Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eula Biss On Immunity: An Inoculation Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014Since my first visit to Buffalo, New York in 1952, I have vacationed, studied and worked in the United States for periods of a few days to a full year on too many occasions to recount or recall. Still, I make no claim to understand American electoral politics better than any other foreigner. I do have some appreciation of its constitution, its two-party system and even its peculiar Electoral College; what I cannot quite grasp, however, is the tendency of its incumbent and aspirant office holders to begin campaigning for the next election before the dust has quite settled on the last one.I also have some difficulty coming to grips with the American culture, especially when seemingly unconnected issues at least temporarily find their way to the centre of political controversy. For instance, I find it more than passing strange that the American scientific community has done singular work in almost every imaginable field from outer space to particle physics and that the far-famed American know-how has been in the forefront of innovation from large-scale industrial manufacturing to nanotechnology; nonetheless, the people of the United States and many of their congressional leaders remain astonishingly ignorant of even the most fundamental facts of science. The far-famed tendency of Americans to be, for example, Biblical literalists and to reject the fact of biological evolution is just one of the most glaring examples of what seems to me to be an extraordinary paradox-equalled only, perhaps, by the eccentric juxtaposition of advanced nuclear knowledge and the extensive use of social media that coexists in the thoughts and actions of Islamic fundamentalists who cling to religious convictions that are plainly analogous to the antiquated notions of those in their US Bible-belt.Older Americans are strong supporters of requiring childhood vaccinations - 79% say they hold that view, compared with 59% of those under 30. (Anderson, February 2, 2015)These two phenomena-the apparent practice of continual electioneering and the pervasiveness of an anti-scientific ideology-has emerged already, almost two years before the forthcoming presidential elections of 2016. The current case in point concerns the public health measure of vaccination against communicable diseases-some of which had been fully eliminated in North America, but which are now staging a comeback thanks, in large measure, to the opposition that some people have to compulsory vaccination.Having grown up at the height of the polio epidemic and having experienced such childhood diseases as chicken pox (varicella), red measles (rubeola) and German measles (rubella), I am baffled by the fact that American politicians feel compelled to take a stand on whether or not publically mandated vaccinations should be compulsory. Most often, the case against vaccination is made on the basis of a uniquely American commitment to personal liberty and a preternatural distrust of anything having to do with government. Although quirky, this strain of American political thought at least has a pedigree of sorts and, when put in the language of contemporary libertarianism, it does represent a consistent and coherent, if not a cogent and convincing, political position.More dumbfounding are the blatantly false claims made by political candidates who are too close to the mainstream for comfort and who have made in the past or may make in the future allegedly credible holders of high office. The most publicized was probably the (not-socredible) presidential candidate Michele Bachmann who blurted out on Fox News (Weathers, 2015): There's a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result.The more people know about it the better. Some people put faith and trust in their medical doctors, rather than put their faith and trust in God. …
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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".