IRRATIONAL OPTIMISM IN A DECLINING INDUSTRY:
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sir Adam Beck, best known for his advocacy of publicly owned electric utilities, in 1920 sought to build a network of electric interurban railways, essentially long-distance trolleys, in southern Ontario. Beck’s proposal illustrates the phenomenon of irrationally optimistic responses to decline of an industry. Interurban railways are an industry that went through birth, a period of mania, decline, and death during a fairly short period. The first interurbans were built in 1899. The industry’s decline had set in by World War I, although some interurban railways lingered longer. As such, this presents the opportunity to observe the growth and decline of an industry within a relatively compressed period of time. The current study focuses on an irrational spurt of optimism in Ontario during the 1920s: An ambitious new network of interurbans was proposed By Sir Adam Beck in southern Ontario at a time when the industry was generally in decline. First, the notion of an interurban must be defined. (The word was used both as a noun and as an adjective.) These were not conventional heavy-rail operations; instead, the vehicles were more similar to trolleys than to conventional railway cars. Interurban vehicles were self-contained (not locomotive hauled), electric, and light in weight. Interurban vehicles would have a toilet, but
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".