"For Good or Evil": The Early Atomic Age in Maclean's, Saturday Night, Life and The Saturday Evening Post, 1945-1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores coverage of the atomic bomb and atomic energy in the Canadian magazines, Maclean's and Saturday Night, and the American magazines, Life and The Saturday Evening Post, between 1945 and 1950.Commentaries in 1945 presented a straightforward dichotomy: either the bomb would remain in the hands of individual states, and atomic war would inevitably result, or atomic power would be brought under international control and improve society.Once the onset of the Cold War had blunted the momentum for international control, the magazines urged the United States to maintain its technological lead over the Soviet Union, while continuing to oppose excessive atomic secrecy.By 1950, faith in the positive impact of atomic energy was tempered by more measured accounts of its potential, though optimism remained about the medical uses of radioactive isotopes.The thesis finds a broad similarity in the four magazines' views of the early atomic age.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".