The impact of BBC Blue Planet II on awareness of and attitude to plastic pollution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research study addresses the issue of environmental pollution caused by plastic waste, which has had extensive negative impact on the ecological systems and human life worldwide. Recent studies have found microplastics in every single aquatic species in the UK, reflecting the extent of harm caused to the biological species, natural environment and human health.Conservationists should promote pro-environmental behaviour, such as reducing plastic pollution by reducing plastic consumption and disposal. Hence, across the globe, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the media have been active in preventing and mitigating the impact of plastic pollution. Mass media, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), have been playing a major role in informing the public and creating awareness. In 2017, the BBC Natural History Unit broadcast the BBC Blue Planet II Series, which had involved 39 countries and 125 marine expeditions. The Series, in part, explores the impact of plastic pollution on marine life. According to some experts, the BBC natural history documentary, Blue Planet II, was watched by millions across the globe, leading to changes in public attitude & awareness of plastic pollution. This dissertation assesses the impact of the BBC Blue Planet II series on public awareness of plastic pollution in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, and contains a comprehensive review of the open literature.The impact of Blue Planet II on plastic pollution was assessed via analysis of search volumes using Google Trends. Whilst attitudes to plastic pollutions was investigated via textual analysis of online comments within plastics related articles in the to The Guardian and The Times online newspaper. The quantitative and qualitative data are presented in graphical forms in this research study, and show that an increase in public awareness of plastic pollution did corelate with airing of the BBC Blue Planet II series. However, using the mentioned methods the research we were not able to find evidence for a causal link between the BBC Blue Planet II series and an increase in public awareness of plastic pollution.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".