Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Long fragmented by essays in scientific and historical journals, rabies history has received monographic treatment recently in Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys's Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2007) and now in Karen Brown's Mad Dogs and Meerkats. Connected by their subject matter, they are also related by the fact that South Africa was a colony of the British Empire, one of the principal disseminators of the rabies virus around the world. Both monographs stand on their own, for sure, but they also raise hope for a global history of rabies, once historians produce a critical mass of research on rabies elsewhere in the world. Following a fine Introduction mapping the entire book, Brown's first chapter surveys the early history of rabies in South Africa. With little evidence for its presence before the 1890s, and given the difficulty of interpreting what traces remain, Brown concludes that any appearance of the disease before the end of the nineteenth century has escaped detection so far.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".