Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Western Canada Airways began flying its pioneering air route down the Mackenzie Valley in 1929, it did so with a fleet comprised entirely of Fokker Super Universal aircraft. By the end of 1933, however, the airline had declared the Super Universals obsolete, replacing them with other aircraft models. In only four years, the Fokker Super Universal had gone from state of the art to obsolescent. Exploring Western Canada Airways' decision to replace the Supers, this paper offers insight into the nature of obsolescence, demonstrating that the aircraft did not achieve this status because of technical changes or dramatic technical breakthroughs in the design of other aircraft. Instead, the Super Universal became obsolete because of changes in its use-context. The rise of the Great Bear Lake mineral rush, the introduction of new sorts of aircraft into the region, increased competition, and changing passenger expectations all encouraged Western Canada Airways' management to re-evaluate their definition of what constituted a superior technology within the context of the Mackenzie Valley. While conditions in 1929 made the Super Universal the best possible choice, by the end of 1933 those circumstances had changed such that the Super was now obsolete. By tracing this episode in Canadian aviation history, this paper will explore the contextual dimensions of obsolescence and the role of historical circumstances in effecting technological decline.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".