Review of <i>Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World'sLongest Undefended Border across the WesternPlains</i> By Tony Rees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By 1872 Britain, the United States, and the Dominion of Canada had many reasons to map officially the international boundary along the 49th parallel, a line that Native Americans would come to associate with "medicine" for its power to halt the pursuit of law. Britain and the U.S. both desired to resolve lingering issues as Canada embraced independence. {The northern survey party was officially the British North American Boundary Commission.} While the U.S. Northern Boundary Commission advanced the Northern Pacific Railroad, Canada gathered information to plan and build a transcontinental railroad. With the line they drew astronomically, these surveyors, according to Tony Rees, would help "draw the long course of empire in North America to a close." Rees narrates the work of the dual independent boundary commissions season by season through the exploits of their surveyors. Using massive zenith telescopes, star catalogs, compasses, and chronometers, the two commissions leapfrogged one another to establish astronomical stations for boundary calculations every twenty miles. The Plains, Rees concludes, " ... was {and still can be} a place where no report could be dismissed as just a tall tale." Dressed in sealskin, Hudson's Bay coats and blankets, buffalo robes, Native-made snowshoes and moccasins, using oxen and dogs, the men lived through _200 to _400 below zero Fahrenheit temperatures and bouts of snowblindness. One group survived by "beating each other with sticks" to free their legs, which had been "instantly encased in a thick coating of ice" after they fell into a creek. The region also served up sweeping prairie fires, swarms of mosquitoes, locusts, black flies, killing horseflies, and wild wind, rain, and dust, as well as "large numbers of sandhill cranes."
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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 | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
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".