Commercially Successful Books for Place-Based Geology: Roadside Geology Covers the US
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
The Roadside Geology series from Mountain Press Publishing (MPP) has profoundly improved access to geology for travelers in North America. Over one million copies have connected places to Earth science concepts for readers, many of whom have little or no formal background in geology. The books, widely available in parks, museums, and on the shelves of both independent and large chain booksellers, now cover 38 US states and part of Canada. The format is characterized by concise introductions to concepts, end-to-end road guides for major highways within each geologic region, and road guide geologic maps with arrows marking outstanding features. All books since 2010 are in full color, which enhances both their visual appeal and the usefulness of the road guide maps. The eight-year process to prepare Roadside Geology of Georgia typifies the effort that goes into each volume in the series. Its authors learned to give readers just enough information to understand what is most interesting about a feature, rather than a systematic textbook. MPP staff helped improve conciseness, as well as clarity for non-geologists. The local expertise of six geologist reviewers helped to insure accuracy.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it