Bibliographic record
Abstract
The most common way to begin a commentary on the obesity epidemic is to rehearse a series of statistics that are meant to support the idea that obesity rates have become a “crisis by any standard” (Pomeranz 186). Then, typically, experts will list the chronic health problems associated with obesity as a means of reinforcing the semiotic applicability of the word “epidemic” to the ostensibly normative issue of there being too much weight on people’s bones. Rather than performing these by now familiar rhetorical moves, my point of departure will be to recognize that although the material basis of obesity panic is the social reality represented by the gradual bloating of these numbers, the obesity epidemic is more aptly to be understood as a particularly speculative and instrumentalist “epidemic of signification,” to use a term from Paula Treichler’s study of AIDS and the intersection of science and morality (1). Indeed, at no point in human history has the collective weight of a population possessed the gravity or borne the intensity of political consideration that it does in our time. At a time in which the global flow of populations and the accelerated global movement of capital destabilizes appeals to the familiar paternalism of the nation-state, fatness and the symbolic weight of an increasingly fat body politic feeds a renewed state concern with social reproduction and public concern over the unsustainability of contemporary life under our increasingly banal conditions of crisis.
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 | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.115 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".