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Record W2090746702 · doi:10.1353/hcr.2006.0046

There's a Bug in Your Head

2006· article· en· W2090746702 on OpenAlex
Patrick J. McDonald

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.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Hastings Center Report · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicChildhood Cancer Survivors' Quality of Life
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Manitoba
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNothingDowntownHeadachesPopulationMainstreamNoticeHistoryMedicinePsychologyMedia studiesSociologyGender studiesPsychiatryLawPolitical scienceDemographyArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

There's a Bug in Your Head Patrick McDonald (bio) Because I was born, raised, and educated in Toronto, my exposure to First Nations people and cultures was limited to what little attention was paid them by the mainstream media and the educational system. When I became an intern and resident in a downtown hospital, the familiar stereotypes were reinforced by encounters with homeless adult Natives, many with substance abuse problems. I confess to not giving aboriginal issues in medicine and in Canada much thought. All that changed when I moved to Winnipeg to practice as a pediatric neurosurgeon at Winnipeg Children's Hospital. Winnipeg has a larger aboriginal population than any other major city in Canada, and First Nations people make a significant contribution to its cultural and artistic vibrancy. For the first time in my career, I encountered First Nations children on a daily basis. One of my new patients was a seven-year-old boy named Timmy. He lived on a remote reserve several hours from Winnipeg, accessible only by air. Timmy had suffered headaches for a few weeks and was starting to develop weakness in his left arm and leg. CT and MRI scans revealed a large cystic tumor in his upper brainstem extending into his right thalamus. Despite his headaches, Timmy was a happy, active child. He spoke Oji-Cree and very little English and seemed to want nothing to do with me until I showed him I could wiggle my nose just like he could. I met with Timmy's mother to explain the nature of Timmy's brain tumor, propose surgery, and discuss the potential risks and expected recovery time. Parents usually react to a talk like this with a mixture of fear, anger, and grief. They often question why this happened to their child. But for the most part, Timmy's mom seemed unconcerned with these issues. Her questions threw me off guard. They didn't have hot water in their small house on the reserve—could I help them get it? What about an indoor toilet? As a matter of fact, maybe I could write to the authorities and stress that they needed a new house altogether. My first reaction was disbelief—this woman seemed more concerned about material things than the health of her son. But over the next days and weeks, I began to understand that these were legitimate questions from a woman anxious not just about the welfare of her sick child (though she clearly was deeply worried about this), but also about the welfare of her entire family. Her questions implied a fear of being unable to adequately care for a child who could be quite sick for a long time in conditions where it was hard enough to raise healthy children. When it came time to officially "get consent" for the proposed surgery, a meeting with the family was arranged. I like to meet with parents and one or two other close relatives or friends (and the child, if he is old enough). I typically refuse requests to meet with large groups of people—I find that too many different people asking questions tends to confuse things. In this case, though, I quickly realized that the process of obtaining consent would not be typical. When I entered, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and parents crowded the room. An older woman sat in the far corner, saying nothing, but listening intently throughout the encounter. Introductions were made, and I began with my usual description of the clinical picture, proposed intervention, alternatives, risks, and probable outcomes. I was then peppered with questions: Would Timmy be okay? Would he be able to go back to school? Play outside? Fish? Had I ever done this type of surgery before? I answered as best I could, and then something remarkable happened. Timmy's aunts, uncles, and mother all turned to the older woman in the corner of the room—Timmy's grandmother, who had not yet spoken—and asked, "What should we do?" She paused, then said: "We should go ahead with the surgery." That was it. No more questions—the decision had been made. Later that day, I told his mother...

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.

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 categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.061
Threshold uncertainty score0.903

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 studies0.0000.000
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 head0.046
GPT teacher head0.332
Teacher spread0.286 · 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