Project Atlantis - An Exercise in the Application of Earth Science to a Critical Examination of a Pseudoscience Hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I ask my first-year physical geology students to write an essay examining the Crustal Displacement hypothesis (Flem-ath and Flem-ath, 1995), a hypothesis that is inconsistent with the accepted understanding of crustal and mantle processes. The assignment involves designing a test of the hypothesis, based on the material covered in our discussion of the theory of plate tectonics and of how the theory evolved. The assignment is useful because it forces students to solidify their understanding of plate tectonics by applying their knowledge in a new context, teaches them about the process of scientific reasoning and the need for objective analysis of all hypotheses, and gives them practice in critical thinking. This type of assignment could be applied to many comparable pseudoscience hypotheses in a wide range of geological disciplines.
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 | 0.018 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".