“A Square Deal for the Least and the Last”: The Career of W.G. Smith in the Methodist Ministry, Experimental Psychology, and Sociology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it is a convention for authors to seek anonymity by using initialized pen names, W.G. Smith is an exceptionally anonymous name. “I have no photograph, not having visited a photographer in ten years,” he wrote in April 1921. “I shall have to ‘sit,’ if you desire one, but I thrive best in obscurity.” It is this modesty that is responsible for W.G. Smith’s (1873-1943) obscurity. He should be remembered today as a Newfoundlander who contributed to the intellectual life of Canada before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. Salem Bland (1859-1950) in his book The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age — a key text for the social gospel movement — acknowledged an intellectual debt to two people, an editor and “my friend, Professor W.G. Smith of the University of Toronto, who gave me valuable criticisms and suggestions” (Bland, 1973: 6). Smith was also a friend of another important intellectual figure in Toronto, the philosopher George John Blewett (1873-1912). Among all the nineteenthand twentiethcentury idealist philosophers in Canada, Blewett may be the most significant for a rational Christian understanding of the relationship between humans and nature (Armour and Trott, 1981: 321). Blewett is the author of The Study of Nature and the Vision of God (1907) as well as The Christian View of the World (1912). Born in the town of Cupids in March of 1873, W.G. (William George) Smith is surely the first Newfoundland-born experimental psychologist. He
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 | 0.016 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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".