Bibliographic record
Abstract
Earth's space environment often offers surprises upon the introduction of new technologies. The history of some space weather impacts on communications demonstrates this vividly. Such history was on my mind during a recent trip to Newfoundland, Canada. Nestled in an eastern inlet, the small fishing village of Heart's Content marks the landing site of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, in 1866, laid by the famous ship Great Eastern with the financial backing of Cyrus Field. The building and laying of this cable is an engineering saga in its own right; subsequent Europe-to-North America telegraph cables in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also had Newfoundland coastal ports as their termini. Geomagnetic storm–produced ground currents that flowed through this and other telegraph cables seriously affected transmission and reception of signals. The voice telephone eventually replaced the telegraph, yet the new technology, with its innovative repeaters and power system, was just as vulnerable as the old. This was dramatically confirmed by the effects of the very large geomagnetic storm of 10–11 February 1958 on the first transatlantic voice telephone cable, laid between Oban, Scotland, and Clarenville, Newfoundland. This cable, placed in commercial service in September 1956 at the height of large solar cycle 19, saw complete disruptions of voice traffic during the 1958 storm. Signal Hill, in St. John's, Newfoundland (∼130 kilometers from Clarenville and ∼80 kilometers southeast of Heart's Content; see Figure 1), was the site of Guglielmo Marconi's reception of the Morse code letter S on 12 December 1901 from his transmission station on the cliffs above Poldhu Bay, in Cornwall, England. This achievement of wireless transmission across the Atlantic was possible only because of the existence of Earth's ionosphere. Wireless transmission provided larger bandwidths for the communications signals and avoided the pesky ground electrical currents that could plague cable communications. However, as Marconi himself wrote, it was quickly discovered that “…times of bad [wireless] fading practically always coincide with the appearance of large sun-spots and intense aurora-boreali usually accompanied by magnetic storms….” He further noted that these are “…the same periods when cables and land lines experience difficulties or are thrown out of action.” Historic occurrences of the effects of space weather on new technologies therefore remind us that continued efforts toward a better understanding of Earth's space environment are necessary to developing and implementing robust systems designs. Such work will be critical to the continued use of cell phone technology and for communications technologies of the future. Louis J. Lanzerotti is editor of Space Weather and a distinguished research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.118 | 0.098 |
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".