Failures and successes: Notes on the development of
Bibliographic record
Abstract
North America’s most comprehensive experiment to introduce electronic cash and, in the process, replace physical cash for casual, low value payments. The technology used was Mondex and its implementation was supported by all the country’s major banks. It was launched with an extensive publicity campaign to promote Mondex not only in the domestic but also in the global market, for which the Canadian implementation was to serve as a ‘showcase.’ However, soon after the start of the first field test it became apparent that the new technology did not work smoothly. On the contrary, it created a host of controversies, in areas as varied as computer security, consumer privacy and monetary policy. In the following years, few of these controversies could be resolved and Mondex could not be established as a widely used payment mechanism. In 2001, the experiment was finally terminated. Using the concepts developed in recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) this article analyses these controversies as resulting from the difficulties of fitting electronic cash, a new socio-technical system, into the complex setting of the existing payment system. Implementing a new technology is seen as a long process in which social and technological actors are required to adapt to one another. In the Mondex case, such adaptation did not happened sufficiently to stabilize the socio-technical network as a whole. However, in some limited areas mutual adaptation did occur and there the Mondex experiment produced some surprising successes. In this perspective, the story of Mondex not only offers lessons on why technologies fail, but also offers insight how short-term failures can contribute to long-term transformations. This suggests the need to rethink the dichotomy of success and failure.
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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 | 0.045 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| 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".