The Public Problem of PPE Waste and Being Prepared
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction I click on the local online news, and the annoying advertisement popup is about toilet paper. Before, I would have muted the sound, but now I watch the advertisement. Charmin, the advertiser, shows a family of bears sitting together watching television. The voiceover claims that Charmin is working hard to ensure that we all have enough toilet paper to make it through the COVID-19 pandemic. And I find myself asking: do I have enough toilet paper? Before the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental tipping points, global climate change, political instability, dwindling primary resources, the everwidening gap between wealthy and poor, mass migration and exponential capitalist growth – among other critical realities – were enough to furnish myriad imagined apocalyptic futures. Now that we are experiencing successive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, an apocalyptic future has mainstreamed to millions of people whose economic and political privilege has hitherto cocooned us from the lived experiences of environmental collapse. And while the international COVID-19 response by-line might be ‘We’re all in this together’, our daily news feed suggests otherwise. As the World Health Organization urges a coordinated global effort to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 and the IPCC and other supragovernmental bodies remain focused on developing systems of resilience and adaptation for populations vulnerable to the effects of climate change, a disparate group of people self-defined as ‘preppers’ have already been mobilizing themselves and their loved ones for myriad imagined apocalyptic scenarios. Once represented by social media as individuals on the margins of mainstream society if not mental stability, the COVID-19 pandemic is positioning prepping – if not preppers themselves – as a rational and, indeed, responsible answer to the pandemic. Preppers distinguish themselves from ‘hoarders’ based on their purposeful stockpiling of things anticipated to be vital to surviving short-or long-term disaster. Whereas hoarding is characterized by the volume of disorganized clutter of a jumble of things with no direct survival value, preppers systematically purchase and organize things for survival under anticipated imminent and/or future conditions of extreme societal collapse. But nor are preppers part of a growing ‘preventer’ identity and movement: preppers aim to protect themselves and their loved ones after disaster strikes; preventers focus their actions on precluding disaster from taking place.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.009 |
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".