Bibliographic record
Abstract
This inelegant question was stimulated by two related events. The first was the Association's centenary, celebrated in style at the Guy's Hospital Campus of King's College London in 2006; the second, West's elegant account of ‘one hundred years of an association of physicians’.1 Both made me reflect on the continuing fascination of medicine, its distinguished past and exciting future, and the role of the Association. My purpose is not to analyse the many factors contributing to recent changes in clinical practice—society's expectations, the increasing effectiveness, complexity and cost of modern medicine—but rather to consider how the Association might help meet the needs of physicians in the years ahead. Implicit in that self-imposed remit is a sense that the Association may not have been fulfilling that function as well in recent years as formerly. The picture chosen to illustrate West's history of the Association was of Osler. I have considerable regard for William Osler, bringing as he did Scottish educational values, via Canada and the USA, not just to England but to Oxford.2 He practised at a time when medicine was growing in confidence. The advances of the second half of the 19th century were becoming established practice, the Nightingale reforms had made hospitals safer, and the public both understood the benefits of the new treatments and wanted more; that demand eventually led to the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 and equivalent health services in other countries. During Osler's time, life expectancy began to increase rapidly, with improvements in public health, obstetrics and the management of infections.
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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.005 |
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".