Bibliographic record
Abstract
This talk surveys the historical fortunes of acoustics as a research topic in American physics departments over the course of the 20th century. Before World War II, nearly a quarter of all PhD granting physics departments employed at least one or two professors who conducted research in musical, architectural, physical, ultrasonic, or electroacoustics. Nevertheless, as early as 1942, Bruce Lindsay felt aggrieved enough to complain that “acoustics has been the stepchild of physics for many years in our universities.” After World War II, a few physics departments took advantage of Navy largesse to build acoustics groups large enough to sustain themselves for some time. Most other physics departments did the opposite. Retiring acousticians were replaced by nuclear or solid state physicists and acoustics instruction was moved out of departments of physics and into departments of applied physics or electrical or mechanical engineering. Today, less than a handful of physics departments maintain a critical mass of professors engaged in acoustics research. A comparison with optics research provides one way to understand the decllining fortunes of acoustics in US physics departments.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.004 |
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".