Bibliographic record
Abstract
Do not be confused: This was the presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Society of Missiology held at Aquinas Institute of Theology, Dubuque, Iowa, June 7, 1975. Gerald Anderson spoke as though he was in the year 2000 and looking backward—or “backcasting”—over the twentieth century. Actually, however, he was also looking toward the year 2000 and “forecasting” about some events that he thought might take place in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Never before published, the address shows some of the hazards of trying to anticipate the future. In giving this to Missiology for publication (without revisions) in A.D. 2000, Anderson says, “It was an interesting exercise, but I learned my lesson. Historians do reasonably well at looking backward from the present to learn about the future. However, I was trying to look backward from the future; I was ‘forecasting’ in the guise of ‘backcasting.’ Did it work? Not too well, judging from how far off I was about some of the events that I thought might happen in the last quarter of the century, but—fortunately—did not. It was fun, and it stirred up a lively discussion at the meeting, but in the future, I will stick to the past.”
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".