The Statistical State of the North American Protestant Missions Movement, from the <i>Mission Handbook</i> , 20th Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
January 2008 T time has again arrived when we can get a fresh understanding of important aspects of the North American missions movement. The Mission Handbook, updated every two to four years, is a directory of mission organizations in the United States and Canada, with statistics. The 20th edition, Mission Handbook, 2007–2009: U.S. and Canadian Protestant Ministries Overseas, is now with us, reporting on 822 mission organizations—giving names, contact information, e-mail and Web addresses, descriptions of affiliations and ministries, purpose statements, and statistics on income, personnel, and countries of service.1 Hearty thanks to the Evangelism and Missions Information Service (at the Billy Graham Center of Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois) and the editors for the gift of this essential reference tool. Their task requires untiring perseverance, unending attention to detail, and unflagging diligence. This continental missions movement is a sprawling, diverse, chaotic enterprise—no small challenge to keep track of. With each edition the editors are careful to warn us that different mission agencies answer the same questions in different ways, and that the same mission agencies answer the same questions in different ways at different times. New agencies appear constantly, old agencies change constantly, many agencies give only partial information, and some refuse to give any information at all. Still, the Mission Handbook is the best we have; it is accurate enough to provide important facts and trends that can guide our understanding and action. Consider three major points that stand out from the findings.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.053 | 0.042 |
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".