On the Adhesion of Sediment to Footwear and the Implications for Geoconservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fossils at the Mistaken Point UNESCO World Heritage Site represent evidence of the oldest known, large, architecturally complex, life on Earth and are protected by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador as part of an Ecological Reserve. Following concerns that foot traffic across the fossil surfaces was having a deleterious effect on the geoheritage, visitors were made to wear quilted ‘Bama Sokkets’ starting in 2009—though the efficacy of this management technique has never been tested. Previous studies in the materials sciences have revealed that footwear erosion of rock surfaces is primarily caused by the action of sediment between the foot and the surface; however, these findings have not before been applied to geoconservation research. In this study, we examine the adhesion of sediment to several footwear types. Our experiments reveal that under wet conditions, the ‘Bama Sokkets’ perform poorly in repelling sediment, and as such their use as a geoconservation management tool is discouraged. This study recommends the use of hydrophobic footwear for walking on geoheritage rock surfaces and has led to policy change at the Mistaken Point UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".