Branding the Earth: Selling Earth system science in the United States, 1983-1988
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
As part of its efforts to find new relevance in the early 1980s, NASA formed the Earth System Sciences Committee (ESSC) to develop a large-scale Earth science research program that would use satellites and computer modeling to study the planet as an integrated system with interconnections between the land, air, water, and biota. Called Earth system science (ESS), the project was conceived on the scale of the U.S. moon missions. Like the Apollo program, it would need enormous government funding to implement. Yet, the project was proposed just as government science funding was contracting. Conscious of the changing political economy of science, the ESSC attempted to build scientific, political, and public support for its project by using promotional techniques akin to the branding efforts more commonly identified in corporate marketing that were themselves changing in scope and importance in the 1980s. These techniques formed part of the ESSC's broader management strategy to promote ESS. The ESS brand was developed around the ideals of an interconnected 'Earth system', the significance of interdisciplinary research, and environmental concern. Though ESS failed to gain widespread traction, an unintended consequence of this branding was the communication and entrenchment of the concept of the 'Earth system'. Today, this concept provides crucial theoretical scaffolding that unifies interdisciplinary Earth science research, including climate change science.
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Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | high |
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 | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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