Response to Comment on “<i>Sphagnum</i> Mosses from 21 Ombrotrophic Bogs in the Athabasca Bituminous Sands Region Show No Significant Atmospheric Contamination of ‘Heavy Metals’”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blais and Donahue (2015) draw attention to many contemporary environmental issues and concerns regarding the industrial development of the Athabasca Bituminous Sands (ABS), most of which are outside of the scope of our original study (Shotyk et al., 2014).\nHere we restrict our response to the remarks they made which actually apply to our paper. The focus of our paper was the abundance and spatial variation in concentrations of “heavy metals” (selected chalcophile elements namely Ag, Cd, Pb, Sb, and Tl) as well as V, Ni and Mo (the three elements which are well known to be enriched in bitumen). We compared the concentrations of these elements in Sphagnum\nmoss with those of Th, a conservative, lithophile element which was taken to reflect the abundance of mineral dust particles in the mosses. Concern was expressed by Blais and Donahue for our analysis and interpretation, in particular the use of average concentrations for each sampling location, the variation in metal concentrations with distance from industry, and the contribution of mineral dust particles to the heavy\nmetal concentrations.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.043 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".