Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle famously wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” It was his contention that a special few wrought the collective destiny of the mundane many. However, one does not have to be a strict historical materialist or biological determinist to recognize that this seems a tad exaggerated – environmental settings and social dynamics have a lot to do with historical change and the rise to prominence of certain individuals. Accordingly, a more cogent account of “the history of the world” might make more of the insight that, although great men and women have undoubtedly played vital roles in shaping society, they have themselves been forged by that same society. Greatness is the complex and serendipitous interaction of personal character and historical circumstance. James Atkin was one of those strong characters who was a product of his own social milieu as well as a major influence on it. Although he stood out from the crowd, he never sought to put himself above or beyond ordinary people. In his long and illustrious career, he managed to hold on to and celebrate the original basis of the common law – that it arose from the customs of the common people and was intended to serve their best interests. As such, he took seriously the special judicial undertaking to develop the law in line with the ideals of the society of which he was such a part. He was an ordinary man in the best and most extraordinary sense of the description.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.084 | 0.029 |
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".