Commercially Successful Books for Place-Based Geology: Roadside Geology Covers the US
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.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.289 | 0.222 |
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".