The Microbiome as TED Knows It: Popular Science Communication and the Neoliberal Subject
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Although criticized for a variety of reasons, TED platforms and conventions have been engaged, often uncritically, as tools for popular science communication. This article critically examines four TED Talks that engage the relatively recent biomedical concept of the human microbiome. Analysis Neoliberal values underpin both the TED universe and the marketization of science. TED conventions produce a discursive regularity that brings together neoliberal subjectivity and bioeconomic imperatives of contemporary scientific research. This neoliberalization is supported by uncritically championing citizen science and the so-called democratization of science alongside crowdsourcing and crowdfunding appeals. Conclusions and implications Uncritically embracing TED Talks can implicate science communication in the reproduction of problematic ideological positions that favour economic interests over the social good or even individual health.
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 | 0.046 | 0.089 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".