‘It proves falsehood absolutely . . .’ The lost notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT With the completion of a careful study of a photographic copy of the original notebook Frederick Cook kept on his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1908, now in Copenhagen, Denmark, many new details have been added that allow a more accurate account of his actual movements and timetable than has been possible previously. Because some records were altered or destroyed by Cook, however, a complete account still necessarily contains an element of speculation, which must be the case when based on the only records that exist of an unwitnessed assertion. But this uncertainty can be controlled to a reasonable degree by the notebook's remaining content in concert with the several other accounts Cook wrote of his expedition. One thing is sure, however: Cook was far behind his published timetable. At the outset, he set his start date back by one full week. He failed to report a number of delays in his journey and left out a lengthy detour that prevented him from reaching land's end at Cape Thomas Hubbard until well past 1 April 1908. This ruled out any chance to reach the North Pole in 1908. Frederick Cook was no fool; he was a veteran explorer. He knew any attempt that late in the season would be suicide. Furthermore his efforts to lay caches that would separate his own return route from that of his Inuit support party indicate that not only had he already given up the idea of making a serious attempt, but also that he was preparing for his eventual hoax of claiming to have reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908 long before he reached the Arctic Ocean.
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 | 0.010 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.012 |
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".