Transforming the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This book is a systematic interdisciplinary account of two epochal trends: the history of the 20th century’s technical transformation based on the unprecedented surge of innovation that took place in Europe and North America during the three pre-WWI generation (1867-1914); and the history of new fundamental inventions during the period 1914-2000. Mass consumption of fossil fuels provided the energetic foundation of this progress. New ways of making steel — the leading metal of our civilization — and new materials including plastics and silicon, opened entirely new technical possibilities. Rationalized production, be it in agriculture or manufacturing, benefited from advancing mechanization, automation, and robotization. New epochal inventions included the discovery of nuclear fission, followed by the rapid development of nuclear weapons and commercial generation of nuclear electricity; the discovery of gas turbines (and their use in jet airplanes as well as in stationary applications); and the invention of solid-state electronics based on semiconductors used to make transistors, integrated circuits, and microprocessors, the key components of modern computing. The new economy based on unprecedented levels of energy consumption brought not only mass consumption and higher quality of life, but also some worrisome social problems and environmental changes; its prospects remain uncertain.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".