Gordon Macpherson: editor who bridged the gap between <i>The BMJ</i> and the BMA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gordon Macpherson was born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where his father was working as an accountant. When Gordon was 10 his father died, but not before writing many letters to find someone to support his son at Christ’s Hospital (the famous “Blue Coat” public school in West Sussex). He was the only child of a single mother, and Christ’s Hospital had a profound influence on his life. He made lifelong friends there, and in the 1980s and ’90s he became a donation governor linked to its medical foundation, supporting three pupils. After Christ’s he spent several terms studying science at McGill University in Montreal before starting at St Thomas’, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth, a Nightingale nurse. He did his national service at RAF Halton, working in the specialist burns unit. Having decided on a career in …
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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 | 0.006 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.007 |
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".