bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Response to Stiglitz
Authors: Chimni B S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It is improbable that any democrat will argue against the Stiglitz thesis that ‘there should be a strong presumption in favour of transparency and openness in government’. As he rightly observes, ‘in today’s world, no one argues against openness, only against excessive openness’. Albeit, most of the arguments which public officials use to justify excessive openness ‘are simply self-serving rationalizations’. In the words of Weber, ‘the pure interest of the bureaucracy in power . . . is efficacious far beyond those areas where purely functional interests make for secrecy.’ Indeed, ‘nothing is so fantastically defended by the bureaucracy’ as the concept of the ‘official secret’. The concept has been ‘enriched’ in the Third World, the subject of my comment, by the colonial experience; the bureaucracy here considers it its right and privilege to deny citizens any information with regard to the workings of the government. Unfortunately, the elected representatives are no less prone to abuse power and to enrich themselves behind the veil of ‘official secrecy’.
Introduction
Authors: Wolff Jonathan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
My answer is: more than one might think. In recent years we could be forgiven for assuming that Marx has nothing left to say to us. Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seemed, all reason to take Marx seriously. The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance: it was often taken to be the fall of Marxism as such, as well as of Marxist politics and economics.
Days of Wrath
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
EARLY on the second morning rifle fire was heard and the roar of a gun. Workmen who had joined the Whites changed their coat and went over to the Soviets. On the third the town was again in the hands of the mob, led by Communists. They were taking their revenge. Looting was in full swing and murder unbridled. I had no horse and could not follow the retreating handful of Whites. Before my eyes I saw the head of the Swedish Red Cross killed and a sister of mercy. The Bolsheviks took off an unfortunate girl I knew, with her mother, to the railway shops, from which no one returned alive. More than five thousand educated people were arrested. They were ordered to dig a common grave, stripped naked and all shot. A little earth was hurriedly scratched over them. Many were buried still breathing. Young Prince C., only a lad, not mortally wounded, fell on top of a pile of corpses ; he lay unconscious for many hours on this fearful bed and at night managed to crawl out and make his way home. His father was already killed, and his mother, when she saw her boy standing there. naked and blood-bespattered, went out of her mind on the spot. His sister washed and bandaged his wounds, put him to bed and tended him; but the next day, on the reports of their neigh bours, Bolsheviks came and shot them both.
Persecution And Alarms
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
PRESENTL Y the weather turned warm. In April the apricots and peaches were in full blossom, but it was only through the chinks of the old wall that I could spy bits of blue sky and the twigs of trees, and only at night that I could come out into the open and inhale their fragrance. Spring and the warmth combined awoke some stirring in my veins, and life seemed somehow easier. though I had no plans at all for the future. Sometimes Akbar and I would debate how I could best make my way through the mountains to Ferghana, the greater part of which was still in the hands of native guerillas who were keeping up the battle with the Bolsheviks. Besides, there were many friends of mine among their leaders. But the news Akbar brought in from his friends among the Sarts and Kirghiz in the bazaar were the reverse of encouraging : Bolshevik patrols were out on the roads everywhere, and there was a pair quite near us. I must wait on. Yuldash came back from the mountains and brought a few small pieces of serpentine, with the news that a White detachment had successfully repulsed Bolshevik attacks. inflicting severe losses on them, and then retired towards. Ferghana, making their way over almost inaccessible passes through the snows. Meanwhile the movement of motors, lorries and mounted troops along the road became rarer and rarer.
The Road To Semirechie
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
IT was not long before B. arrived and brought me all the documents necessary for my journey into Semirechie, together with some money. I was now armed with papers stating that I., Nikolai Ivanovich Novikoff, civil engineer, was sent on duty into Semirechie on ‘hydrotechnical investigations,’ a rather artful term which would be incomprehensible to the half-educated Bolsheviks and place me in a position of superiority. Special ‘ mandates ‘ required the Soviet authorities to afford me every possible co-operation in my work, and to forward me on my road by the mailcarts and horses. Nevertheless, ordinary caution demanded that, for the time at least, I should avoid the main roads and make my way over the mountain footpaths past the district and town of Chimkend, where I might easily be recognised or merely detained ‘ pending orders,• as was the custom with the proletarian authorities in their dealings with educated people. The evening before my departure a Sart arrived with a small donkey for my baggage, and on the next day, 19th August, before sunrise we started. I was sorry to leave the peaceful secluded spot where for three months I had lived alone amid the beauties of nature ; where I had become so used to my surroundings that I had become part and parcel of them myself. I felt sad at heart. I was teari myself away from well-tried friends and going into the unknown, an unknown full of dangers and alarms.
