When the Mill Goes Quiet: Maine Paper Industry 1990-2016
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper industry has been a mainstay of Maine’s economy for over a century. Paper mills in all corners of Maine employed numerous workers, purchased wood and supplies locally, and contributed significantly to the state’s industrial base. This conferred not only local recognition but political influence in Augusta. All concerned viewed the paper industry, based on Maine’s extensive forests, proximity to large Northeastern paper markets, abundant hydropower, and a trained workforce, to sustain these communities for another century. By 1990, however, a series of slowly shifting forces began to accelerate, threatening the industry’s cost competitiveness. Larger mi ls based on low-cost fiber appeared globally. At a dizzying pace, electronic communications replaced traditional print media, the principal market for most Maine mills. One after another, leading national companies cut back or closed mi ls, sold land, and finally sold surviving mills to investment groups. The quarter century after 1990 became a challenging time that left a number of former mill towns with lost tax bases, high unemployment, and uncertain futures. The author is a semi-retired forestry consultant living in Wayne, Maine. He attended college at Michigan State and University of Arizona and earned his doctorate at Yale. Following brief stints at the US Forest Service and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, he came to Maine to serve in the Department of Conservation and the State Planning Office. Since 1987, he has been a consultant to wood products and paper companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Northeast’s Changing Forests, published by the Harvard University Forest
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.006 |
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".