Bibliographic record
Abstract
Procedural values such as transparency seem to be all the rage. I’m unsure why. I find them obscure and, even if we can make sense of them, I think they tend to be given far more significance than they deserve. Some of these problems are illustrated by the value assigned to transparency in the three recent decisions by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).1 These judgments are made in relation to deliberations about mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccination by three different Department of Health (DH) committees.2–4 In brief, an unnamed applicant asked the DH for full copies of the minutes from three different committees (the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation; the MMR Sub-Committee; and the Adverse Reactions Committee) for the period 1986 to 1992. The DH pointed out that edited versions of these minutes were already in the public domain and that no further details would be made available. Perhaps the most important reason for this conclusion was the existence of an explicit duty of confidentiality to committee members. If particular points or arguments were attributed to named individuals, then this might result in inhibited discussion and a weakened policy-making process. The DH notified the applicant of the right to appeal to the ICO, and the applicant appealed. The ICO is empowered by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (and other legislation) to promote access to official information. The presumption upon which it functions is that information ought to be available unless there are justifiable reasons for this not to be the case. In these three related cases, the ICO decided that none of the reasons provided by the DH were, in the end, significant enough to justify withholding the missing information and ordered that full minutes be provided to the complainant. My concerns …
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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 | 0.055 | 0.117 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".