NOTHING BUT BLIND PITILESS INDIFFERENCE: BOUNDARY MONUMENTS, DEFERRAL AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 it