and by exploring the increasing integration of large-scale IT into public health surveillance practice, this dissertation considers the uncertain trade-offs involved in the contemporary movement towards large-scale, IT-mediated public health surveillance systems. The theoretical framework that guides this line of inquiry emerges out of a Deleuzian-Latourian tradition in surveillance studies. This framework foregrounds the material assemblages, the network of people, machines, microbes, maladies, organizations, and so on, that make public health surveillance possible. Material assemblages tend to be submerged from view, even marginalized, by large-scale, IT-mediated surveillance systems. Such systems strive to immaterialize information. They are organized according to an immaterial conception of information. This arrangement fosters the marginalization of the material dimensions of information. In order to empirically specify the heterogeneity of the marginalized material assemblages that make public health surveillance possible, 64 semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with public health professionals and patients. The main findings of this dissertation are explained using the example of communicable-disease surveillance, and particularly HIV/AIDS surveillance. These findings highlight the systemic nature of marginalization that accompanies the increasing automation of public health surveillance. They suggest the need to question whether large-scale, IT-mediated surveillance is optimally configured, not merely for the challenges posed by disease, but also for the broader provision of public health services. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2009-01-29 15:28:27.326

Social media services like Facebook mark the continued domestication of surveillance technology. Facebook has been remarkably successful at establishing a presence within a variety of social settings, including the interpersonal sphere, the academic sector, and the marketplace. As a platform shared by these spheres, Facebook distributes personal information beyond intended contexts. This research will develop a sociological understanding of individual, institutional, and aggregate surveillance through social networking sites. A series of semi-structured face-to-face interviews with students, university administrators and business employees provides a detailed understanding of surveillance practices on Facebook. Three kinds of surveillance are considered. First, lateral – or peer-to-peer – surveillance refers to interpersonal scrutiny between individuals. Second, institutional surveillance is the scrutiny of key populations by universities and other institutions. Third, aggregated surveillance is used primarily by businesses to study relevant markets. I propose that mutual augmentation exists between individual, institutional, and aggregate forms of surveillance on social media. These three models are situated within the same informational platform. By sharing not only the same information, but also the same interface used to access that information, formerly discrete surveillance practices feed off one another. New personal details, criteria, and searching techniques become common knowledge. Marketers and institutions now benefit from ‘user-generated value’ when individuals exchange relevant information amongst themselves. Likewise, university-age users have adopted new criteria like ‘employability’ and ‘liability’ to assess their peers as well as themselves. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-12-31 05:12:00.199

This project explored the feasibility of performing swine influenza surveillance in Manitoba using provincial veterinary diagnostic laboratory data and a farm premises identification registry. Diagnoses of swine influenza using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were obtained from the veterinary laboratory database and linked with registry data on farm location and characteristics. Statistical and space-time analyses, including the Cuzick and Edwards test, Kulldorff Spatiotemporal scan, the Knox test and the modified CuSum method, were used to determine the time and spatial patterns of swine influenza in Manitoba. Analysis showed that swine influenza was endemic but also seasonal and that the frequency of diagnosis was increasing in time. Swine influenza was clustered in several regions across the province, including the southeast, and was clustered in time, particularly during the later time periods of the study. This study demonstrated that the farm premises identification registry is a crucial component of disease surveillance in animals.

Introduction: An injury surveillance system was piloted in 2011 to monitor injuries in Canadian Forces. This evaluation of the key system attributes examined system performance. Methods: A retrospective chart review, a coding reliability study, a completeness of forms study and a key informant interview. Results: Sensitivity was 0.36 (95% CI: 0.28, 0.46). The system was missing patients over age 35. Kappa coefficients over 0.80 demonstrated good agreement. Completeness of forms study demonstrated high percentages of response for most questions and lower rates for questions related to using protective equipment, and consent for information sharing. Interviews proved acceptability to stakeholders, usefulness for identifying clusters and trends, simple and complete data collection, and flexibility. Conclusion: The injury surveillance system had good potential for several reasons: data collection did not require additional work in clinics; the system was well accepted and partially proved usefulness and timeliness in identifying unusual injury events.

This project explored the feasibility of performing swine influenza surveillance in Manitoba using provincial veterinary diagnostic laboratory data and a farm premises identification registry. Diagnoses of swine influenza using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were obtained from the veterinary laboratory database and linked with registry data on farm location and characteristics. Statistical and space-time analyses, including the Cuzick and Edwards test, Kulldorff Spatiotemporal scan, the Knox test and the modified CuSum method, were used to determine the time and spatial patterns of swine influenza in Manitoba. Analysis showed that swine influenza was endemic but also seasonal and that the frequency of diagnosis was increasing in time. Swine influenza was clustered in several regions across the province, including the southeast, and was clustered in time, particularly during the later time periods of the study. This study demonstrated that the farm premises identification registry is a crucial component of disease surveillance in animals.