Michael James (1940–2023)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael James liked to tell a story from his childhood when he was fascinated by rockets and their propellants.After walking over to the local branch of Canadian Liquid Air in Winnipeg he asked for some liquid oxygen.'Sure, kid' they said, and put some in his bucket.(Attitudes to health and safety were different in those days.)As he walked home, he realized that liquid oxygen boils pretty quickly, so he ran the last part of the way and carried the rapidly emptying bucket into the basement.There was only a bit left and there wasn't time to do anything fancy, so he splashed in some methanol to make a lox/alcohol propellant and tossed in a match.When he picked himself up from where he had been thrown by the explosion, he heard picture frames crashing down upstairs and his mother shouting 'Michael, what have you done this time?'.He never lost this childhood enthusiasm for science (though his experiments became less dangerous) and was active in research until the end of his life.Michael James was born in Vancouver and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba on the Canadian prairies.After high school, he studied chemistry at the local University of Manitoba, where he was excited to learn that it was possible to see the 3D structures of molecules using X-ray crystallography.Aiming to get the best possible background for a future working in this area, he applied to do a DPhil at Oxford with Dorothy Hodgkin in 1963.It was a time of great advances in crystallography, with Dorothy about to win the Nobel Prize for her ground-breaking structures of penicillin and vitamin B 12 , and the first protein structures having recently been determined in Cambridge.Michael's thesis project was to determine structures of antibiotic peptides.While there, he was exposed to protein crystallography through the work going on at the same time to determine the 3D structure of insulin.After completing his DPhil in 1966, Michael took a postdoctoral position determining small-molecule structures in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.He remained at the University of Alberta for the rest of his life.However, his career took a quick turn when he learned that the Biochemistry Department was seeking to set up a protein crystallography laboratory.With his move to
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.238 | 0.171 |
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".