Bibliographic record
Abstract
My only contact with Wilfred Cantwell Smith (in person, rather than through his writings) was a talk he gave at the 14th quinquennial congress, at Winnipeg in 1980, of the International Association for the History of Religion.Two of his thoughts in that lecture rang intriguing bells at the time, and still do so.The first was a remark about the number of movements in the history of humanity that seemed to have had their origin in Central Asia: "movements," not simply of peoples, but in the human mind.The second was a suggestion that the time was now ripe, or at least drawing near, when it would be possible to write a unified history of human religion, while still of course acknowledging the differences between the religions.The first remark fed a long-standing curiosity on my part regarding what was, especially in the era of the Cold War, a sort of "black hole" in most people's (certainly in my) knowledge of what was somewhat vaguely called "Central Asia": it was reminiscent of the nineteenth century's "darkest Africa."So, for instance, although Afghanistan may be "Inner" rather than Central Asia, it was a considerable surprise to find that, due to the Russian invasion, it was the first item on the BBC's News Bulletin at 7 o' clock on Christmas Day in 1979.I had spent a few days there in 1961, on my way back to Britain after two years' study in India; but I cannot recall in all the intervening eighteen years, ever meeting any body else who had been there.Now, of course, Afghanistan has a worldwide Afghan diaspora.The second suggestion chimed in with a handful of "coincidences" that had presented themselves over the years.At school, when studying the implications of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-Dharo, and Toynbee's Maurya and Gupta civilizations, I had come across the theory, based on the discovery of some coins in Sri Lanka, that the Roman Empire was trading with the Chinese Empire in A.D. 150; and the suggestion that the rosary had been introduced to the West, as an aid to prayer, by two Buddhist monks sent to Alexandria following the adoption of that faith by the Emperor Asoka (c.270-230 BCE).However, as a recent graduate travelling and studying the (then, unrecognized)
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.480 | 0.377 |
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".