Breathe Deep, Boys: Voices of the McIntyre Powder Project Miners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Northern Ontario gold and uranium miners represent the largest cohort of industrial laborers who were historically exposed to daily nonconsensual industrial medical treatments involving the inhalation of finely ground aluminum dust known as McIntyre Powder. The daughter of one of those miners founded the McIntyre Powder Project in 2015 to document health issues in exposed miners, in an effort to determine whether her father's Parkinson's was related to aluminum inhalation. In response, 553 miners registered with the McIntyre Powder Project between 2015 and 2021 either directly or by their next-of-kin. This paper compiles their lived experiences of being subjected to McIntyre Powder, which contrasts starkly with the official narrative of the northern Ontario mining industry, which licensed its use globally. Additionally, this paper illuminates concerning industrial practices that emerged from the miners' disclosures, involving incentivized claims suppression, and raising serious questions about the effectiveness of medical screening and regulatory enforcement.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".