Time to Make a Call? The Ethics of Mandatory Reporting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over 50 years ago, the first U.S. laws were passed regarding the mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect. During the ensuing decades, other laws have emerged that delineate the role of the physician in protecting his or her patients as well as the public. In theory, the reporting by clinicians who become aware of concerns plays a critical role in decreasing harms; however, in practice, various tensions exist, including the limits of our observations, the veracity of information received, and perhaps an underlying ambivalence about privacy and the role of the doctor. This column grapples with the ethical issues of mandatory reporting. Why might we be reluctant to report suspected abuse or neglect, someone who is unsafe to drive, or a colleague who is impaired? At the core of the concerns about reporting is the relationshipdthat between doctor and patient, doctor and family members, and between colleagues. Many also express distrust in systems or worry about what will be done with the information that is provided to the authorities.
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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 | 0.130 | 0.288 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.025 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".