Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sanders replies: These letters provide a welcome alternative viewpoint to my support for scientific conferences independent of politics. The central disagreement between me and the writers of these letters is whether a conference should be held completely independently of the host nation’s politics—provided of course that safety of participants is guaranteed—or whether political matters, such as banning people based on citizenship or human rights violations, should militate against organizing such conferences.I support the goal of the universal right of all scientists, regardless of citizenship, to participate in open scientific meetings, and equally support the goal of universal respect for human rights. The question before us then is whether it is better to hold conferences, even under compromised conditions, or not to hold them, with the hope that the lack of engagement will drive change.In our complex world, we need the yin and the yang of political and cultural engagement. Sanctions and boycotts have a place, but scientists in every country have a need for contact with others with whom to share ideas, to collaborate, and to learn and teach.In the sports, music, and science worlds, we are seeing exchanges that somewhat transcend politics. This year the Summer Olympics were held in China, and the New York Philharmonic played a concert in North Korea. In 2007 the 38th International Physics Olympiad was held in Iran. These events are important in bringing together athletes, musicians, and scientists, but also in catalyzing change in our global society.The letter writers have in common the view that holding these conferences is tantamount to appeasement. If they think that threatening to cancel a conference or holding it once and refusing to do so again is an effective tool for creating a better world for science, they may do so, either on their own or with some allies. Personally I regard threats and cancellations as counterproductive. Perhaps the letter writers see a way forward that I do not see.As I write this letter (1 October 2008), I am returning from the First International Iran Summer School on Quantum Information, which I co-organized and which featured top international speakers. Sixty-eight students chose to participate, including several international students; unfortunately Israelis were forbidden. In our imperfect world, the students were grateful for the opportunity to learn, and the speakers for the opportunity to share knowledge. Despite the compromises, the school was a positive event that built scientific discourse independent of politics but constrained by reality.© 2008 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 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 | 0.009 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.022 |
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".