Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Physics Today news story “Iranian scientists persevere under renewed sanctions” by Toni Feder (January 2019, page 22) blames the US embargo for hardships that Iranian scientists encounter as they pursue international collaborations. Only two sentences in the four-page report mention Iran’s recent actions against numerous scientists in the country who have Western connections, and no mention is made of the long prison terms or death sentences they have received “for collaborating with a hostile government.”Omid Kokabee, a physics doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, was sentenced to 10 years on a “collaboration” charge and spent 2011–16 in an Iranian prison; he was released only after he developed kidney cancer (see “Physicist imprisoned in Iran is granted medical furlough after surgery,” Physics Today online, 25 May 2016). Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish resident and a principal investigator on two European research projects in disaster medicine, was arrested in 2016 after he was invited to a scientific workshop in Tehran. In 2017 he was sentenced to death for his refusal to spy for Iran’s military.11. E. Chudnovsky, “He refused to spy for Iran’s military, and was sentenced to death for it,” Washington Examiner, 2 November 2017.Xiyue Wang, a doctoral student in history at Princeton University, was sentenced in 2017 to 10 years in prison when his studies of ancient documents in Tehran were interpreted as espionage.22. R. Gladstone, “Colleagues of Princeton University scholar convicted of spying in Iran express shock,” New York Times, 17 July 2017. Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi, an Australian citizen and fertility expert, was detained on her research trip to Iran last December on charges of trying to “infiltrate” Iranian institutions.33. Dubai newsroom, G. Elgood, ed., “Iran said to hold Australian-based academic on ‘infiltration’ charge,” Reuters World News, 9 December 2018.In 2018 several Iranian environmental scientists were rounded up on suspicion that their studies of wildlife might have revealed information about Iranian military sites. One of them, Kavous Seyed-Emami, a Canadian citizen and professor at Imam Sadiq University in Tehran, died in prison after intense interrogations.44. E. Chudnovsky, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards rain down terror upon scientists suspected of contacts with the West,” Washington Examiner, 11 April 2019. Four others have been accused of “sowing corruption on Earth,” a charge that can carry a death sentence.The above-mentioned cases represent the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has dual citizenship or is a doctoral student residing or studying in another country is taking serious chances when returning to Iran for a professional or family visit. Although the US sanctions contribute to the hardships experienced by our Iranian colleagues, the actions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are largely responsible for making the lives of the Iranian scientists miserable.ReferencesSection:ChooseTop of pageReferences <<1. E. Chudnovsky, “He refused to spy for Iran’s military, and was sentenced to death for it,” Washington Examiner, 2 November 2017. Google Scholar2. R. Gladstone, “Colleagues of Princeton University scholar convicted of spying in Iran express shock,” New York Times, 17 July 2017. Google Scholar3. Dubai newsroom, G. Elgood, ed., “Iran said to hold Australian-based academic on ‘infiltration’ charge,” Reuters World News, 9 December 2018. Google Scholar4. E. Chudnovsky, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards rain down terror upon scientists suspected of contacts with the West,” Washington Examiner, 11 April 2019. Google Scholar© 2019 American Institute of Physics.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.019 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".