Innocent Experiments

From the 1950s to the digital age, Americans have pushed their children to live science-minded lives, cementing scientific discovery and youthful curiosity as inseparable ideals. In this multifaceted work, historian Rebecca Onion examines the rise of informal children's science education in the twentieth century, from the proliferation of home chemistry sets after World War I to the century-long boom in child-centered science museums. Onion looks at how the United States has increasingly focused its energies over the last century into producing young scientists outside of the classroom. She shows that although Americans profess to believe that success in the sciences is synonymous with good citizenship, this idea is deeply complicated in an era when scientific data is hotly contested and many Americans have a conflicted view of science itself. These contradictions, Onion explains, can be understood by examining the histories of popular science and the development of ideas about American childhood. She shows how the idealized concept of "science" has moved through the public consciousness and how the drive to make child scientists has deeply influenced American culture.

This book offers a readable introduction to the main aspects of thought experimenting in philosophy and science (together with related imaginative activities in mathematics and linguistics). It presents the main options in understanding thought experiments, from empiricism to Platonism, and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. However, it also provides some original perspectives on the topic. Firstly, it provides a new definition and analysis of thought experimenting that brings it closer to laboratory experimenting. Secondly, it develops the author’s earlier theory of “mental modelling”, proposed some decades ago by him, and some other researchers in the field as the crucial procedure in thought experimenting. The mental modelling approach links work with thought experimenting to cognitive science and to research on mental simulation which is a hot topic in present-day research. Thirdly, it proposes a principled way to respond to criticism of thought experimenting by “experimental philosophers” as they have been dominating the present-day debates. The response suggests a possible ameliorative, self-help project for thought experimenting. Finally, the book provides a way to systematize the history of important thought experiments in science and philosophy and thus connects, in an original way, the systematic investigation of experimenting to the historical work of famous thought experiments. It is of interest to scholars interested in history of ideas and philosophy of science.

From the courtrooms of Nuremberg to the battlefields of the Gulf War, Undue Risk exposes a variety of government policies and specific cases, includingplutonium injections to unwilling hospital patients, and even the attempted recruitment of Nazi medical scientists bythe U.S. government after World War II.

"This important book, joining many others about the possibility and actuality of executing innocent persons . . . examines the full range of potential and real cases in which innocent people are falsely accused, convicted, and incarcerated and describes the variety of missteps in our criminal justice system that lead to unjust imprisonment . . . . In six clearly written chapters the authors examine the reality of unjust incarceration . . . . The last chapter may be the most compelling; the authors recommend how to reduce the number of errors in our criminal justice system. For anyone concerned about justice; highly recommended for public and university libraries." --Choice "In this well-researched and fascinating volume, the authors mix materials from case files in the literature and reported in numerous research reports and in the media. There is great reliance on research studies, national and international, on the accuracy of eyewitness perceptions. Interviews with the exonerated and some of the actors in the system are included as are trial documents and court transcripts as well as media reports on the trials. There is no other book on the ′′guilty′′ but innocent that has so broad a focus and so much rich detail. It is a good read, indeed." --from the Foreword by Simon Dinitz, Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University Even if the American system of criminal justice proved 99.5% accurate, it would still generate more than 10,000 wrongful convictions a year--and those would reflect only the eight serious index crimes. Each time an innocent offender is wrongfully convicted, the actual offender remains free to continue victimizing. Insightful and stimulating, Convicted But Innocent grapples with the very specific, difficult issues surrounding wrongful convictions and the implications for society. Using fascinating case samples and survey data that reflect the possible magnitude of the problem, the authors detail the major factors associated with this stunning potential for error in our criminal justice system. Although no system of justice can be perfect, this volume shows that a focus on preventable errors can substantially reduce the number of conviction injustices. Committed to that end, authors C. Ronald Huff, Arye Rattner, and Edward Sagarin also examine public policy implications and recommendations for putting their findings to work. Intriguing, and about a problem that is frightening to contemplate, Convicted But Innocent offers a stimulating read for students, academics, researchers, law enforcement and corrections professionals, and policy makers.

A chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorized in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathizer tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. A significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled private life into a compelling personal narrative. An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung. Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism, civil liberties, and mental and physical health. In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd. Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently embroiled Sinclair in controversy. Sinclair’ s passion and optimistic zeal inspired America, but privately he could be a frustrated, petty man who connected better with his readers than with members of his own family. His life with his first wife, Meta, his son David, and various friends and professional acquaintances was a web of conflict and strain. Personally and professionally ambitious, Sinclair engaged in financial speculation, although his wealth-generating schemes often benefited his pet causes–and he lobbied as tirelessly for professional recognition and awards as he did for government reform. As the tenor of his work would suggest, Sinclair was supremely human. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur offers an engrossing and enlightening account of Sinclair’s life and the country he helped to transform. Taking readers from the Reconstruction South to the rise of American power to the pinnacle of Hollywood culture to the Civil Rights era, this is historical biography at its entertaining and thought-provoking finest.