Bibliographic record
Abstract
The inevitability of technological progress is one of the most widely-held beliefs of our era but there is one very important field in which technological progress appears not only to have stagnated but reversed. Examining the technical and commercial reality of modern aviation, there are three objective markers of slowdown. First, airplanes operational today can no longer reach the speed and altitude records set four decades ago. Second, commercial flight times have not only failed to get shorter, they actually take longer than they did in the past. Third, forty years after its introduction, supersonic flight is no longer available for civilians, neither in commercial nor private jets. While flight today is safer, cheaper, and more widespread than in the past, it has become slower, and jet makers are strangely not even interested in exploring ways of making it faster. The paper concludes with a discussion of the cultural, political, economic, and institutional reasons behind this slowdown. The receding state of the art in aviation acts as both an object lesson and a warning for the state of economic dynamism overall.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".