“Destroying Generation after Generationâ€: Outbreaks of Smallpox in the Cuchumatán Highlands of Guatemala (1780-1810)
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 advent of Covid-19, unforeseen though it was, and destructive though it remains, affords timely opportunity to reflect on the occurrence of past pandemics and their impact on humankind. Devastating as the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe is known to be, loss-of-life caused too, in the wake of World War I, by the Spanish Flu, both pandemics pale when compared to the mortality of Native Americans following the Columbus landfall. Guatemala and its Indigenous Maya peoples, especially those of the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, are discussed as a case in point. Demographic collapse here, begun in the 1520s, continued well into the seventeenth century, after which attrition abated and recovery set in – slowly, and not without reversals, as scrutiny of the ravages wrought by the re-occurrence of smallpox between 1780 and 1810 vividly attests. As with the success of vaccines made to combat the scourge of Covid-19, so also did Edward Jenner’s experiments with inoculation prove beneficial, even when they reached and were administered in one of Guatemala’s most isolated and intractable parts. Thereafter, Indigenous numbers stabilized and began to grow, guaranteeing Maya survival.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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