Natural history in newspapers: Dugald Semple (1884–1964), Ayrshire naturalist and nature journalist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dugald Semple (1884–1964), living in Ayrshire, Scotland, was a prolific twentieth-century author of books and articles in local newspapers on natural history, as well as on diet and simple living. Forsaking a conventional urban life he chose to live close to nature in rural surroundings. Espousing vegetarianism he emulated Thoreau, following for fifty years a Ghandi-like philosophy of simplicity while earning enough from his writings and lecturing to provide for what he could not grow himself. It was his life outdoors and his enthusiasm for the natural world that he imparted not only in the printed word, but also in lectures to all who were prepared to listen. He illustrated many of his articles with his own photographs, a collection of which survive as deteriorating glass-quarter-plate negatives and lantern slides, along with three decrepit, but extensive, scrapbooks of his personal press cuttings. These form the basis for his contribution to the popularization of natural history, which deserves to be more widely recognized.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".