Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1995, no doubt anticipating this special issue of AWG, the Omani government kindly drafted Oman Vision 2020. Alas, this document is mostly an irrelevant testament to the optimism of its authors and a reminder that reality will always intrude. In fact, Oman fell so far short of its goals for 2020 that it is currently drafting a new strategy, Oman Vision 2040 (Valeri 2015). As Yogi Berra reputedly said, “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” To do so in the Middle East, where the pace of political change has been particularly rapid in the past few years, is arguably even more perilous, whether the horizon is 2020, 2030, or next week. Nevertheless, there seems to be broad consensus about the nature of the challenges confronting Oman in the near future, and how the sultanate looks in 2020 or 2030 will largely be determined by how successfully these challenges are addressed. Most pressing is the issue of who will succeed the 74-year-old Sultan Qaboos, who has ruled Oman almost single-handedly since 1970 (Nereim 2014). In 2014, he spent several months in Germany receiving medical treatment for what is widely believed to be colon cancer. In November, looking emaciated, he announced to the nation that he would not attend Omani National Day celebrations, explaining his absence “for reasons you all know” (Nereim 2014). It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Oman’s entire political system has been personalized and focused on the sultan for the past four decades. Unfortunately he has no brothers, no sons, and no designated heir. According to Omani Basic Law, a royal family council must select a successor within three days of Sultan Qaboos’s death. If they are unable to do so, an envelope containing the sultan’s preferred choice will be opened. Although the transition will most likely be peaceful, many Omanis fear that the process, and the uncertainly surrounding it, could trigger infighting within the royal family. In the worst (but unlikely) scenario, any succession dispute could in turn provide an opening for the resurgence of long-suppressed tribal feuds and regional rivalries, notably in Dhofar, where a rebellion raged for 13 years before 1975, and in the interior, where Ibadi Muslims lived
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".