Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1777, the regulating officer for Bristol, Captain William Hamilton, the man responsible for recruiting seafaring men into the navy, ran into a spot of trouble. His lieutenant had impressed a couple of pilots for assisting men to escape the clutches of the press gangs, and the whole river came to a standstill. As Hamilton explained to their lordships at the Admiralty, the pilots and their assistants were responsible for the navigation of all inward and outward boats to Bristol, and he had no choice but to release the men his lieutenant had detained. The pilots, who all lived at Crockerne Pill, a village some five miles from Bristol and two miles from the mouth of the river on the Somersetshire side of the Avon, were ‘absolutely necessary to the trade of this City & have always been considered as such’, he remarked.1 The master of the Society of Merchant Venturers had applied for their discharge and Hamilton had conceded. What else could he do but continue to garner good relations with the merchant elite whose co-operation was always important to the manning of the British navy. Hamilton was not the only regulating officer to be confronted with this dilemma. In March 1742, the lieutenant of a naval tender impressed another pilot, one James Rumney. He lived in Pill with his wife and four children, and predictably his fellow pilots swung into action, threatening to close the port in protest to his detention. As the town clerk reminded the Admiralty, it was quite irregular to impress pilots on duty. ‘If such Grievances are overlookt, or winkt at’, he continued, the merchants’ ‘Shipps must be kept riding at their anchors, which they shall rather choose than to hazard them loaden down our Channel without the assistance of these so usefull and necessary Conductors.’ Huge tides, blustery winds, treacherous rocks, and shifting quicksand meant that pilots were essential to the commerce of Bristol. John Stuckey remarked that the tides to Bristol ran ‘at a prodigious rate’ with a range of nearly 6 fathoms or 36 feet. Without an experienced pilot and his hobblers, ships could easily be beached on the serpentine Avon, bringing traffic to a standstill. The approach to the Avon estuary was equally treacherous.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.118 | 0.016 |
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".