Bibliographic record
Abstract
Born: May 2, 1843, Colchester, CN Education: Machinist trainee, 1858 ff, Edinburgh, Scotland Died: October 10, 1929, Eloise, MI McCoy's parents escaped Kentucky slavery to Canada, but moved to the North. They sacrificed to school their twelve children, including mechanics for fifteen-year-old McCoy in Scotland. This opportunity was not available for northern blacks, who faced rampant job discrimination after the Civil War. Unable to find machinist work when he returned, McCoy became a fireman and oilman for the Michigan Central Railroad. He routinely shoveled coal into his train's engine and oiled engine parts during frequent stops. Oiling would prevent combustible friction. Thus he invented and patented a “lubricating cup” for locomotives in 1872. The cup facilitated “the continuous flow of oil on the gears ... thereby do [ing] away with the necessity of shutting down the engine,” he explained. McCoy's brand won a loyal following. Others tried to reinvent his lubrication device, but the McCoy Graphite Lubricator captured the market and customers always asked “Is this the real McCoy?” Their use of the popular expression reflected a product of high quality. Opening his own shop, McCoy created, obtained patents on, and sold almost six dozen mechanical devices and products, notably an automatic lawn sprinkler and an ironing board. He was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2001).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.117 | 0.037 |
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".