A Thousand Brooms, A Thousand Buckets: Accountability and the Institutional Investigation of Scandal1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice features an impatient individual of limited wisdom who borrows the powers of his master to do his own work: he animates a broom so it will fetch water from the well. But the apprentice only knows how to start the broom off, and cannot find the spell to make it stop. As the water rises, he tries to chop the broom into pieces, but only multiplies his problem: each piece re-animates and relentlessly continues to fetch ever more water. Soon the furniture is floating, and the apprentice is threatened with drowning as the water rises and the brooms prove unstoppable.
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 | 0.017 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".