Midyear Report: America Takes the Train and Railroads are Enjoying the Ride
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the rest of the economy plummets, this article reports that times are good for the railroads. Stock performance for Class 1s has reached all-time highs, and railroads have continued to raise their rates over the past year due to the commodity boom. And while the trucking industry has been hit hard by fuel costs, rising fuel prices have had less impact on railroads than other forms of transportation. One railroad executive is quoted as saying that despite a prolonged business downturn, railroads have continued to handle high volumes and are posting better financial results year after year. Passenger rail travel has gone up across the board—intercity, commuter, rapid transit, light rail--and around the nation, as well. Amtrak ridership is up nearly 12 percent, and many trains are fully booked. At the same time, the Federal Highway Administration reports vehicle miles on the nation’s roads dropped by 2.3 percent in the first quarter of the year. Included in the Midyear Report is an article in which the author suggests that a modal shift is underway. Rising fuel costs are leading to higher fuel surcharges charges, and there is growing evidence that shippers are switching to intermodal service. In another article in the Midyear Report, the author contends that a modern passenger rail system will only come about as a result of a transportation-related national crisis. The author relates that various milestones in the U.S. transportation infrastructure were achieved because of transportation crises. Examples, such as the formation of the Union Pacific Railroad, the building and expansion of commercial airports, the formation of the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Interstate Highway System, are given to support the author's thesis. Additional articles included look at the railroad and trucking industries' battles over truck size and weight legislation, and the upcoming November 2008 election and the impact it will have on the railroad industry.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.064 | 0.035 |
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".