Back On The Trail
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A FRIEND of mine arrived from Tashkend. He warned me that the Soviet authorities had found out that I was somewhere in Semirechie, and that orders had been given to the local Che-Ka to spare no effort to find me. For this reason it was vital to get away from Pishpek as soon as possible. To put their agents off the scent and to mask my tracks, I managed to get official orders to start on an expedition to the neighbourhood of Lake Balkash to prospect for useful minerals, while as a matter of fact I set off in exactly the opposite direction, to the south, making for Naryn on the Chinese frontier near Kashgar. I drove out of Pishpek on r8th May in a light cart drawn by a troika of horses. I intended to ride one of these animals from the frontier to Kashgar, and to send back the cart with the remaining pair. This time my driver was a smart young Kirghiz, Azamat Bek, a resourceful fellow of proved trustworthiness. Formerly he had been extremely rich, but now be was totally ruined, as after the rising of 1916 the Russians had stolen all his property and stock, although both he and his old father, who was killed, were loyal to the Russians, and he himself had done a great deal to help those who had suffered in the rising : he had saved from captivity among the Kirghiz seventeen Russian women and girls whom the rebels had taken off to Chinese territory.
Desolation
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A FEELING of intense relief. of real joy and freedom, came over me when this last post of Soviet Russia was left behind and my cart continued its road up to the lofty plateaux of Arpa and Chatyr Kul. Snow lay about the place in patches still, and in it I saw the tracks of wild sheep, foxes and wolves. In the valley of Arpa, which looks like a real steppe in the Orenburg district, the thawing snow gave rise to.rivulets all over the place. We stopped to bivouac at the entrance to the valley of Kara Su (Black Water), at the foot of some rocky hills. The next morning I was a o used by the ringing cries of ruddy sheldrake (Casarca rutila), a flock of which was busy among the stones on top of the hill, behaving just like chukar. These duck nest in holes in absolutely waterless spots, and obviously they had found a suitable site up here. I have found their nests even in fresh Kirghiz graves, and as they often feed on carrion, joining in with vultures and crows, it is better to cut them out of the list of edible game, especially as the meat is tough and stringy. The road kept mounting. High up on the right above the hills there rose a column of cloud, just as though out of the crater of some volcano, black and threatening. This was the steam rising from the Lake of Chatyr Kul (the Lake of the Tent).
Despair
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
MY situation was now about as hopeless as it could be ; neither horse nor other means of transport of getting away anywhere, and, to crown my misfortunes, my financial resources had almost come to an end. I could, in fact, not see any way out of my desperate situation. The great altitude, which makes movement an effort and always has a lowering effect upon the nervous system, also acted upon me, and I was reduced to the depths of melancholy and gloom. External conditions, too, seemed as though they had been specially designed to drive a man into despair. In the morning the sun would occasionally show his face for a brief moment and there would be a respite from the snow, but in the afternoon the storm would begin again and the blizzard rage the whole night long. The horizon was all the time covered with lowering leaden clouds. Below, from the basin of Chatyr Kul, as though out of an enormous crater, there arose a column of black evil-looking clouds, which crept over towards us and enveloped us in a blanket of hurricane and snow, till my very soul seemed blotted out in blackness and despair.
At last !
Authors: Nazaroff Paul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
WHEN it was light we rode out on to a broad desert. On both sides there were rows of small hills. By daylight I could see that the water in the river was full of dirt, and in spite of my raging thirst, I should have to bold out longer, until we came to a brook where, though muddy, it was fresh and cold. Here Tursum Bai filled his tursuk, a leather bottle made of smoked skins, in which he had a few drops of sour milk. We then turned towards the east, between the rows of hills, where we chose a suitable secluded spot to stop and rest.
Light on sweetness: the discovery of aspartame
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Aspartame, or Nutrasweet, must have relieved a corpulent population of many tons of excess weight. It is a sweetener devoid of the disagreeable aftertaste of saccharine and seems to have no pathological side-effects. Its discovery arose by pure accident, like indeed those of most other ‘artificial’ sweeteners, including the very first: saccharine was synthesized in 1879 by Constantine Fahlberg, a student of the foremost American organic chemist of the time, Ira Remsen, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Fahlberg, struck by a curious sweet taste on his fingers while eating his dinner, realized that it came from something he had spilled on his hand during the day. It was ort/m-sulphobenzoic acid imide. He took out a patent on the substance, from which he excluded his mentor, and became rich, a lapse that Remsen never forgave him.
Winter in Paris: Becquerel and the discovery of radioactivity
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) was a member of an august scientific dynasty, the third of his line to hold the Chair of Physics at the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris (in which his son, Jean, later succeeded him).
