The complexity of the merchant-fisher relationship : revising the merchant domination thesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The academic perception of the historical role of merchants and the system of credit that they employed in the Newfoundland state has been changing in recent years, particularly among scholars here in Newfoundland. In the past merchants have borne much of the blame for both the social and economic problems that were prevalent in this region prior to 1950. Poverty, the absence of significant community development, the cleavage of social ties within communities, and even the collapse of the Newfoundland state in the 1930s have been attributed largely to the self-interested economic activities of the merchant class. Gerald Sider's work has been cited as a good example of this perspective. Some scholars have now begun to consider other contributing factors to these problems, however, such as the role of technological change, the inherent complexity of the credit or 'truck’ system, and the necessity of credit to the proper functioning of the informal economy. An important aspect of this recent work is that it has begun to suggest that merchants were also operating under constraint. Consequently, their ability to re-invest in communities or alter their mode of business to remedy Newfoundland's social and economic ills may have been quite limited.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".