Possible mercury poisoning in alluvial gold miners in the Porgera Valley, Papua New Guinea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1938, alluvial gold was first reported at Porgera and local prospecting began. By 1975, Placer (PNG) Pty. Limited became the operator of a joint venture with Mount Isa Mines Ltd (MIM). The Porgera Joint Venture gold mine (PJV) is now 50% owned by Placer Pacific, an Australian company whose major partner is Placer Dome, Canada. Built at 2700 m above sea level in rugged mountains, the operation is one of the world's largest modern mines using the latest mining technology developed. The mine is located 200 km west of Mt. Hagen in the remote Enga Province in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Peak undated). During the exploration and construction in the 1980s and early production days in the early 1990s, the mine experienced a lot of national and international criticism for environmental damage. One of the most detailed reports done on Porgera as a notorious company responsible for environmental damage was 'The Porgera File: Adding to Australia's Legacy of Destruction' by Philip Shearman (1995), a consultant with ICRAF. After this embarrassing exposure and others that followed (Kennedy 1996; Apte 2001), the mine has come a long way and now uses the latest technologies that are more environmental friendly.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".