Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 443-452).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Film and Video. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-48). Includes filmography (leaves 49-50). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004 & res_dat=xri:pqdiss & rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation & rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR30155.

In the mid-twentieth century, French philosophers looked to contemporary biological research as they attempted to come to grips with the philosophical and historical crises of the previous decades. My dissertation provides a genealogy of the relationship between developments in the fields of evolutionary theory, genetics, and embryology, and the emergence of French structuralism and posthumanist history. The story centers around two generations of French philosophers, including Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Ruyer, and the biologists they turned to as resources for their philosophy, including Maurice Caullery, George E. Coghill, Étienne Rabaud, and Étienne Wolff. As I show, because these philosophers did not look to “life” as a metaphor or to “science” understood as either mere ideology or pure rationality, but instead grappled directly with the specific content of evolutionary theory, embryology, and genetics, biology profoundly reshaped the philosophical concepts of human and history.

This project proceeds from a narrow question: What, if anything, is a brain wave? Beguiling in its simplicity, this question prompts a cultural-historical investigation that spans over 150 years of science, technology, and society. Proposed in 1869, the original theory of brain waves cites etheric undulations to explain reports of apparent thought transference. Though most modern thinkers no longer believe in outright telepathy, I argue that dreams of thought transmission and other mental miracles subtly persist—not in obscure and occult circles, but at the forefront of technoscience. A hybrid of science and fiction, brain waves represent an ideal subject through which to explore the ways in which technical language shrouds spiritual dreams. Today, the phrase “brain waves” often function as shorthand for electrical changes in the brain, particularly in the context of technologies that purport to “read” some aspect of mental function, or to transmit neural data to a digital device. While such technologies appear uniquely modern, the history of brain waves reveals that they are merely the millennial incarnation of a much older hope—a hope for transmission and transcendence via the brain’s emanations.

"The Science of Antislavery" explores the critical though rarely studied role scientists played in the early antislavery movement. It argues that scientists not only helped legitimize abolitionism but also helped create the myth that slavery was a backward institution. During the Age of Revolution (1770-1830), when antislavery societies first took root, abolitionism attracted many scientific supporters. Though their refutations of scientific racism are perhaps better known, they also made many arguments that went beyond race. Chemists argued that new chemical techniques would fertilize the soil more effectively, which would in turn reduce the need for slave labor. Botanists touted the natural environments of new British colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia, contending that they would make ideal free labor alternatives to Caribbean plantations. Geologists argued that the western American frontier, with its unique mineral deposits, was best suited to free white agricultural settlements rather than slavery’s expansion. Even by the 1830s, when the movement was taken over by a more radical, less elite multiracial coalition, scientific arguments continued to influence antislavery arguments. From the 1830s until the Civil War, antislavery supporters on both sides of the Atlantic argued that slaveholders’ alleged refusal to adopt new machinery was evidence of their backwardness. Today, as a new generation of historians demonstrate how modern slavery in fact was, The Science of Antislavery shows how the idea that it was somehow never modern came into being.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1993. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-80). Also available via the Internet.

The following thesis examines and historicizes the assortment of tools and practices—material, epistemic, and institutional—that developed over the last century in U.S.-based newsrooms as a result of news organizations’ first sporadic, then increasingly conscious, attempts at incorporating data-driven methods of information gathering, classification, archiving, and distribution into their organizational operations. In its methods this thesis presents, first, a historical narrative that reaches from the early decades of the twentieth century into the early 2020s, and second, showcases empirical evidence through five case studies. Of the case studies one is historical and is explored in the third chapter through previously not consulted archival material. The other four are recent or current—two involved computational data collection and web scraping (seen in chapters four and five), one relied on ethnographic embedding, and one on interviews (mixed in with the previous two and also featured in chapters four and five). In its conclusion, the thesis will argue that, at the very least, current and future organizational histories of journalism ought to more readily take into account the approaches and findings of the histories of technology and the sociologies of scientific knowledge, especially because understanding the contemporary epistemic and technological intrusions of computer science, statistics, data science, and software development into journalism requires the exploration of both the parallels and fault lines between these domains. In its Conclusion, then, this thesis will speculate on the potential future trajectories that such convergences might take and asks hopefully generative questions, both analytical and (mildly) normative. These include: Can news organizations maintain a unique position among technology companies, intelligence services, and private data brokers in such a way that public and personal data can be responsibly collected, analyzed, and made transparent? Should the multi-lingual journalistic media corpus (text and images both) constitute a significant part of the training data used by generative language models and computer vision algorithms? Should investigative reporters work alongside computer scientists, statisticians, geographers, and data scientists, or should they incorporate the skills of the aforementioned domain knowledges into their own area of expertise? Does it benefit news organizations to rely on external data-analytic products for their work, or should they develop their own proprietary ones? And finally (and very broadly): What is the role of news stories today in not only the traditional sense of framing and giving account of current events but as automatically becoming the data that are inevitably ingested into the machines that “read,” “make sense of," and invariably produce much of the public intelligence on which humans rely?

A research project report submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MSc in Science Education. Johannesburg, February 2017. / An understanding of the NOS is a basis for scientific literacy which is one of the major goals of science education the world over. This study compared Grade 11 High school learners (n=10) and third year Bachelor of Education, Pre-service teachers’ (n=10) understandings of Nature of Science (NOS). Data on participants’ understandings of NOS was collected by means of a Likert type questionnaire and through semi - structured interviews. Likert type questionnaire data was quantitatively analysed using a combination of descriptive statistics, the Mann-Whitney U test and graphical comparison of group median scores on questionnaire items to ascertain differences in NOS understandings between the Grade 11 learners and the B.Ed. Pre-service teachers. Semi-structured interview data was analysed through a combination of typological and interpretative analysis of interview transcripts to determine differences in NOS understandings between the two groups. The findings reveal that there are no significant differences in the understandings of the NOS between the Grade 11 learners and third year, Bachelor of Education, Pre-service teachers. The analyses reveal that overall; the Grade 11 Learners and third year B.Ed. Pre-service teachers’ understandings of NOS are not very different from each other. Both groups held such misunderstandings as; there is a single scientific method, scientific knowledge is not socially and culturally embedded, scientific knowledge is universal and can be proven through collection of empirical data. It is recommended that if the goal of science education for scientific literacy is to be achieved, initial teacher education training should do more to explicitly develop Pre-service teachers’ subject matter knowledge understandings, pedagogical skills and valuing of NOS, that is, their pedagogical content knowledge for nature of science. Explicit testing of learners’ NOS understandings is also suggested as a way of improving the school Physical Science curriculum. The effectiveness of the current science content and methods courses in improving the Pre-service teachers’ NOS understandings is questioned. Recommendations for further studies are suggested. / MT2017

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1983. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-84).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2008. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Sustainablity, Environmental and Life Sciences. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 439-459)