Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In foreign campaigns and domestic service, British officers and soldiers relied on local children in several significant ways. They provided a cultural bridge. Though civilian children could become weapons in quartering disputes, they could also help their parents, neighbours, and relatives accept the army’s presence in their community. Servicemen associated foreign children with those of their acquaintance back home, finding more common ground with local adults through shared parenting practices and affection for youngsters. Children’s linguistic adaptability also made them ideal servants. Their unthreatening appearance and tendency to roam about the countryside allowed them to serve the military in other roles as well: as messengers, guides, and informers on deserters. Within the regiment, rank-and-file and junior-officer fathers might receive preferment through their offspring, if the latter’s appearance and behaviour endeared them to a senior officer. Equally, rankers with a knack for quieting officers’ babies and entertaining their older children were in high demand. Their skill at child-minding might make them more valuable to their commanding officer than their skill at arms. Youngsters were conduits for hostility as well, such as when junior officers beat a superior’s boy servant. Despite the risks, young people were often rewarded as servants, guides, and hawkers to British troops. They did not always serve army interests, however; children might identify more with its enemies or have goals that conflicted with those of the campaign.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.227 | 0.055 |
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".