Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the second Industrial Revolution got underway in the latter half of the nineteenth century, demand for copper soared. Malleable, durable and resistant to corrosion, the red metal formed a key component in two technological advances that defined the era: telecommunications and electricity. The first transatlantic cable, with seven thick copper wires at its core, was laid in 1866, paving the way for the next communications revolution. Thomas Edison similarly exploited copper's conductive properties in his electrical lamps. Thus, the global demand for copper increased exponentially as these industries expanded. Meanwhile, the technological advances of the 1830s meant that copper ore, for the first time in its long history, no longer had to be smelted close to the extraction site, leaving its production ripe for consolidation and globalization. Born with a copper spoon explores these phenomena, focusing on how the rise in demand for this commodity shaped and reshaped the places where it was produced, traded and consumed over a 150-year period. The title refers to Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda's remark that his compatriots were born with a copper spoon in their mouths, underlining its vital role both in Zambia and in many other places defined by the metal. Similarly, poet Pablo Neruda underscored the metal's centrality in Chile in his 1954 Ode to Copper. Neruda called for the industry to be wrested from American control for the benefit of the people. The book studies the truly global nature of copper in granular terms, with 14 chapters taking readers on a journey across Australia, Belgium, Chile, Cuba, Iran, Japan, the region known as the Central African Copper Belt, Papua New Guinea, the western United States and the trading floors of Victorian London. Each location acts as a case-study on the effects of the metal's globalization, whether on markets, communities or national and international policies. The story begins in the Welsh city of Swansea, as it became the centre of global copper production, and then gave way to the US as the economic hub. As the book moves into the twentieth century, production increasingly shifts to the global South.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.002 |
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".