Media coverage of mercury contamination in the Canadian Arctic
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mercury contamination in the Canadian Arctic is a significant concern. Some traditional food sources are contaminated by mercury and pose a health risk to local residents. Media can affect public awareness and opinions of environmental health risks. Therefore, it is important to understand how the risks associated with contaminants are communicated through the media. To better understand how the issue of mercury contamination in the Arctic has been presented in the media, a content analysis was conducted across 14 newspapers in the Canadian North and South. We examined how news sources presented the health risks of mercury in the Arctic, how mercury was defined, if pathways for self-efficacy (i.e., how a person can reduce his or her exposure to a hazard) were provided and who was quoted as an information source. Results demonstrate that few Indigenous people were cited as information sources, articles often failed to describe mercury to the reader and many did not provide direction to support self-efficacy. This study provides insight into how newspapers have communicated about mercury in the Canadian Arctic and suggests specific ways that this communication can be improved.
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.
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 | 0.006 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it