Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the eve of the Second World War — as it turned out, in itself an event destined to become an imperial turning-point of unforeseeable magnitude — the British Empire comprised almost twelve million square miles. That was over a quarter of the world’s inhabited land mass, eighty times the size of Great Britain. Modestly, the Colonial Office, with authority over thirty-five countries, took care to point out that this impressive statistic did not include those territories which Britain or one or other of its Dominions was administering on behalf of the League of Nations. 1 More modestly still, the Colonial Office maintained a category of Miscellaneous Islands. ‘Various islands and rocks throughout the world are British territory’, ran the definition, but, it was conceded, ‘many of these have no permanent inhabitants’. 2 Nor, of course, did it include the million or so square miles and 9m inhabitants of the joint condominium of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Some of these possessions were islands with sizeable offshore jurisdiction, and the substantial Tanganyika Territory had 20 000 of its 360 000 square miles classified as water. The post-First World War acquisitions of League of Nations mandates added a further 10 per cent to the Colonial Empire. To put this into some sort of ready-to-recognize imperial perspective, 7.5 m square miles comprised the four self-governing Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, while India accounted for another 1.8 m square miles, so the Colonial Empire, in so far as the direct responsibility of the British government exercised through the Colonial and not any of the separate Dominions, India or Foreign Offices was at issue, amounted to nearly 2 m square miles, carrying a population of approximately 50 million. Add to this the 35 million living in the Dominions and the 400 million in India, and the Empire could claim a quarter of the world’s population. In comparison, the Roman Empire held jurisdiction over 120 m people in an area of 2.5 m square miles. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.034 | 0.007 |
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".