Were the Poppers Right? Outmigration and the Changing Economy of the Great Plains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I was born and raised west of the 100th meridian and lived close to the land and people of western Kansas for more than 40 years. When I entered high school, I set a goal of knowing everyone in the school within two weeks and I accomplished that. I also knew the name of every street in town, thanks to my having a paper route. Within my lifetime, I have seen dramatic changes in both the land and people. When the Poppers first introduced their Buffalo Commons idea, I was governor and I came out guns blazing like Matt Dillon. Like many Kansans, I wondered what two East Coast academics could possibly know about the Great Plains. Seventeen years later, I must admit I was wrong. In some areas, from Alberta to the Rio Grande, the depopulation has been even greater than what the Poppers predicted. That was disappointing to me as my families’ roots are deep in western Kansas. My mother and father built a house in Atwood and lived at that same address for 51 years. During that same time period, I’ve had 29 different mailing addresses, exemplifying changing lifestyles.
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 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 | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".