Bibliographic record
Abstract
Daniel Patrick Thurs's book has a good topic: the general public's understanding of science. In this interesting and well-documented work, he offers much of interest and illumination. Thurs starts with a paradox, well expressed by popular science writer and new atheist Richard Dawkins, that “the United States is by far the world's leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003). I am not sure that this is entirely fair—years of living in both England and Canada suggest to me that there may be competition for this prize—but it is certainly true that in the United States today we have a society that is completely dependent on sophisticated science and technology and that most of the population have but the vaguest idea of what makes anything tick. More than this, as Thurs points out, we have a population that denies and dislikes intensely many major aspects of modern science, particularly those that conflict with a literalistic reading of the Old Testament.
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".