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Record W2000802858 · doi:10.1177/0162243909340271

Quality Assured Science: Managerialism in Forensic Biology

2009· article· en· W2000802858 on OpenAlexafffund
Myles Leslie

Bibliographic record

VenueScience Technology & Human Values · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicEthics in Clinical Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersPierre Elliott Trudeau FoundationAmerican Academy of Forensic Sciences
KeywordsManagerialismQuality (philosophy)Process (computing)WorkflowEngineering ethicsControl (management)Criminal justiceComputer sciencePolitical sciencePublic relationsLawEngineeringEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article takes as its point of departure the idea that the adoption of managerial principles to ensure the quality of DNA evidence is an accident of history which has changed the ways forensic biology is conducted and forensic biologists think. I begin by defining managerialism and tracking its entry into the contentious world of forensic biology, asking how it is that a focus on efficiency and precise process control is affecting these labs. My analysis unfolds in two parts. I first look at the external inspection routines that assure quality in forensic labs and the degree to which these routines represent ‘‘self” rather than ‘‘peer” assessment. I next look at the internal lab quality assurance (QA) routines that facilitate managerial control of technical and scientific workers, noting that QA is a trope flexible enough to govern both the numerically auditable and quasirobotic activities of technicians along with the less tangible more consensus-based human interactions of scientists. Illustrating that ‘‘science” is being pushed aside by management imperatives, I examine the consequences of this new emphasis for both the lab workers and the criminal justice system.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.067
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.051
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.988
Threshold uncertainty score0.353

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0670.051
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0120.060
Scholarly communication0.0170.007
Open science0.0020.007
Research integrity0.0040.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.345
GPT teacher head0.619
Teacher spread0.274 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2009
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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