NOTHING BUT BLIND PITILESS INDIFFERENCE: BOUNDARY MONUMENTS, DEFERRAL AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Boundary monuments in Canada have long been asserted to be a public good. Such goods, however, be they monuments or water and sewerage systems, are only in the public interest if they are reliable. Some 800 boundary monuments in 26 residential subdivisions in the province of Alberta were closely inspected (using metal detectors and shovels) for their reliability. Four findings resulted. First, monuments established immediately upon survey, but before servicing and construction, are reliable only 60% of the time. Second, deferring establishment for 4.5 months increases the reliability of the monuments by only 10%; they are reliable 70% of the time. Third, the practice of not deferring establishment until house construction is the reason that deferral is ineffective at significantly enhancing the reliability of monuments. Fourth, although enhanced deferral is in the public interest (if boundary monuments are a public good), land surveyors are reluctant to embrace a longer deferral period. This reluctance is partly a function of wanting to appease clients who prefer to locate house foundations from boundary monuments, and partly a function of viewing deferral as the slippery slope to the wide-spread use of coordinates in place of monuments to define boundaries. This reluctance, however, leads to a logical contradiction: If monuments are a public good, then their reliability only 60 – 70% of the time is intolerable. Conversely, if monuments are not a public good, then their current use is questionable.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".