‘Merlin and the Mason’: Balancing New Technology and Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the wide range of problems that confront us in the conservation of historic masonry buildings. Many of the problems are concerned with incidences of departure from traditional materials and their uses, which are particularly common in the buildings of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other rarer cases we are confronted with unusual uses of materials in former centuries where the actual construction details and specifications do not appear ever to have been written down—and where the essential craft or trade knowledge was usually passed from master mason to new mason by word of mouth.The authors work together frequently on major conservation projects combining the skills, knowledge, and experience of the master mason with those of the forensic conservation specialist. In a review of projects ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the authors seek to demonstrate some of the positive and problematic aspects of multi-disciplinary approaches to conservation.This paper is based on a presentation given on masonry restoration at the Construction Specifications Canada conference held in Ottawa during May 2001.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".