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Record W1575915629 · doi:10.7202/1071926ar

An Engineer Well Lost

2020· article· en· W1575915629 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Paul O'Leary

Bibliographic record

VenuePaideusis · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPoetry Analysis and Criticism
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEngineeringConstruction engineeringEngineering ethicsComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Since I was born and raised in a predominantly Catholic area of Boston and sent to a Catholic elementary school, it would be natural to infer that my interest in philosophy was stirred by questions about religion.Such was not the case.As evidenced by having to repeat the third grade, I was a very mediocre student with a mind to match.In fact, the only questions that seriously occupied me concerned the fate of the Boston Red Sox and, occasionally, the Boston Bruins.My less-than-stellar school performance continued in a secondary school devoted to science and engineering and came to an unwelcome end at Northeastern University's School of Engineering when, after two years of desultory study, I was authoritatively told that the world would be much safer if I did not become an engineer.Realizing that I was lost to engineering, I stopped my mindless drifting.My predicament forced me to ask serious questions about what I was going to do with my life.Little did I know at that time how such a personal question can easily morph into the sort of philosophical inquiries found in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics!Fortunately, a friend of mine, who was well informed about matters philosophical, helped guide my incoherent inquiries.Because of him, I became an omnivorous reader though, perhaps, a somewhat indiscriminate one.Unfortunately, I still had to earn a living and, thus, spent the next two years attached to an engineering firm where I worked as a road surveyor.It was then, too, that the judgment about the safety of the world was confirmed when one of the half completed bridges I had worked on, began slowly to sink into a riverbed.Before I could return to university to pursue my interest in philosophy, I was drafted into the United States Navy for two years.While I disliked my time in the navy, it proved to be beneficial since it not only fostered my maturing, but also helped me develop my interests.For one thing, I was the only sailor aboard our ship who was reading Plato, Aristotle, as well as George Santayana!Moreover, six months in the Mediterranean allowed me visits to Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, and France.Since our home-port was on the French Riviera, I frequently escaped the gastronomically disastrous food served on our ship and tasted the remarkable cuisine of southern France.After my discharge from the Navy, I was lucky to be admitted to Boston College-a Jesuit-run university.The Jesuits required all students, Catholic or not, to take two courses per year in philosophy as well as two in theology.The philosophy courses followed a prescribed sequence starting with logic and epistemology in the first year and ending with ethics in the final year.It was in the ethics course that I encountered my first Jesuit teacher of philosophy.We respectfully addressed him as -Father Toolin‖ but he was known to us as -No Foolin' Toolin‖.These required courses tended to be formulaic as well as too dependent on a single textbook.Surprisingly, although he was acknowledged, Aquinas's work never made an appearance.Nevertheless, these courses gave rise to argument and debate about important issues.1

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.122
Threshold uncertainty score0.408

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.004
Scholarly communication0.0110.005
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0030.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.1220.064

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.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.220
Teacher spread0.190 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2020
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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