Bence Jones Island in Shepherd Bay, Nunavut: a little known tribute to the legendary physician and chemist’s “thé de voyage”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Henry Bence Jones is among the esteemed physicians of the mid-19th century. Eighteen biographical medical journal articles, published between 1952 and 2021, describe his life and contributions to medicine. Unmentioned, however, is an island in the waters of Shepherd Bay in northern Canada, now Nunavut, designated Bence Jones Island, by the British explorer John Rae in 1854. Rae had sailed from Great Britain to the regions extending north of Hudson's Bay in search of information regarding Sir John Franklin and 133 other officers and men who departed from the Kingdom of Great Britain in two ships in 1845 to search for the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean; they disappeared. In anticipation of Rae's voyage to search for evidence of Franklin's expedition, Bence Jones provided a special preparation of tea that could be drunk cold, if necessary. It was so meaningful to the crew of Rae's ship that it resulted in Rae naming an island near Boothia Isthmus in Shepherd Bay in recognition of this contribution to the contentment of his men under arduous conditions and in acknowledgment of Bence Jones's professional standing, upon which we comment. Rae's report of his voyage in 1855, cited herein, mentioned the island and showed its position on a map of the region. We have located it on a current map of the waterways and landmasses of Nunavut using Google Earth Pro by showing its position at the approximate coordinates of latitude and longitude cited by Rae.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".