Plastic Grass, Suburban Dreams: AstroTurf and the Idea of Augmented Nature
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the development of AstroTurf in postwar North America as a case study in "augmented nature," where technologies simulate and redefine elements of the natural world. The plastic substitute for natural grass embodied a broader cultural commitment to suburban lawn aesthetics and exemplified a "break-it-and-fix-it" approach to ecological challenges. By analyzing AstroTurf's marketing-particularly its showcase at Montreal's Expo '67-the article introduces the concept of augmented nature and examines its role in reshaping mid-century understandings of nature, technology, and environmental problem-solving. In so doing, it offers new insights into the cultural significance of domestic green spaces, aesthetic ideals, and the role of synthetic materials in manipulating perceptions of the natural world.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it