Why fear the coming of Winter in
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Game of Thrones fiction is particularly marked by an alarmist maxim, "Winter is coming", which highlights the fear of Westeros inhabitants as Winter approaches. The threat is such that Winter has been given the face of the Night King, whose progress threatens all life north of Westeros. The objective of this narrative review was to elucidate why the coming of Winter was so threatening, particularly by exploring the hypovitaminosis D hypothesis. Methods: Three sources of information were consulted in April-June 2019, including PubMed, the fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, and the Game of Thrones Wiki. Results: As the sun is the primary source of vitamin D, lower serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are typically observed during Winter. Vitamin D regulates hundreds of genes in almost all human tissues, with relevance for several diseases. Winter-induced hypovitaminosis D may thus initiate and/or exacerbate: i) diseases such as osteopathies, viral infections, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases and cancers; ii) decline of physical abilities and skills needed for physical trades or combat; iii) decline of cognition and decision-making abilities, which are necessary to carry out the game of thrones; iv) greater mortality risk threatening all humanity. Conclusions: If Winter comes south of the Wall, people of all ages and conditions in Westeros would be exposed to the risks induced by hypovitaminosis D. We propose that Winter, the Night King and hypovitaminosis D are one and the same danger in Game of Thrones.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".