Neonatal circumcision is neither medically necessary nor ethically permissible: a response to Clark et al. Comment to: Mandatory neonatal circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa: medical and ethical analysis. Peter Clark, Justin Eisenman, Stephen Szapor Med Sci Monit 2007; 13(12): RA205-13.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their review article Clark et al. claim Neonatal circumcision is medically necessary and ethically imperative [1]. This represents a double contradiction of among others the positions of the American Academy of Pediatrics [2] the British Medical Association [3] the Canadian Paediatric Society [4] and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians [5]. To justify such a dramatic conclusion the authors need to make a strong case. This is all the more true given the authors far-reaching intent to examine the give an ethical analysis and develop guidelines to implement mandatory neonatal circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately the authors stumble so badly on the first two steps that the third step becomes irrelevant. We will evaluate the accuracy and quality of the medical evidence Clark et al. use in their analysis by parsing the facts from the fantasy providing an overview of the risk-benefit analyses of circumcision evaluating the authors ethical justification of infant circumcision and providing our own modest proposal. (excerpt)
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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 | 0.006 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.054 | 0.059 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
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".