Bibliographic record
Abstract
In May 1954 Gilbert Andrew Nixon, 37, a company director of a firm of manufacturing chemists from West Kirby, Cheshire, killed himself with cyanide in a gaol cell. He had just been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment at Somerset Assizes at Wells on a charge of gross indecency. Fourteen other men, some with Taunton addresses, had also pleaded guilty to committing or attempting to commit unnatural acts and acts of gross indecency; nine of them received prison sentences, ranging from one to four years. During the Second World War Nixon had received the Military Cross in Sicily and had recently retired as a lieutenant-colonel from the Territorial Army. ‘It is a terrible thing’, said Mr Justice Oliver in passing sentence, ‘to see a man like you with a gallant military record standing as you are.’ As recorded in The Times , The Judge said that it was an appalling thing for him that an ancient, historic, not very large town like Taunton should at one single Assize exhibit as many cases of homosexual crime as in the ordinary way he met with in a whole year. The answer, as he saw it, was not that the population of Taunton was more debased than other groups of the community, but that once that vice got established in any community it spread like a pestilence and unless held in check threatened to spread indefinitely. 1 Gilbert Nixon’s tragic end caused only a ripple in the national press. But it came amidst a period of intense introspection about homosexuality and the law among those hankering for reform and those, like Mr Justice Oliver, who wanted the ‘pestilence’ eliminated. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.503 | 0.308 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier 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".