Bibliographic record
Abstract
The location of cities is linked to access to trade, but security also matters, in particular for capitals. Here we document this phenomenon, and explore its implications, in the context of Europe’s Great Power era. First we show that Great Power battles tend to occur in shortest-distance corridors between belligerent powers’ capitals, except where those corridors are intercepted by seas, mountains, and marshes. Then we show that capitals locate closer to each other when they have more of these types of geography between them. Finally, we show that city pairs are less likely to belong to the same state if they have more of this geography between them, allowing us to use geography to predict the territorial size and shape of Europe’s Great Powers. In sum, our results suggest that terrain which slows down military incursions makes capitals safer, allowing them to locate closer to each other; given all capitals’ locations, the surrounding geography then shapes the associated state territories.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
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".