Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nitsan Chorev The World Health Organization between North and South Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyThe United Nations is in trouble ... by definition ... in principle and in practice. For one thing, the member are not united. They attack one another with hideous weapons. They swindle one another with nefarious trade practices. They denigrate each other's cultures. They can't even agree to protect the air that they all breathe. What's more, the UN is inefficient and corrupt. It is a bloated home for bloviators. It passes pompous resolutions which no one takes seriously and, when a critical problem arises, it almost never finds a solution. Depending on the specific issue in question, it is either in the hands of a half-dozen or so major powers that treat it as a private club for their own benefit, or it is in the hands of irresponsible extremists including terrorists and terrorist sympathizers who use it as a platform to make outrageous statements mainly for propaganda purposes back home. It is worse than useless because it makes everything worse. What's even worse than that is the fact that it is now coming under the sway of overarching international corporations and regulatory organizations which thwart its nobler ideals and take advantage of its nepotism, cronyism and bureaucratic inertia.... or so it is said by critics who have been skeptical of the project at least since the dominant powers ceased to control the majority in the General Assembly, and probably long before. Even if this assessment were more false than true, however, it displays a level of frustration and pessimism that must be taken seriously by anyone who supports the UN's high-minded ideals in theory and in practice. For a moderately revealing account of UN statics, dynamics and political intrigue, see KofiAnnan's Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (2012) which, while plainly seeking to consolidate (or rescue) the UN Secretary-General's legacy, occasionally displays a measure of candor about the inherent limits of the United Nations as a political forum, an instrument of diplomatic intervention in conflict and an organization capable of making a difference in social, economic and humanitarian problems; but, we will get to such matters in due course.First, it is necessary to remind ourselves that, ever since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) forged a consensus among European powers about the nature and rights of sovereign nation-states, these generally well-defined political entities have been suspicious of alliances with friends and fretful of impending attacks by foes. They live in a largely lawless quasi-Hobbesian world. They fear domination by others, even as they seek to impose their influence on their neighbours, their regions and, in some obvious cases, the entire world. Despite the perils presented by other sovereign countries or alliances of countries, they are nevertheless frightened that a congress of large and small nations will conspire to violate their independence by imposing rules governing everything from ocean fishing to criminal law and presenting health care alternatives (birth control being only the most obvious) that various religions and cultures refuse to countenance. The countries that comprise the United Nations, whatever their ideologies, interests and b, commonly believe that they have indispensable rights as sovereign nations, and they are reluctant to compromise them even in what is demonstrably their own self-interest.Worries about foreign influence and about the potential power of an overriding international legislature, executive and judiciary is noticeably galling to the United States of America, which regularly affirms that it is exceptional and somehow above and beyond external control. Whether dealing with procedures to deal with crimes against humanity or eminently humane attempts to afford basic rights to the disabled that was based on its own Americans with Disabilities Act, US lawmakers are loathe to allow any international body to interfere with its citizens or its sovereign authority, no matter what the cause. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
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 teacher head, 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".