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Collapse of the Quebec Bridge, 1907

2006· article· en· W2123781005 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Cynthia Pearson, Norbert Delatte

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Performance of Constructed Facilities · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicStructural Engineering and Vibration Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNational Science Foundation
KeywordsChord (peer-to-peer)Forensic engineeringEngineeringBridge (graph theory)PierSpan (engineering)Structural engineeringShouldersBeam bridgeCivil engineeringComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In the late 19th century, the transportation needs of Quebec led to proposals for bridging the St. Lawrence River. The Quebec Bridge was the longest cantilever structure attempted until that time. In its final design, the clear span was 548.6 m (1,800 ft) long. The bridge project was financially troubled from the beginning. This caused many setbacks in the design and construction. Construction finally began in October 1900. In August 1907, the bridge collapsed suddenly. Seventy five workers were killed in the accident, and there were only 11 survivors from the workers on the span. A distinguished panel was assembled to investigate the disaster. The panel’s report found that the main cause of the bridge’s failure was improper design of the latticing on the compression chords. The collapse was initiated by the buckling failure of Chord A9L, on the anchor arm near the pier, immediately followed by Chord A9R. Theodore Cooper had been the consulting engineer for the Quebec Bridge project, and most of the blame for the disaster fell on his shoulders. He mandated unusually high allowable stresses, and failed to require recalculation of the bridge dead load when the span was lengthened.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.054
Threshold uncertainty score0.392

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0130.002
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0180.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.004
GPT teacher head0.168
Teacher spread0.164 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations57
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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