Andrew Raymond Simons, 1921-2012
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.” Freeman John Dyson, Disturbing the Universe Programmable calculators in the late 1970s and personal desktop computers in the early 1980s put the brute force of iterative calculations for statistical data analysis within the reach of all epidemiologists, students, and established professionals alike. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, Ray Simons was a scientific photographer already celebrated for his work on the pages of Time-Life, National Geographic, and other magazines. To achieve this photographic excellence, he had written programmable calculator software to adjust his camera lenses and allow him to capture nature and biologic phenomena with unsurpassed clarity. At the CDC, Ray met epidemiologists coping with Legionnaires’ disease, toxic shock syndrome, and the developing acquired immunodeficiency syndrome pandemic. Armed with his programmable pocket calculator and a self-acquired knack for statistics, Ray generously spent hours trying to solve the computational problems people brought to him. He was passionate about finding simple solutions for numerical problems that the CDC faced every day. In 1983, he received a Superior Performance Award from Dr. William Foege, who was the director of the CDC at the time, for his work in writing the computer programs used in epidemiologic data analyses at the center. Ray retired from the federal service in 1987 but continued to influence the development of epidemiologic software. He inspired many of us with his generosity and passion for developing simple software for use in the field by epidemiologists. He profoundly touched the lives of the 3 of us, his intellectual soul mates who shared with him the vision in the above Dyson quotation, which later took the form of public domain and open source software. He would write and rewrite lines of programming code like a poet editing a sonnet, constantly striving to make the algorithms tighter and faster to fit the memory and processing capacity of an available handheld calculator and to increase their esthetic value. Ray never earned a doctorate; rather, he focused the considerable heft of his intellect and ability on his creative work. Although not a card-carrying epidemiologist, he was a devoted developer and user of the tools of our trade. His brilliance went hand-in-hand with his kindness and pure passion for epidemiology and biostatistics. Always with self-effacing humility, he took great satisfaction in seeing others improve on the work he started, and he inspired us to do the same. His influence in epidemiologic computing can be traced not only to lines of code that are part of widely used epidemiologic software programs but also to the many improvements and bug fixes that his sharp eyes and statistical skills inspired. His work in transforming complex algorithms into elegant and concise programming code spanned the entire range, from exact confidence limits for proportions to 2 × 2 contingency tables to regression analyses and stochastic modeling of infectious disease epidemics. Like Dyson, Ray believed that science and religion provide 2 different windows into our world and our existence in it. He peered into his meaning in life through both windows, and this brought him the inner peace needed for his creativity and strength. To him, these windows brought nonconflicting views that guided him morally as a husband, father, and member of his community. Until a few weeks before his passing on May 15, 2012, from the consequences of a brain tumor, he was busy writing e-mails to us, perfecting programming code, and asking how our children were doing. His hundreds of e-mails to friends and family are a fascinating collection of essays, cartoons, photographs, evangelism, science, and statistics. Our professional community has many unsung heroes. In recognizing Ray Simons’ legacy, we also seek to pay tribute to the champions of our profession who preferred to avoid the limelight while giving us the tools of our trade.1 Conflict of interest: none declared.
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,003 | 0,014 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,003 | 0,002 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,006 | 0,003 |
| Communication savante | 0,003 | 0,002 |
| Science ouverte | 0,001 | 0,002 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,003 | 0,005 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,018 | 0,005 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».