Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi. An Epic American Adventure by John S. Sledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord "Empire of the Beaver: Sir George Simpson and The Hudson's Bay Company."A merger of the North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company in 1821 created the vehicle with which the Scottish Simpson competed (until his death in 1860) with American interests for the fur trade and sovereignty of a continent from Hudson Bay to the Pacific.Though its territory became part of the Dominion of Canada in 1870, its influence endured.The Company's Fort Garry became Winnipeg, Manitoba, Fort Edmonton became Edmonton, Alberta, and Fort Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia.The Canadian-American border reflects the Hudson Bay Company's shadow.The final Merchant King is Cecil John Rhodes of the British South Africa Company.From his arrival in southern Africa in 1879, Rhodes consolidated diamond and gold mines, encouraged settlements and served as prime minister of Cape Province.His mineral enterprises fuel and racial policies plague a subcontinent to this day.His Rhodes Scholarships remain a prestigious award and supporter of academic excellence.Bown's text captures and holds the reader's attention.Most chapters commence with a quote from their principal personalities.An index facilitates reference and the bibliography encourages further study.Pictures add faces and scenes to the text and the maps and "Timeline For The Age Of Heroic Commerce" are valuable supplements.I find Merchant Kings to be a very interesting work.It teaches us that for three centuries, 1600-1900, policy and development was often led, not by politicians and generals, but by businessmen who assumed many of the powers normally associated with governments.The "Kings" featured were flawed men of accomplishment.Industries and nations are built on foundations they laid.Some of their means are no longer acceptable, but, as Bown posits, were even controversial in their own days and not necessarily inevitable.This is an excellent read for anyone interested in history of commercial and colonial development or pondering how so much of our world came to be.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.010 |
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".