Off Our Rockers and Into Trouble, The Raging Grannies. Alison Acker and Betty Brightwell. (2004). Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., Victoria, BC, 224 pages.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt coined the name "muckrakers" to designate those literary personalities who exposed corruption and unethical practices in the meatpacking, oil, railroad, and food industries.Although sometimes vilified as opportunists, those who raked around in the muck were ultimately responsible for major governmental reforms in these industries and paved the way for progressive legislation.Contrasting Canada's own muckraking phenomena, The Raging Grannies, with their earlier American counterparts is a bit of a stretch, but this movement, which began in Victoria, BC in 1987, does have similar ends in mind: "We were out to shock....We would rattle the cages of all those who, we felt, were destroying our world: politicians, corporations, warmongers and wreckers of the environment" (p.xi).Who are the Raging Grannies?As their name indicates, they are grandmothers who would go anywhere and do anything to focus attention on issues of their concern, whether by wearing outrageous clothes, writing outrageous poetry, or singing outrageous words with undisciplined voices.Indeed, after almost two decades of showmanship, the Grannies are not only national in scope, but have international counterparts.True enough, one can call Off Our Rockers and Into Trouble, The Raging Grannies a history of this 17-year-old movement, but that would be too limiting a description.To be sure, their purpose is to gain our attention to their concerns, and they will delightfully employ any means to achieve publicity.If only public awareness were enough, but, as they candidly admit, it isn't.Are they then a failure?Definitely not, although perhaps it is still too early to tell.As outlandish as their means might be, they have been responsible for the creation of sixty chapters throughout Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and even Australia.There is a Grannies Without Borders chapter, while the Ottawa contingent, known as the Parliament Hill Mob, often manages to garner national attention, as they did in protest to the
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.083 | 0.044 |
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".