Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Half a century ago, two 18‐year‐olds arrive at university, are randomly paired as chemistry lab partners and become fast friends. Their careers and even family lives entwine, and both go on to join the pantheon of Canada's great statisticians. This all begins at a time when North American university education, and access to it, is growing explosively. It begins at a small start‐up university, an upstart start‐up that eschews conventional wisdom, finds a way to mine a seam of the brightest high school students and innovates—catching important waves and becoming a mathematical sciences powerhouse. In this interview, we explore these stories and some lessons that might be learned from them. Unfortunately lurking variables confound the easily implemented ‘put them in chemistry class in random pairs’ as a prescription for producing top‐flight statisticians.
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 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 | 0.027 | 0.066 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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".