Prairie Birds: Fragile Splendor in the Great Plains, by Paul A. Johnsgard [Review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Critical Study of the Species in its Wild State (University of Toronto Press, 1951)?"The answer is: Quite a lot.Isenberg deals more extensively with the socio-cultural aspects, especially recent studies in social, cultural, labour, and gender history.As he says, "Insights from those fields suggest far greater complexities in the relationships of Indians and Euroamericans to the bison than historians formerly supposed."Unfortunately, Isenberg's summations are almost exclusively restricted to affairs south of the 49th parallel.He tells nothing about the more symbiotic relations between Indians and fur traders in Canada, and makes no mention of the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway.His sweeping generalization that "The fur trade on the western plains emerged from the spread of horses" would be less true for western Canada, where the appearance of guns and steel traps was perhaps more important than the advent of the horse, and furs were more readily transported by canoe.Isenberg believes that ecological and economic changes were inseparable on the plains in the 18th century."Horses and smallpox -an Old World animal and an Old World disease -destroyed the dominance of the Missouri River villagers and levered the nomads to power in the grasslands.... The bison liberated and empowered the plains nomads....[its] flesh served as food, its skin as clothing and lodging, its sinew as thread, its horns and bones as tools, even dried bison manure served as fuel."The annual harvest was six or seven bison per person per year.But, by selling their furs to the Euroamerican market, the aboriginals "bound their fate to the Euroamerican economic and ecologic context."Nevertheless, the ethic of communal cooperation, necessitated by the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".