Blazes along a Diplomatic Trail: A Memoir of Four Posts in Canada's Foreign Service
Bibliographic record
Abstract
'T^he rising number of memoirs published by Canadian diplomats JL in recent years strikes a different note from that heard in the memoirs of the preceding generation. The memoirists of the 'golden age' were disposed to recall, expansively, how they had grappled with the great issues of the day, in politics and other areas. The current generation writes more personally, more modestly, more succinctly in a lower key. Gordon Browns memoir is an engaging example of the current school. This is an admirably selective memoir. The author tells of his twelve best years (1958-70) in four overseas postings. The foreign service is becoming a bureaucracy, the mandarins civil servants. But it is still fun: this account of diplomatic life breathes with Browns bluff personality, practical, wry, and down to earth. The title itself is fun: blazes are cut prudendy to mark a trail but they are also conflagrations hot spots encountered on the way. The hot spots Brown encounters are: the implementation of grand apartheid in South Africa (leading to its departure from the Commonwealth); the last phase of Khrushchev's rule in the Soviet Union and his overthrow; General Mobutu's rise to power in Congo amid great-power rivalry and civil strife (compounded, for the embassy in Kinshasa, by a fuel crisis in Zambia and Quebec's effort to play the part of a sovereign state in Africa); and the Greek-Turkish conflict in Cyprus (together with the Trudeau government s disengagement from it). Each is of interest in itself, as are the sub-plots. Students of diplo-
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.068 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".