published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Medicine / Master / Doctor of Medicine

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_version / Paediatrics / Master / Master of Philosophy

My overall aim in this thesis is to elucidate the precise nature of Russell's mature 'neutral monist' metaphysic. I show how an understanding of it has been hampered by pervasive misunderstandings. The approach I take is an historical one, and my account reveals that, after his adoption of neutral monism in 1918, there were no radical changes in his worldview, and certainly no lurch from a supposed quasi-phenomenalistic system prior to 1921, to a causal theory of perception after 1927. Instead, the earlier system is not as phenomenalistic as is sometimes supposed and his later philosophy is a development, not a repudiation, of the themes in the earlier. Russell sought to show how his metaphysic dovetails with the outcome of modern physics in his 1927 book The Analysis of Matter. I seek to show how a proper understanding of modern physics indeed leads to Russellian conclusions. I also discuss the implications of quantum mechanics for metaphysics – a task which Russell could not have performed when he wrote The Analysis of Matter, since QM was still very much in a state of flux. I show how Russell moved from empiricism to a naturalistic position in the theory of knowledge,and in doing so supplied a definitive solution to Hume's scepticism. Once again, the usual perception of him as an “empiricist” fails to do justice to the complexity and subtlety of his philosophy. Finally, I argue that Russell's solution to the mind-body problem is the only one with any chance whatsoever of being true. In all this I seek to show how Russell's philosophy has been unjustly neglected in contemporary debates and how it can provide elegant solutions to contemporary philosophical puzzles in the philosophy of science, epistemology and the mind-body problem.

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Stories told of and by teacher-researchers hold the potential to inform members of both academic and school communities with concerns about teaching and learning. The author's self-study and an embedded case study constitute this thesis. The latter is an instrumental, single-case (Stake, 1998), seeking to offer insight into teacher learning. It is framed by theories of cognition (Sternberg, 1998), adult learning (Mezirow, 1991), narrative (Gudmundsdottir, 1995), teacher-research (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999), and self-study (Hamilton, 1998). This thesis presents my experience as a teacher-researcher engaging in self-study, asking: "What do I care about in education?" (Whitehead, 1993). / In conducting my inquiry, I have become interested in knowing the following: (1) What have I learned? (2) How do I represent my learning? (3) How shall I take my learning forward? / Learning is understood to mean "the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action" (Mezirow, 1998, p. 6), and is seen in terms of improvement to professional practice. In examining the self-study report of my colleague, Nancy, the question "How is learning evidenced in the narrative report of the teacher-researcher engaging in self-study?" is addressed. A claim is made that, as teachers engage with questions about what they care about in education, they are learning. Data for my self-study include narrative accounts, artifacts, and images. Data for the embedded case include a co-constructed narrative account, photographs, a tape-recorded conversation, and interview and concept map collected between January 2000 and July 2003. Narrative data in the embedded case study were subjected to inductive and deductive analyses. Confirmatory evidence was sought in the conversation and interview, which were analyzed similarly, and the concept map, which was interrogated deductively. It may be seen that the stories of teacher-researchers inquiring into practice offer evidence of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991), which may initiate and constitute living educational theory (Whitehead, 1993), and provide insights to those with interests in teacher education.

In this thesis we examine the method of counting BB events produced in the BaBar experiment. The original method was proposed in 2000, but improvements to track reconstruction and our understanding of the detector since that date make it appropriate to revisit the B Counting method. We propose a new set of cuts designed to minimize the sensitivity to time-varying backgrounds. We find the new method counts BB events with an associated systematic uncertainty of ±0.6%.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal