Bibliographic record
Abstract
I conclude that universities nowadays, in presenting themselves to the public, are loath to make any mention of books. One need only consider the uses to which universities put the promotional spots provided by television networks broadcasting intercollegiate athletic contests to grasp the extent of current anti-book sentiment. I offer a composite, drawn from dozens of such ‘college commercials’ that aired during 2003: The avuncular president of Fabulous State University emulates Little Jack Horner in a spiel (liberally sprinkled with words like ‘excellence’ and ‘greatness’) which originates from his oak-panelled office. His jowly image gives way to a montage of campus scenes – whitecoated folk busy in a lab full of test tubes and beakers; a bearded math professor writing equations on a chalkboard; young and attractive students jogging, chatting, walking, and lounging on the greensward or near the entrance of impressive new classroom buildings or dorms – scenes wherein nobody is shown reading anything, least of all a book. The camera pans quickly across the front of a large, windowless, and unidentified structure that you know to be the Fabulous State University library, but only because you once visited the campus. You are also aware that Fabulous State is the parent institution of a firstrate, top-drawer, prize-winning, slam-bang scholarly press, and you are surprised not to hear it mentioned in company with the worldclass art museum and the world-class natural history museum and the striking replica of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to be found on the east quadrangle, thanks to the diligence of the avuncular president’s landscape-conscious first lady. Indeed, the press is not mentioned at all. After sixty such jam-packed seconds, the slogan of the
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 | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.097 | 0.030 |
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".