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Record W1234754036 · doi:10.20361/g2hw21

A is for activist by I. Nagar

2015· article· en· W1234754036 on OpenAlex
Leslie Aitken

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.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
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

VenueThe Deakin Review of Children s Literature · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCrafts, Textile, and Design
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedia studiesPoliticsVotingDemocracyCourtesyWritSociologyMotleyRevelsMantraLawVisual artsArtLiteraturePolitical scienceLinguisticsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Nagar, Innosanto. A is for activist. Mississauga, Ontario: Random House, 2013. Print.A publisher’s release indicates that Innosanto Nagar is the founder of “…The Design Action Collective, a worker-owned cooperative design studio in Oakland, California, that is dedicated to “serving the movement…” (Enclosure dated November 16, 2013). It is not the least bit surprising, then, that he would produce a book in the cause of activism; in fact, he would appear singularly qualified to do so. But that he should, in good conscience, produce this particular book is baffling.At times political propaganda, always a diatribe, A is for activism comes in the form of a board book for tiny hands, and in the guise of an ABC book. Who is Nagar’s intended audience? Or, more cynically, just whom is his publisher trying to kid?The underlying intent of English language alphabet books is to introduce preschoolers to phonics. Typically, words and illustrations are kept within the young child’s own experience level, real or vicarious. One is free to agree with the following sentiment; it is, however, absurd to suggest it as an appropriate mnemonic for fastening the sound of the letter “d” in the mind of a three-year-old: “Little d democracy More than voting, you’ll agree. Dictators Detest it. Donkeys Don’t get it. But you and me? We Demand equality!” It also strains credibility to think that the symbolism of the illustration accompanying this stanza, a donkey and an elephant butting heads, will be grasped by American infants. This mnemonic for “n,” I grant you, might appeal to a two-year-old; but his mother? Not so much. “N is for NO No! No! No! Yes, to what we want. No to what must go! No! No! No!” Finally, if you are seriously opposed to the expanding use of fossil fuels, join the adult conversation. Sell your car. Install some solar panels. Vote. Don’t waste time teaching your babies to chant, “Silly Selfish Scoundrels Sucking on dinosaur Sludge!”Some of Nagar’s ideas would be worth presenting to high school students—but not in board book format. For young children, there are excellent picture books about people who have championed human causes with courage and conviction; for example, Every Day is Malala Day by Rosemary McCarney. Don’t buy A is for activist for a little child. If you must have it, buy it as a gift for your adult friend who joins causes. With this last possibility in mind, I am awarding the book one out of four stars.Not Recommended: 1 out of 4 starsReviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.875
Threshold uncertainty score0.446

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
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 head0.031
GPT teacher head0.273
Teacher spread0.241 · 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