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Record W2047352030 · doi:10.1680/ehah.2009.162.3.147

Engineering ‘the aerodrome of democracy’, Canada 1939–1944

2009· article· en· W2047352030 on OpenAlexaffabout
Alison MacKenzie

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Engineering History and Heritage · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicArchaeological Research and Protection
Canadian institutionsToronto Metropolitan University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCommonwealthScope (computer science)Training (meteorology)Political scienceSubject (documents)Civil defenseCivil engineeringEngineeringPublic administrationManagementLawGeographyMeteorologyLibrary scienceComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The British Commonwealth air training plan was created to address the critical shortage of trained flyers that existed at the outbreak of World War II. As the expansion of existing training facilities in areas likely to be subject to enemy attack was unlikely to be satisfactory, an agreement was reached between Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to provide training facilities in Canada. Initial requirements were for 58 airfields, one to be complete by May 1940, 37 by the end of 1941 and the remaining 20 by April 1942. The extent of this civil engineering challenge is highlighted by the fact that, in 1939, the Royal Canadian Air Force possessed only five airfields. However, not only were the original targets achieved, they were surpassed in both scope and time. On completion, 88 ‘main’ airfields were in use; as most of these airfields required at least one ‘satellite’ field with many of the facilities of the main fields, the grand total was 176 airfields. In the words of President Roosevelt, Canada had become ‘the aerodrome of democracy’. As airfields were constructed in every province of Canada, planning and logistical problems were immense. Standardisation of design for airfield layout, prefabrication of components for hangars and other airfield structures, a centralised management organisation and the application of what, today, we would describe as modern construction project management techniques all helped Canada's civil engineers to successfully complete this Herculean task.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.986
Threshold uncertainty score0.765

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0140.005
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0140.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.160
Teacher spread0.152 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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