Wildlife, Landscapes, and Geology: An Alberta and Saskatchewan Touring Guide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dale Leckie, after a notable career with the Geological Survey of Canada and then with Nexen Energy in Calgary as chief geologist, has turned his sights to popularizing geology in the prairie provinces.His third book on the natural history of the region is a masterpiece, full of fascinating scientific information and geographical detail for the traveller, authoritatively explained and beautifully illustrated.The book is replete with route and location maps, landscape paintings, diagrams, animal and landscape photographs, and even a few graphs for good measure.The introduction explains the various ecozones represented, giving a series of maps showing north-south highways with key locales.The next sections deal with wildlife and postglacial geomorphology-geology, broadly speaking-starting with the mountains and ending with the rivers that cross the prairies.Each of these sections is colour-coded along the top of the pages.He picks a variety of animals, such as the snow goose, hoary marmot, hognose snake, harlequin duck, lake sturgeon, golden eagle and Ord's kangaroo rat, and describes how the post-glacial landscape has influenced their biology and distribution.The Banff Springs snail is one of two invertebrates to make an appearance.The book describes such features as sand dunes, kettle lakes, and ice-thrust ridges.Glacial erratics come in for a mention, and it is noted that large ones were favoured by bison to scrape their rough hides during hot weather.Along the way the book describes how the climate
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.018 |
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".