Kate Brown, Associate Professor of History, presented the Social Sciences Forum “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” to a large audience Wednesday afternoon in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

Brown spoke about the plutonium disasters of the United States and Soviet Union, telling the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia. They are the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. She described how American and Soviet leaders created plutopias, which are communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized atomic cities.

For many, living in these cities was like “winning the golden ticket,” Brown said because families could achieve great prosperity. She also told stories of many temporary workers forced to live outside these communities who often performed the most dangerous tasks. Because the communities were so secret, Brown said they did provide prosperity for many, but also concealed disasters that remain unstable to this day.

Kate Brown is author of A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland and Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. 

The way humans assist Twitter’s search and advertising algorithms shows that machines still need a helping hand in some important areas.

Twitter’s listing on the NYSE arguably reflects renewed faith in human traders after Facebook’s error-strewn debut on the more heavily computerized NASDAQ in May 2012. But there’s another, more subtle, reason why Twitter’s success should warm the hearts of those of us who still exist in meat-space: Twitter’s search and advertising system relies on human computers as well as Big Data algorithms.

Carlo DiClemente, presidential research professor and professor of psychology, was selected as a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Addictive Behaviors Special Interest Group (AB-SIG) of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT).

The award is presented every other year to a member who has made outstanding contributions over the course of his or her career to the field of addictive behaviors, consistent with the goal of advancing cognitive and behavior therapies. 

The selection committee this year felt DiClemente best embodied the spirit of this award. He will be formally honored at the upcoming ABCT meeting in Nashville, TN on November 23rd.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of CSS Style Attributes. Markup languages such as HTML and SVG provide a style attribute on most elements, to hold inline style information that applies to those elements. This draft describes the syntax and interpretation of the CSS fragment that can be used in such style attributes. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published two Working Drafts today:

• W3C DOM4, which defines a platform-neutral model for events, promises, and document nodes.
• Use Cases and Requirements for Standardizing Responsive Images, which captures the use cases and requirements for standardizing a solution for responsive images. The use cases and requirements were gathered with consultation with the HTML Working Group and WHATWG participants, Responsive Images Community Group members, and the general public.

Learn more about the HTML Activity.