Retail Signage During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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
Early in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact countries across the world. Within weeks, people’s normal social behavior had to be changed in order to stop the spread of the disease. In Canada, where this study takes place, governments and public health departments were the primary and trusted information sources. Photographs of retail signs were taken by the author in one neighborhood in a major Canadian city in March and April. Along with descriptive information, the author speculates on the meaning conveyed by the printer-paper signs, beyond their traditional role of supporting wayfinding. Paper’s relative fragility may have simultaneously reflected the uncertainty that people felt in the early days of the pandemic, while its familiar and timeless presence may have provided a sense of emotional security and direction. Marking a return to “business as usual”, stores replaced many, but not all of the informal signs with professionally produced and branded signs suggesting that the early “blind panic” had been replaced by a form of “steady state”. One could say that retailers demonstrated corporate social responsibility through their efforts in creating and posting the signs to create awareness of, educate, and reinforce the new and changing social distancing behaviors.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.003 | 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