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Record W1758403395 · doi:10.14288/bcs.v0i11.710

Cominco and the Manhattan Project

2010· article· en· W1758403395 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Clark Andrews

Bibliographic record

VenueOpen Collections · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTwentieth Century Scientific Developments
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGovernment (linguistics)Nuclear weaponManhattan projectPolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Among the letters delivered to the office of the president and general manager of Cominco in Trail, British Columbia on a snowy February 26, 1941, was one of special significance. Although stamped secret, the letter seemed innocent enough. It carried a request from the National Research Council of Canada for information on the type of cell used by Cominco in their electrolysis of water process and for information on Cominco's ability to make heavy water. This innocent-sounding note was to launch the company into one of the most remarkable projects of its long history, involvement in the Manhattan Project, the giant engineering undertaking which was to bring forth, in the summer of 1945, the atomic bomb. Nearly two years later, the company would sign contracts with the United States Government to produce a substance called heavy water, but not before some careful bargaining had been conducted on both sides. As early as 1934, Cominco had investigated the properties of heavy water, and had corresponded with the National Research Council on the subject. But these early investigations did not go far. It took the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1939 to focus attention on heavy water because of the research that was hurriedly being conducted into atomic fission. It will be necessary here to explain briefly atomic fission, and the relationship of heavy water to the process. A nucleus, which is the heart of the uranium atom, fissions, or splits apart, giving off particles called neutrons. These particles leave the nucleus at enormous speeds. For a chain reaction to develop the speed of the neutrons must be moderated so that they can come into contact with other uranium nuclei. And every

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.984
Threshold uncertainty score0.799

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0160.005
Scholarly communication0.0100.003
Open science0.0020.006
Research integrity0.0030.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0520.009

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.224 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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