In 1896, Becquerel was busy pursuing a mirage. Like all physicists he had been shaken and impressed by R6ntgen’s discovery of X-rays [4]. If cathode rays striking glass could elicit a secondary radiation, might not visible light do the same when it fell on a phosphorescent material? To test this wholly incorrect conjecture Becquerel chose a crystal of a uranium compound as a phosphor. He placed a cross made of copper on a photographic plate, enclosed the whole in black paper, laid the crystal on top, and allowed sunlight to fall on it. And, indeed, when the plate was developed it revealed an exposed area, on which the white outline of the cross could be plainly discerned.
Two hundred monks aleaping and the devil in the bottle
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The discovery of electricity in the eighteenth century caused great excitement, and attracted not only scholars, but the public and a swarm of charlatans. An appetite grew for spectacular scientific entertainments. So Stephen Gray, for instance, who expounded his work on conductors and insulators before the Royal Society of London in I 720, took to performing demonstrations on human subjeds, and especially the boys in the Charterhouse charitable founda tion. He ‘caught an urchin, hung him up with insulating cords, electrified him by contact with rubbed glass, and drew sparks from his nose’.
Such public diversions became all the rage, and led in due course to the belief that electrical discharges might have therapeutic properties and might even revive the recently dead (as in Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein). Considerable voltages were generated by rapidly revolving glass cylinders, and then Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692-1761) in Holland invented the famous Leyden jar. This was a water-filled vessel, coated with conducting material on both the inside and outside. A wire poked through a stopper in a hole at the top and when this was brought into contact with a charged object (a rubbed glass rod, for example) charge would be conducted down the wire to accumulate in the jar. Discharges from such jars could attain considerable power. Indeed, van Musschenbroek warned against the danger after he had himself experienced a traumatic shock.
Loving an enzyme
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Arthur Kornberg is one of the great biochemists of our time. His Nobel Prize in 1959 came for his work on the synthesis of DNA. The hallmark of his approach to his science has ever been the isolation of highly pure materials from biological tissues, and the analysis of their functions in minute and fastidious detail. He called his memoirs For the Love of Enzymes. Here is an episode that he has related from his apprenticeship in the New York laboratory of his mentor, the Spanish biochemist Severo Ochoa.
The purification of an enzyme was (and often still is) an arduous undertaking, involving generally a long succession of treatments that, for instance, rendered some components (generally the unwanted proteins extracted from the tissue) insoluble, while other material remained in solution. The presence of the enzyme was recognized by its activity in the reaction that it catalysed in the cell, so as more and more of the contaminating components were eliminated the activity relative to the total protein in the preparation increased.
Drowning the telephone
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
R. V. Jones [106] was a physicist, latterly Professor of Physics at the University of Aberdeen, who made notable contributions to operational research during the Second World War, and was celebrated for his ingenious hoaxes on his colleagues. The following jape was conceived in Oxford in the years before the war with the connivance of two friends. Here is fones’s own description of what occurred.
I telephoned Gerald Touch’s digs. Before anyone could answer I rang off again, and repeated the procedure several times to create rhe impression that someone was trying to ring the number but that something must be wrong. After this spell of induction, I dialled the number again, and heard a voice which I recognized as belonging to a very able research student in chemistry—in fact he had won the Senior Scholarship in Chemistry in the whole University that year. Reverting to the tongue that was my second language, the Cockney that came from my early schooling, I explained that I was the telephone engineer and had just received a complaint from a subscriber who was trying to dial the number and who had failed to get through. From the symptoms that he described I would say that either his dial was running a bit too fast or there was a leak to earth somewhere at the receiving end. 1 added that we would send a man round in the morning to check the insulation* but it was just possible the fault could be cleared from the telephone exchange if only we could be quite sure what it was. A few simple tests would check whether this were so, and if the victim would be good enough to help us with these tests, whoever it was who wanted to get through might be able to do so the same evening. Would the victim therefore help with the tests? Immediately, of course, he expressed a readiness to do so, and I explained that I would have to keep him waiting while I got out the appropriate manual so that we could go through the correct test sequence.
Trouble at t’lab
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When judged by its impact on human life and happiness, the discovery of insulin was perhaps the most momentous event in the history of modern science. Up to the third decade of the twentieth century a diagnosis of dia betesߞwhich an alert doctor could often make from the white spots of dried sugar that bespattered a male patient’s shoes or trouser bottomsߞpresaged an early and miserable death. This could be delayed only by a starvation diet, no less agonizing for most patients than the disease.
