Before the planetary thaw: Sensing permafrost infrastructure at the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mackenzie Valley Pipelines were two competing natural gas pipelines proposed in the early 1970s that faced unprecedented scrutiny after then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for an inquiry into its impacts at the behest of the Dene, Inuit and Métis whose ways of life would be impacted by these lines, appointing Justice Thomas Berger to be its commissioner. After holding formal hearings with stakeholders and a series of hearings in the primarily Indigenous communities along the proposed path of the pipelines, which made the Inquiry take about twice as long as normal, Berger recommended a ten-year moratorium on construction to resolve outstanding Indigenous land claims and devise a new route to avoid disrupting the annual migration of a caribou herd numbering in the 100,000s. Around fifty years later, the pipeline has not been built. This short article turns to the senses and sensing of permafrost communicated at the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, speculating on what figuring permafrost as infrastructure and media might offer us today as we enter an age of planetary thawing.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".