Risk communication and public response to industrial chemical contamination in Sydney, Nova Scotia: a case study.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The town of Sydney, located on the north coast of Nova Scotia, is Canada's most contaminated community. The local tidal estuary, called the tar ponds, was used as a receptacle for industrial waste from a century of coke production and steel making and is estimated to contain more than 700,000 metric tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, 50,000 metric tons of polychlorinated biphenyls, and many other residuals including arsenic, naphthalene, and toluene. Many residents have expressed consternation over the potential for exposure and subsequent health effects from the ponds. Recent epidemiological studies estimate a 30 to 40 percent increased incidence in several types of cancer within the community. This paper examines the claims and responses made by a variety of interested parties about the chemical contamination in Sydney. It also considers how those claims, in addition to a number of other mediating factors, may have influenced the local community in the mobilization of a response to the contamination.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".