Bibliographic record
Abstract
r e v i e w 3 8 ( S u P P l e m e n t ) : 2 6 5 -2 7 9 ( 2 0 1 2 ) 2 6 5 The Last Eighty Years: Continuities and Change VaclaV Smilthe first time Paul demeny asked me to write for PDR was in 1985 in a taxi in (as it was) west Berlin, going to a dahlem Conference on resources and world development.at that time i was still spending about half of my time working on China, and so i wrote an article on the country's much-improved food supply.during the nearly three decades that followed, it was Paul's repeated nudging that led me to ask ''what next?''and so i wrote (always given a much-appreciated free range) about diet and heart disease, planetary warming, how many people the earth can feed, environmental services, the nitrogen cycle and global population, eating meat, global catastrophic events, national socioeconomic and strategic trends, and harvesting the biosphere.after so many different topics for PDR, i was not immediately sure what the present essay should be about.eventually i proposed a topic, but then i decided to do something different, something obvious: to look back at the last eight decades in order to appraise the true nature of human advances and to emphasize our continuing inability to foresee fundamental changes.looking 80 years ahead did not tempt me at all because all truly longrange predictions are nothing but fairy tales, and hence must inevitably draw on an imagination that invariably tends to be either too feeble or too ridiculous.looking back is actually one of the best ways to make clear the futility of looking far ahead: when such efforts are seen in retrospect, they seem forced, naïve, awkward, and, above all, wide of the mark in their inevitably prejudiced selectivity and (often risible) bias reflecting the changing concerns of the day (as global warming displaces acid rain and as economic crisis displaces global warming) and the herd instinct of learned prognosticators.Growing frequency of forecasting and scenario-writing (by self-appointed experts, by think tanks of every leaning and consultancies, and by governments and corporations) might be seen as a proof that such products offer real insights and valuable guidance.But even a brief reflection dispels that impression.evolution of human societies is marked by continually and gradually un-©2013 the Population Council, inc.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".