The road to insulin was beset by misadventure, rancour, and deceit. The award of a Nobel Prize in 1923 to two of the principal actors, Frederick Banting (1891-1941) and John Macleod (1876-1935), inflamed several others, who felt (with some justice) that their efforts had been disparaged or forgotten. One of these was Nicolas Paulesco, a Romanian physiologist, who made the critical observation that linked diabetes to the dearth of an active component in the pancreas: he discovered that high levels of sugar in the blood and urine of dogs, rendered diabetic by extirpation of the pancreas, fell when the animals were injected with pancreatic extracts. Paulesco’s work was interrupted for four years by the Austro-Hungarian invasion of his country before the end of the First World War, and by the time he returned to the problem Banting, Macleod, Best, and Collip in Toronto were closing in on their quarry.
Following by example
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Benjamin Silliman was a noted scholar, a professor at Yale Cniversity during the first half of the nineteenth century. He created the university’s chemistry laboratories and became one of the country’s foremost chemists of his time. Here he describes an exasperating incident, which occurred when he ordered from the local instrument manufacturer a dozen retorts. Having only a broken specimen, he sent both pieces to indicate exactly what was needed:
In due course my dozen green glass retorts, of East Haverford manufacture, arrived, carefully boxed and all sound, except that all were cracked off at the neck exactly where the pattern was fractured: and the broken neck and ball lay in state like decapitated kings in their coffins. The more than Chinese imitation afforded a curious illustration of the state of manufacture of chemical glass in this country, or rather in Connecticut; the same blunder would probably not have been made in Philadelphia or Boston.
Solving the insoluble
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff stand out as giants in the history of chemistry. Bunsen’s most important monument is the science of spectroscopy—the analysis of lines or bands at characteristic wavelengths making up the light emitted or absorbed by chemical elements and compounds (for one of its later practical applications see [45]). He devised the famous burner that bears his name to generate a pale, almost colourless flame in which the colours of spectra could be viewed. Bunsen (born in Gottingen in 1811) was a much-loved, affable bachelor of slovenly habits; the wife of one of his colleagues at Heidelberg University declared that she wanted to kiss him, but first she would need to wash him. Kirchhoff, Bunsen’s friend and collaborator, shared in much of the great work on spectral analysis and went on to contribute to many branches of physical chemistry. Bunsen and Kirchhoff occupied neighbouring laboratories in the physics building, the Friedrichsbau.
Phlogiston consigned to flames
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-94), ‘d’immortelle memoire’, is generally seen as the founder of modern chemistry. He introduced the principle of accurate measurement, especially by weighing, of the reagents and products of chemical reactions; it was this fastidious adherence to quantitative evaluation, rather than mere observation, that led him to most of his great discoveries. He was a man of conspicuous vanity, hauteur, and no little concupiscence. Rich by birth, he had married an even richer and intelligent and beautiful wife, but it was his membership of the rapacious Ferntiers G&itraux, the association of tax-tenants, who levied tributes on a wide range of goods, that brought him eventually to the scaffold.
Lavoisier was not above laying claim to the work of others and he seldom acknowledged the efforts of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, it was he who (among many other achievements) defined the difference between elements and compounds and understood (even if he shared the discovery with Joseph Priestley in England and Karl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden) the significance of oxygen—which he named from the Greek, meaning ‘acid generator’ (a misnomer, of course, perpetuated in current German usage as Sauerstoff, or sour substance). Lavoisier formulated the principle of conservation of matter and put paid to the phlogiston theory, which had dominated chemistry for a half century.
Cook knows best
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
We owe the concept of radiocarbon dating to the chemist Willard Libby (1908-80). Carbon, which is a constituent of all the compounds that participate in the processes of life, contains a small proportion of a radioactive isotope [149]. When an organism dies, metabolism ceases and there is no more turnover of all these carbon compounds; so the radioactive isotope is not replenished and decays away. Consequently the amount of radioactivity detected in the substance of the deceased animal or plant (wood or cotton, for instance) gives a measure of how long it has been dead. This technique revolutionized the practice of archaeology and won Libby the Nobel Prize in 1960. The following recollection comes from the American biochemist, Daniel Koshland, at the time a research student.
The sound of physics
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Richard Feynman [89] is one of the few scientists since Einstein to have impressed himself on the public consciousness. This is in large measure the result of the two books of transcribed reminiscences and obiter dicta, which caught the popular imagination. Here is an extract from one of them, which gives a hint of the ebullient spirit that informed his science and his life.
Feynman was always careless with engagements and seldom wrote down addresses or telephone numbers. In 1957, he had been invited to take part in a conference on gravity, to be held at the University of North Carolina.
1 landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn’t make it the first day), and 1 went out to where the taxis were. 1 said to the dispatcher, ‘I’d like to go to the University of North Carolina.’