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Record W2065749078 · doi:10.1177/030631200030006001

Towards a Sociology of Measurement:

2000· article· en· W2065749078 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Studies of Science · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicRace, Genetics, and Society
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsObjectivity (philosophy)NormativeNegotiationEpistemologySocial psychologyPsychologySociologySocial science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper examines an inflammatory subject - `DNA typing' (or `DNA fingerprinting' as it is popularly called) - to show how credible scientific knowledge is produced through the systematic erasure of uncertainty and random variation. This erasure occurs at the levels of measurement and of group processes. I use the history of DNA typing in the United States as a case study to develop a three-fold argument. First, that objective knowledge is achieved through interactions and social processes that erase the actions of the representing subject from the representations made of the natural world. Second, that this set of social processes and interactions includes normative judgements, but that these judgements do not pose a threat to objectivity: instead, they are what constitute objectivity. Objectivity is attained through personal judgements and evaluations of what is good enough to constitute an objective measurement, or judgements of how big or small a deviation must be to count for or against a particular theoretical interpretation. Third, I argue that measurements, the result of the translation of properties of the natural world into numbers, always have a gap or error between the theoretically predicted measurement and the empirically obtained measurement. At some point this error cannot be reduced any further. The final measurement is the outcome of negotiation and interaction between people and nature. I demonstrate that these judgements, evaluations and negotiations take place within a laboratory, when forensic workers construct estimates of measurement error, and also in negotiations among disparate social groups involved in calculating random match probabilities. Scientific and legal disputes about the construction of measurements and measurement standards for DNA profiling began in the late 1980s, and continued for the better part of a decade. In this paper, the protracted controversy provides especially rich materials for examining the social construction of measurement.

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.

Direct model labels (unvalidated)

Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.

Model armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaScience and technology studies
Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Theoretical or conceptuallow
gptScience and technology studies
Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Theoretical or conceptuallow
models agreeAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.091
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.009
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.045
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.276 · 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