Ear cropping and tail docking - a comment.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dear Sir, This is a comment regarding the most recent review articles in The Canadian Veterinary Journal (Can Vet J 2010;51:485–492; 598–604) on spinal cord injury by David Fowler et al, which was brought to my attention only recently. I found the article to be severely lacking in a comprehensive and basic understanding of the biology of spinal cord and central nervous system (CNS) injury/repair in general. Not mentioned in the article, for instance, was the extensive work done in the treatment of CNS injury by investigators whose work in the basic science should be made public to the veterinary community. Ironically, much of this work was done at the University of Saskatchewan and much of that in connection with the Department of Human Neurosurgery there. Specific therapies not mentioned included ways to control reactive gliosis (using rat optic nerve as a model of such) with Ara-C, cholorquine and 6-aminonicatinamide and promoting nerve growth/sprouting with use of effectively applied and oriented DC current, laminin, collagen type IV. As for the biology of the peri-axonal milieu, the ability of astrocytes and Schwann cells to thrive in anaerobic environments due to their high complement of glutamine synthetase and lactic dehydrogenase is worthy of mention, as well as the synthesis of a protein specific to reactive glial-enriched tissue which may provide a specific marker for control of reactive astrocytes. In addition, the use of peripheral nerve grafts and explants of peripheral nerve was mentioned only briefly, in connection with Aguayo et al, but not other people who have done far more with this technology than their group. Also, high doses of glucocorticoids (10 times inflammatory levels) were tested in rodent models of spinal cord injury by members of the neurosurgical unit in Saskatoon and were shown to have a beneficial post-traumatic effect histologically and behaviorally. Furthermore, electrostimulation of emergency acupuncture first aid points (Gv4, UB 62, 60, UB 39/40) was shown to preserve spinal cord tissue and function in rodent models, this work having been done at the University of Saskatchewan and subsequently published in the Journal of Acupuncture and Electrotherapeutics. Most of the aforementioned work was done and published between 1979 and 1991. But unless I am mistaken, biological bodies have not changed since that time, and the information obtained is worth maintaining in the public eye. The investigators who did this work moved on to other things and while doing them were working with limited funds, which are the only reasons why follow-up articles were not done. Specific articles can be accessed by digging up articles by J.E. Miller, M.J. Politis, M. Khan, J. Beveridge, M.F. Zanakis, and B. Albala.
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 | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.014 |
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".