Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the importance of Marconi as a precursor to our information age, a contention well argued in this book, it is surprising how little has been written about his legacy over the past half century. This neglect is more than offset by Marc Raboy’s exhaustive and detailed study which effectively combines biographical narrative with communication history. Two fortuitous events in Marconi’s life might have led to a somewhat different account—a narrow escape and a timely death. As daughter Degna notes in her memoir, the family was supposed to sail on the Titanic in 1912. As departure time neared Marconi opted for the Lusitania—a faster ship—to engage in some corporate raiding (of United Wireless) in New York; and when baby Guilio came down with a fever the rest of the family were spared the fateful voyage and sadly waved to the ship as it passed their summer home near Southampton.1 Had Marconi opted to travel on the doomed liner he probably would have perished, but his legacy to that point would have still been enormous and thus comprises approximately half the book. Had he survived, when several self-sacrificing notables did not, a taint might have clouded the rest of his career. A more positive connection to the ship emerged in the aftermath of the sinking. His wireless drew wide attention, He was deemed a hero, the apparatus having facilitated the rescue of 700 of the 2,200 on board—a view represented in a widely circulated news cartoon. Improved regulation might have yielded a better use of the medium and the book provides coverage of later debates and legislation. This was perhaps the defining public moment of Marconi’s career, although Raboy opts for the first transatlantic message in 1901.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.006 |
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".