Past Forward: The First Land-Mine Detector that Actually Worked
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The invention of an effective land-mine detector came about after a tragedy on the beaches of Dundee, Scotland. In 1940, the British Army, fearing a German invasion, buried thousands of land mines along the coast. But it didn't notify its allies. Soldiers from the Polish 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade on a routine patrol of the beach were killed or injured when the land mines exploded. After the tragedy, a Polish electrical engineer named Józef Stanislaw Kosacki developed a portable mine detector that performed flawlessly in tests. It weighed less than 14 kilograms and operated much like the metal detectors used by beachcombers today. The devices quickly went into production and were shipped first to Egypt, where the Germans had created a vast minefield, called the Devil's Gardens, covering over 2,900 square kilometers. Kosacki's detector was able to clear mines twice as fast as previous methods. It's estimated to have saved thousands of lives by the end of the war. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States continued to use versions of it until 1991.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it