Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New IdeasIssue #4: March 2019Featuring Ideas by: James Q Whitman, Costica Bradatan, Angela Kennedy, Matthew Francis, David Munns, Chris Kempes, Van Savage, Neil Levy, Stefani Engelstein, Walter Vannini, Tom Winterbottom, Lori Miller Kase, Matthew Karp, Philip Goff, and Scott Aaronson

The little-known history of nuclear reactors in American life, and the role of public colleges in the Atomic Age.In The Atom Goes to College, David Munns explores the creation and forgotten prominence of “teaching reactors,” nuclear reactors dedicated to education during the golden age of American atomic ambitions. From the 1950s to the 1970s, a generation took the science of the atom and made it into the engineering of the reactor. Across two dozen teachi...

David Niven appeared in films for over 50 years of his life, from swashbucklers such as The Prisoner of Zenda and The Guns of Navarone to the Pink Panther series. Despite his on-screen persona, Niven wasn’t always the perfect gentleman. He was insecure both privately and professionally and used people to get ahead. But he did, he said, ‘at least try to be a decent man.’ He knew he often failed, although it isn’t easy to find people who ever had a bad word to say about him. In this fascinat...

From the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have worked on systems to help humans survive for the astounding 28,500 days (78 years) needed to reach another planet. They’ve imagined and tried to create a little piece of Earth in a bubble travelling through space, inside of which people could live for decades, centuries, or even millennia. Far Beyond the Moon tells the dramatic story of engineering efforts by astronauts and scientists to create artificial habitats ...

Promising an end to global hunger and political instability, huge climate-controlled laboratories known as phytotrons spread around the world to thirty countries after the Second World War. The United States built nearly a dozen, including the first at Caltech in 1949. Made possible by computers and other novel greenhouse technologies of the early Cold War, phytotrons enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms. Subsequen...

How radio astronomers challenged national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and the constraints of vision to create an international scientific community.For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio te...

Most intermediate-level machine learning books focus on how to optimize models by increasing accuracy or decreasing prediction error. But this approach often overlooks the importance of understanding why and how your ML model makes the predictions that it does.Explainability methods provide an essential toolkit for better understanding model behavior, and this practical guide brings together best-in-class techniques for model explainability. Experienced machine learning engineers a...

The Hanford History Project held the “Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years” conference in March 2017. Its Richland, Washington, meeting venue was a stone’s throw from the southern-most edge of the Hanford Nuclear Site--the place where workers produced the plutonium that fueled the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.The symposium’s appeal extended well beyond local interest. Professionals from a broad array of backgrounds--working scientists, gover...

Placing the experiences of victims at its heart, this book provides an authoritative overview of disability hate crime - explaining what it is, how it happens, its legal status, the impact on victims and how individuals and agencies should respond.The guide outlines innovative projects developed to address the problem, and provides tailored guidance for professionals spanning education, health and social care, and criminal justice. It also offers recommendations for effective multi...

Readers of Plato have often neglected the Laws because of its length and density. In this set of interpretive essays, notable scholars of the Laws from the fields of classics, history, philosophy, and political science offer a collective close reading of the dialogue "book by book" and reflect on the work as a whole. In their introduction, editors Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday explore the connections among the essays and the dramatic and productive exchanges between the contributors. This ...

A collection of eight short stories written between May - August 2014. The Candy-Filled Fleshlight - The tale of Jimmy Stamper, the man who purchased a fleshlight that spits out candy. Bag - A killer present lies under the tree this Christmas. Food - A voyeur spies on couples at their most intimate moment: Eating Food. Samaritan - A jaded Samaritan has a chance at redemption. Upstairs - A man awakes each night with no memory, other than the knowledge that something lies upstairs. Something...

'Tell me the old, old story…'I can still remember listening to this age-old hymn being sung by lovely but warbling old ladies at the home league. The poet calls to others to tell them the story of faith, the one that has inspired countless millions to surrender their lives for the sake of the King and His Kingdom; the story of life and hope that has brought salvation to the world, the story of Jesus doing what He does best—changing people's lives, working through His people, to tra...