Review of <i> Trails and Trials: Markets and Land Use in the Alberta Beef Cattle Industry, 1881-1948</i> By Max Foran
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Max Foran's Trails and Trials does a superb job of filling a conspicuous gap in Alberta's agricultural history. By covering the period 1881-1948, the book extends the standard accounts of Alberta's ranching history well into the twentieth century. And it expands on traditional ranch history themes with its clear and consistent focus on the importance of cattle exports in relation to Canada's small domestic market and on the importance of markets in understanding land use change. Foran periodizes and organizes his story clearly. Each chapter follows a similar structure with sections and subsections describing major market and policy developments and their land use implications, making the book easy to use as a research source and keeping the reader attentive to key themes. The book's thoroughgoing documentation shows Foran's mastery of Alberta's historical record and will prove useful for future Great Plains historians.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".