Evaluating the Avaluator - First Reflections on the Canadian Decision Aid
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2006, the Canadian Avalanche Centre introduced the Avaluator, a decision support tool that offers amateur backcountry recreationists decision guidance based on expert opinion and historic avalanche accident records. Simultaneous with the launch, the curriculum of the standard introductory avalanche course (Avalanche Skills Training 1 – AST1) was revised to include the Avaluator as a central component. In this paper, we will take a first look at the reception of the Avaluator and its impact on the decision process and recreational behavior of AST1 course graduates. In a series of surveys, a conjoint rating task was used to assess the decision preferences of participating students before their AST1 course, right after the course, and after considerable additional personal experience in avalanche terrain. In addition, the Theory of Planned Behavior was used to identify the most influential factors for the use of the Avaluator on private winter backcountry trips among AST1 graduates. The preliminary results provide interesting first perspectives for the further development and delivery of the decision aid.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".