Madame Curie, Baron de Rothschild, Professor Lacroix and the Madagascar experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From 1912 to 1926, over 100 tonnes of crystals of radioactive minerals were shipped from Madagascar to France. The enterprise involved three important people: the indefatigable Professor Alfred Lacroix, who discovered these minerals in material donated to museum collections, the doctor and heir to family fortunes, Henri de Rothschild, who funded a refinery to treat them, and the scientist and humanitarian, Mme Marie Curie, who researched the product of this refinery, namely radium. First intended for medical purposes, in World War I, radium from Madagascar crystals was mainly used to illuminate dials in armored vehicles. After Armistice, it was employed in cancer treatment and research. However, in the 1920s, owing to access to more easily processed ore, the commodity price fell, along with France's import of crystals. By the end of 1926, after a fifteen-year struggle, the once-promising experiment failed; mining and shipment of radioactive crystals ceased.
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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.002 |
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".