Governing Obese Bodies in a Control Society
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 10 October 2006, BBC Breakfast Television reports that England is now officially the fattest nation in Europe. According to a Health Survey for England, 2003, 23% of English women and 22.2% of English men are obese. An official “fatness map” of the UK demonstrates that the West Midlands has the highest percentage of obese women (as determined by a body mass index over 301) and Yorkshire has the highest percentage of obese men. Later the news notes the alarming rates of eating disorders in Brazil; in a nation where thousands of people die for lack of proper food, others are voluntarily starving, binging and purging to obtain a certain look. The BBC breakfast show also airs an item about new “toy” exercise equipment designed to make children exercise. This equipment is modelled closely on its adult equivalents – treadmills, weight training machines – just smaller in size. When parents were asked why they would invest in such toys, they say they don’t want their children to become fat and unhealthy adults and therefore, they want to teach a healthy lifestyle from early on. While these parents appear well-informed about the importance of exercise, when I open my faculty website I find a special feature on why governmental messages on healthy lifestyle are not reaching their target: the fat and unfit. According to this report, the health messages preach to the already-converted while the couch potatoes stay horizontal unless harsh, negative words like “lazy” are used to hit home the message for the necessity of behavioural change. This “newsflash” does not detail why exactly there is a need for a behavioural change toward more active living. As I gather my mail, I read from the recent IDEA Fitness Journal (a US-based publication for fitness professionals) that medical costs for obese employees are 77% higher than for healthy-weight employees and that obesity-related disabilities cost employers up to $8,720 per claimant per year. It further estimates that obesity accounts for 43% of all healthcare costs by US business on coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, stroke, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis of the knee and endometrial cancer combined. These figures are designed to demonstrate to consumers the need to control obesity levels: being fat is costly and dangerous.2
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it