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Record W2121329059 · doi:10.3828/bjcs.19.2.11

Human Rights Codes: Are They Ready for Today's Challenges?

2006· article· en· W2121329059 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
ONS Mayann Francis

Bibliographic record

VenueBritish Journal of Canadian Studies · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal Issues in South Africa
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMandateHuman rightsCommissionNova scotiaEquity (law)Political scienceSociologyLawWork (physics)Engineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

One of the most challenging aspects of my work with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission (NSHRC) is the opportunity to reach new audiences and engage them in a thoughtful dialogue about the importance of human rights issues. Each new audience poses different questions and contexts in which to carry on this dialogue. Amazingly, while the locales may change, the issues themselves are not really all that different. Equality and the freedom to build a future for ourselves and our communities are common values I believe are shared the world over. The groundwork for this article was actually laid some years ago by one of my colleagues from the NSHRC. Viki Samuels, Coordinator of Race Relations and Affirmative Action, was at Queen's University Belfast in November 2000 talking about the work of her division and the challenges and opportunities which a diverse society can bring. I like to call Ms Samuels' work the leading edge of human rights in Nova Scotia. Instead of waiting for issues of discrimination to be brought forward by complainants, her division is reaching out to all the various sectors of Nova Scotian society and encouraging them to protect equity and fairness before discrimination can become an issue. When I came to the NSHRC in August 1999, I knew that I was going to have to roll up my sleeves - a lot of work needed to be done. As Director and CEO, I came with a mandate to create change within the organisation because a cultural shift was needed. We needed to become more customerfocused and more efficient at what we were doing. We needed to expand our gaze beyond reactive work, to work which anticipated the change happening around us. By making that shift we could become agents of positive change for Nova Scotia. The work of Ms Samuels' division is enabling that positive change. One of the first things I did as CEO was to initiate a comprehensive organisational review of the Commission, its first since it was created in the late 1960s. That review meant taking a hard look at our current practices and resources and making sure they matched the external climate. When the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act and the NSHRC were created the intention was to help combat the discrimination which had marginalised communities of people such as African Nova Scotians and aboriginals. Three decades later we need to ask the question, 'Were we doing that job well enough?' A lot has changed in the intervening thirty years. Both complainants and respondents are more aware of their rights, thanks to the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ('the Charter') and the reach of the media. And now immigration is a more important factor to counter the ageing of our population. In Nova Scotia, we have one of the highest occurrences of disability in Canada - 17.1 per cent in 2001 (Statistics Canada 2002) - making issues of accessibility of critical importance. These and other factors challenge the NSHRC to evolve and keep pace with change. One thing I believe passionately is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It is far better for the NSHRC to be engaging business and community leaders in a dialogue that promotes positive change instead of waiting for issues to be brought to us requiring investigation of complaints of discrimination. Surely we have become smart enough in this new century to realise that racism, sexism, classism and all those other 'isms' not only are a moral blemish on our societies, but harm all of us by diminishing our well-being on the social and economic level. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned how interconnected our world is. 'Globalisation' is a fashionable phrase used to describe the intricate web of relationships that binds Canada with the United Kingdom and both of us to the rest of the globe. People, money and resources flow in ways which could never have been imagined even fifty years ago. Along with the material aspects of a globalised society, human rights continue to occupy an ever more important role. …

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.023
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.061
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.973
Threshold uncertainty score0.462

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0230.061
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0140.050
Scholarly communication0.0270.029
Open science0.0030.009
Research integrity0.0150.023
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0160.004

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.

Opus teacher head0.080
GPT teacher head0.344
Teacher spread0.263 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueBritish Journal of Canadian StudiesSame topicLegal Issues in South AfricaFrench-language works237,207