National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World, by P. A. Folkens et al. [Review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is another milestone publication and a wonderful and handy guide book which is full of details about the fascinating world of sea mammals.It was created by a high-caliber team of five North American authors with world-wide experience.Forget about "World-Birding"; instead, this book presents the solid foundation for "World-Whale-Watching": the world's sea mammals ("whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea lions, manatees, Marine and Sea Otters, and the Polar Bear'') all in one solid book.The user will agree that this "field guide" turns easily into a fascinating read.A true highlight of this book are its 320 splendid drawings by Pieter Folkens; but the gorgeous 418 photographs, many from field research world-wide, deserve major recognition as well.Although most whale watchers will not see animals "underwater", the stunning illustrations cover sea mammals in and out of the water, and show in detail the special features of sea mammals.A short chapter about Marine Mammal morphology explains all body features of a "sea mammal".The authors introduce topics like "What is a Marine Mammal", "Behaviour", "Reproduction", "Food and Foraging", "Status and Conservation," and "Watching Marine Mammals" (e.g., Equipment, Etiquette, and Stranded Marine Mammals).As in other field guides, such topics are "kept on the surface'.I find the balance between information and usability in the field is well achieved.The 120 species accounts cover much ground.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.061 | 0.051 |
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".