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The crackle that made history

2002· book-chapter· en· W4388389466 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Walter Gratzer

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Medicine
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEngineeringNewspaperTelecommunicationsHistoryMedia studiesSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract In January of 1891 Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, opined in a newspaper interview that ‘we have done as much with wireless telegraphy as is likely to be done’. Ten years later, on a windswept eminence in Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi clasped a telephone receiver to his ear and heard above the crackle of static a signal cast into the void at Poldhu in Cornwall 1,800 miles away. Preece had asserted—and many experts agreed with him— that ‘bridging the Atlantic’ was a pipedream, for ‘the curvature of the earth will send the waves out into space’. Preece, it must be said, seems to have enjoyed a remarkable record where prediction was concerned. When Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his first telephone Preece gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons. His confident evaluation was: ‘Americans have need of this invention, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.’ (Americans, by contrast, were on the whole cautiously optimistic. ‘One day’, said the mayor of Chicago after witnessing a demonstration of the instrument, ‘there will be one in every city.’ A Senator, on the other hand, when told that Maine would soon be able to speak to Texas, riposted, ‘What should Maine have to say to Texas?’)

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.044
Threshold uncertainty score0.146

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.013
Scholarly communication0.0080.010
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0030.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0440.007

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.

Opus teacher head0.096
GPT teacher head0.202
Teacher spread0.106 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2002
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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