FRED NADIS. Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 318. $26.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What Fred Nadis calls a wonder show is a combination of science, technology, and magic, designed as popular entertainment. Some performances are shocking, some spectacular, many are sophomoric, requiring not only the audience's suspension of disbelief but their suspicion of the basis of scientific investigation: evidence. Nadis begins his energetic, impressively researched tour of wonder shows in the late eighteenth century and argues that these spectacles persist today, with demonstrations that include paranormal phenomena, alternative medicine, creationist science, and evidence of alien visitors. He divides the book into three sections. The first focuses on performers who relied on electricity to create dazzling effects, inexplicable to awed onlookers. Electrical wonder shows continued into the twentieth century, as x-rays and radio waves provided new astonishments. The second section focuses on hypnotists and mind readers, who both drew on their audience's desire for belief in telepathic communications and spiritual connections and, at the same time, tried to debunk superstition. The third part moves into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on evangelical science shows, UFO proponents, and New Age productions, concluding with a discussion of current “science wars.”
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.047 | 0.022 |
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".