Response to Siegel, Kratzer, Smith et al.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The American Cancer Society (ACS) Correspondence1 concludes that our “title, premise, and conclusion are conjectures” that “jeopardize research to discover the etiology behind” the increasing colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence in 45-49-year-olds that the ACS includes in their CRC screening guidelines.2,3 However, our title states “the young” and not 45-49-year-olds and includes “all cancer” and not just CRC. Our focus was on adolescents and young adults (AYAs, age 15-39) and to a lesser degree on <15-year-olds. We did not cite 45-49-year-olds or depict this age group except in one figure that has all 5-year age groups from birth to 85. Our premise was that reclassification of carcinoid tumors as malignant “artifactually” increases colon, colorectal, and all cancer incidence if the appendix is included, and especially in AYAs and younger patients. We concluded that “the younger the age the greater the appendix artifact” and “a significant proportion of the overall cancer increase in AYAs during the last decade, as much as 32%, is attributable to the appendix cancer reclassification” and that “appendix tumors should … not be included.”
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 | 0.006 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.035 | 0.035 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.019 |
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".