Zuoyue Wang . In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America . New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press . 2008 . Pp. xix, 454. $49.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Zuoyue Wang's history of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) places in focus and in context vast changes in the relationship between scientific, technical, and professional experts and American presidents. Beginning with a concise review that spans the creation of the National Academy of Sciences during the Civil War, World War I, the New Deal, and World War II, the author highlights how already fluid relations between science and the state rapidly expanded in the context of what he calls the Cold War liberal consensus and then degraded as bilateral U.S.-Soviet relations stabilized and this consensus gave way to Vietnam War-era distrust and divisiveness. This period of liberal consensus, defined by its “anticommunism abroad and incremental reform at home” (p. 183), extended from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, encompassing the prehistory of PSAC in the form of the Korean War-era Office of Defense Mobilization's Science Advisory Committee (ODM-SAC), the Kennedy administration, and at least part of Lyndon Johnson's time in office. The main narrative ends with the committee's demise shortly after Richard Nixon's re-election in 1972, followed by an epilogue that discusses science advising for subsequent presidents through the administration of George W. Bush. Specialists in presidential history as well as American science policy will find this treatment thoughtful and reliable, as will many general readers.
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 imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.115 | 0.051 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".