Nature's Past Episode 020: The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Winnipeg
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Toward the end of the Great War, Canadians were struck by the most devastating influenza epidemic in the young country’s history. More than 50,000 Canadians succumbed to this virulent strain of influenza that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919. Nearly as many Canadians died from this disease as those who were killed in combat overseas during the First World War. While the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 has received recent scholarly attention outside of Canada, Canadian historians have only begun to examine the social consequences of this devastating event. \n \nThe social history of disease and environmental history intersect because both sub-disciplines take into consideration the role of non-human actors in the past. The influenza virus that spread throughout Canada in 1918 and 1919 placed biological and material limits on human agency during this critical period in Canadian history. While the course of the epidemic was shaped by social and political factors, the disease itself ultimately came to have a significant social impact on Canadians. \n \nTo learn more about the impact of this epidemic in Canada, we speak with Esyllt Jones about her book Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.003 |
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".