Book Review: The Best Interests of Children: An Evidence-Based Approach, by Paul Millar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IF CUSTODY AND ACCESS DISPUTES are a deck of cards, the best interests of the child doctrine is the trump suit.When separating parents litigate about howand with whom-their children should live, findings about what is best for the children are meant to sweep away the parents' interests and rights claims.This principle is uncontroversial, but applying it is difficult.What parenting arrangements are best for children, and how successful is the legal system in putting these arrangements in place?Sociologist Paul Millar responds to these questions with this volume, the goal of which is to "explain child custody outcomes in Canada in terms of factors that predict legal behaviour and factors that are empirically associated with beneficial outcomes for children."'The empirical data in this book are a powerful and fruitful new resource.However, the book would benefit from a broader and more objective account of the law and secondary research in this field.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
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".