“It is the finest piece of government work that I know of anywhere”: The Influence of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario on the Giant Power Survey of Pennsylvania, 1923-1927
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since its foundation in 1906, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario exerted a major influence on the politics of electricity in the United States. American supporters of publicly-owned utilities saw the Hydro as a model worth emulating south of the border. Reformers who sought lower electric prices for consumers also looked to the Hydro for evidence of the technically-feasible lowest cost of producing and transmitting this source of energy. This paper will examine a specific instance when American Progressives sought to use the Hydro as both a source of information and inspiration for electric policy reforms: the Giant Power Survey of 1923-1927, an attempt by Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot to bring about lower electricity costs for consumers and to extend access to rural areas, through a mix of greater regulation and government action. The individuals involved in Giant Power came into close contact with Hydro officials for the vital administrative and technical information with which to argue for their cause; the Ontarians, however, had their own reasons to be wary of getting involved in a controversial proposal.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".