Sharing the hero's journey: blog posts from the Appalachian Trail.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter focuses on a hiking choice that, like the hero's journey, embraces difficulty. The researchers studied online blogs posted by thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail (the AT). The term thru-hike describes a typically long-distance hike that traverses an acknowledged 'trail' from end-to-end. Thru-hiking the 2190 mile (3525 km) AT requires months of planning and effort and thousands of dollars to pay for related expenses. More than that, participants expect to undergo extensive physical and emotional hardship. The trail is challenging, often dangerous and fraught with uncertainty. It demands much of its participants, yet hikers are both willing and even eager to undertake those demands. Over 2000 hikers attempt a thru-hike on the AT annually (Littlefield and Siudzinski, 2012).
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".