Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: So You Want to Be an Explorer? Elizabeth Bush St. George, Judith So You Want to Be an Explorer?; illus. by David Small. Philomel, 2005 [56p] ISBN 0-399-23868-9$16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 3-5 If President (BCCB 7/00) isn't exciting enough, and Inventor (BCCB 10/02) is too sedentary, St. George and Small offer readers a third career option in their now familiar series: consider the life of an explorer. There are explorers who "tackle a quest with gusto," such as Alexander the Great and Thor Heyerdahl; there are risk takers, such as mountain climber Barbara Washburn and test pilot Chuck Yeager. Some focus on firsts: circumnavigating the globe by spacecraft (Yuri Gagarin) or on foot (David Kunst—but how he crossed the oceans is left a mystery). Others find fame in failure: Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic near-misses, and Amelia Earhart's mid-flight disappearance. St. George encourages readers to think broadly about what constitutes exploration, including not only the big names in earth, sea, and space travel, but also Francis Collins and Craig Venter, "who decoded the human DNA 'letters' in 2000." A collection like this really needs the background knowledge of Presidents to work most effectively; without it, the result is ultimately an enticing [End Page 115] but disjointed collection of underexplained trivia. Information flies by at warp speed, and claims that aren't adequately nuanced will raise some questions: was the Kon-Tiki voyage really "proof positive" that "Westerns could have sailed from Peru to Polynesia thousands of years ago? How did the northerly Inuit manage to help Roald Amundsen on his trip to the South Pole? Nonetheless, St. George and Small have their audience pegged—kids thirsty for lightning-fast factoids accompanied by high energy, comical caricatures that refuse to treat must-know personages with the textbook reverence they generally enjoy. Report writers can cull the glossary for topic tips if they must, but expect this to find its real berth with the casual page-thumbers. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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.
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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.017 |
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".