The origin of feces: what excrement tells us about evolution, ecology, and a sustainable society / David Waltner-Toews, ECW Press, £12.99
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One is drawn immediately to this book by its wonderfully whimsical title – a play on Darwin's famous paper – and the merriment does not end at the front cover. With chapters entitled Turds of Endearment and Know Sh*t: A Way Forward, there are plenty of puns, jokes and anecdotes, but the underlying message of how management of natural waste can provide a solution to environmental challenges is a serious one. Waltner-Toews, a Canadian conservationist and epidemiologist, outlines how in nature excrement is a source of food and energy and is important in the recycling of nutrients. This holistic view of poo is at odds with its perception in today's ultra-sanitised developed societies, where it is seen as something unpleasant and which disposal of is, er, the end point.It is argued that while substandard sanitation leads to fouling of waterways and public health concerns, faeces should be embraced on an industrial scale as a ready made source of energy. Using biodigester technology, both human and animal sewage can be digested anaerobically to make nitrogen-rich fertiliser and to produce methane to generate electricity and heat. Importantly, this would provide a simple, cost-effective solution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from farming waste. The electricity and fertiliser can be sold for profit and the heat generated reused on the farm to save money. A case of "where's there's muck, there's brass". This book is recommended reading for all those with an environmental conscience – not just the organic composters among us.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.007 |
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".