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The Secret History of RDX

2018· book· en· W4254189151 on OpenAlex
Colin F. Baxter

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueUniversity Press of Kentucky eBooks · 2018
Typebook
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Medicine
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNavyExplosive materialHistoryChemical warfareWorld War IIVietnam WarWhite (mutation)EngineeringLawPolitical scienceForensic engineeringArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

During the 1930s, British scientists perfected a sugar-white explosive called RDX. Twice as deadly as TNT, RDX was also ten times more expensive. In <italic>The Secret History of RDX,</italic> historian Colin F. Baxter tells the story of the people who developed, produced, and used RDX in the top-secret, $100 million factory near Kingsport, Tennessee, called the Holston Ordinance Works. Drawing from archival records and numerous interviews with individuals who worked at the “powder plant” from 1942 to 1945, he explores not only the explosive’s military significance but also its impact on the lives of ordinary Americans involved in the war industry. Behind thirty-eight miles of fences, thousands of local men and women synthesized twenty-three thousand tons of RDX each month, enough to supply the entire Allied army, air force, and navy. RDX was added to torpedo warheads, airborne antisubmarine depth charges, and a mounted antisubmarine weapon called the Hedgehog. For the first time, the Allies had a weapon that could challenge German U-boats in the Atlantic, and RDX became the workhorse explosive for the Allies throughout the war. Baxter details the work of Canadian, British, and American scientists as well as the Eastman Company executives who raced to produce the explosive effectively and quickly. He examines the debates between RDX advocates and their opponents in the Army Ordnance Department, as well as the use of the explosive in the bomber war over Germany, naval war in the Atlantic, and as a key element in the trigger device of the atomic bomb.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation 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: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.229
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.004
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.171
Teacher spread0.140 · 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