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Record W4402995353 · doi:10.3998/ptpbio.5492

Sex and the Riddle of Variability

2024· article· en· W4402995353 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy Theory and Practice in Biology · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicIntellectual Property Law
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUniversity of TorontoNational Science Foundation
KeywordsComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Scientific research associations, funders, and publishers have recently introduced sex inclusion mandates requiring the use of male and female specimens in preclinical research designs and the analysis and reporting of data disaggregated by sex. However, it is not necessarily a simple matter to incorporate males and females in the same study design with the aim of detecting differences between them while following best practices for rigorous inference in laboratory science using model organisms. For example, if there are ways in which male and female variability might differ for the trait or procedure of interest, principles of sound experimental design may require larger numbers of organisms and observations to make valid inferences about the presence of a sex difference. This paper analyzes a current scientific debate over differences in variability between male and female laboratory rodents, and specifically over whether potential sources of sex-specific variability such as the estrous cycle, group housing, and body size constitute components of sex that should be measured. The variability debate surfaces the trade-offs between constructs of sex difference and similarity that face scientific researchers attempting to meet mandates to include both males and females in research design and report sex-specific results. This "riddle of variability" illuminates how laboratory researchers using model organisms must make contextual choices (Richardson 2022) at multiple decision points in order to stabilize sex as a biological variable in a particular research design. These judgments are informed by social and epistemic values and carry consequences for the validity, precision, and generalizability of claims of biological sex differences derived from preclinical research models.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.018
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.019
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.977
Threshold uncertainty score0.989

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0180.019
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.364
Teacher spread0.319 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it