The Magnetism of Antarctica: The Ross Expedition 1839–1843, by John Knight
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From today's perspective, Sir John Franklin seems to tower above his fellow nineteenth-century polar explorers, mainly because of his disastrous 1845 Arctic expedition and the ensuing idealization of a lost British hero.Yet although Franklin was very well known to his contemporaries before 1845, Sir Edward Parry and Sir James Clark Ross were by far the most acclaimed polar figures.Both had the advantage over Franklin of being exceptionally handsome-Ross, indeed, was said to be the best-looking officer in the entire Royal Navy-but their celebrity rested on more solid foundations.Parry made his name in 1819 -20 with the first voyage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, sailing from Baffin Bay as far as Melville Island.Ross served in the Arctic four times under Parry and under his own uncle, John Ross.During the latter's 1829 -33 expedition, the younger Ross was the first European to reach the North Magnetic Pole, which was then located on the Boothia Peninsula.He went on to lead an extremely successful Antarctic expedition, breaking through the pack ice of what is now called the Ross Sea into the unknown and forging onward to a coast that he named Victoria Land.As a result, Ross seemed to be the best possible commander for a new attempt to find the Northwest Passage.However, he had recently been married and his health had suffered as a result of his Antarctic work.He decided to leave the way open for Franklin.Ross eventually led one of the early Franklin searches, but the disappointing results evoked considerable public criticism.His status was on the wane even during his own lifetime, and although Ross is certainly not forgotten by polar historians, his Antarctic voyage has never received as much attention as many other, far less successful ventures.In The Magnetism of Antarctica, John Knight sets out to redress this neglect.His approach to the task is decidedly old-school.In Knight's view, the main fact about the 1839 -43 Ross expedition is that it carried out its geographical and scientific programmes with skill and efficiency.Therefore, it deserves to be not only remembered, but celebrated.He has no interest in questioning or analyzing the geopolitical aims that underlay British interest in the polar regions.Instead, Knight offers a straightforward, readable narrative account of the Ross expedition's origins and progress, supplemented by detailed biographical information on the participants from all ranks, not just the officers and scientists.The biographical section, which occupies a significant part of the book, is obviously the result of very extensive archival and online searching.It represents a real contribution to polar scholarship.Very regrettably, however, the bibliography is mainly limited to published sources, with just a vague reference to naval records at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.There are only a
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".