Bibliographic record
Abstract
It's not anyone who would choose-not once, but twice-to be posted to a country like Afghanistan. After all, UN's human development index, which in 2004 took its first comprehensive look in 30 years at that sad, troubled land, ranked it ijyd of 178 countries it tracks. And if you look at Euromoney's country risk rankings, Afghanistan is 18401 out of 185, just ahead of North Korea.The statistics are shocking, whether it's level of child mortality, literacy, corruption, or production of opium. The average life expectancy is 45 years. Then there's intractability of political and economic problems, 30 years of warfare, rivalries of warlords, strength of Taliban, lack of infrastructure, millions of landmines scattered throughout country, and number of able Afghans who have fled-though some have returned-leaving a huge talent deficit.Diplomats posted to Afghanistan face all of these problems in a country with a notoriously inhospitable terrain and severe security problems. The Canadian ambassador in Kabul is only Canadian ambassador forced to travel with bodyguards in armoured vehicle.Despite all this, in 2003, at remarkably young age of 34, Alexander, who had been number two in Canadian embassy in Moscow, put his name forward after Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade decided it wanted to appoint its first resident ambassador to Kabul (previously, Afghanistan had been handled from Islamabad, Pakistan).Seldom has anyone garnered more praise for his work as ambassador-one of youngest ever-or for his ongoing work in Kabul, after his two-year term came to end, as deputy special representative of UN secretary general for Afghanistan. Alexander has been variously described in articles as a wunderkind, rising star, young superstar, and golden boy, sensitive to Afghan culture, knowledgeable, persuasive, totally committed, and hardworking. Even normally scathing satirical magazine Frank grudgingly referred to him recently as hotshot former ambassador. In 2005, Alexander was named a young global leader by World Economic Forum and one of Canada's top 40 under 40.The dozen or so people interviewed for this profile echoed these heady assessments. Jawed Ludin, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's former chief of staff, says: Chris knows a lot of subtleties of political and social situation in Afghanistan. He is perhaps one of brightest and most capable diplomats that have come to Afghanistan over past five years. He played extraordinarily active role in diplomatic community in terms of relations with government. Ludin says that Alexander was a great help with disarmament of illegal arms programs and was active on human rights issues.I wouldn't normally follow a 38-year-old, but I would go anywhere with that guy, said Col. Mike Capstick, who worked closely with Alexander as commander of strategic advisory team for Afghanistan. Veteran aid executive Nipa Banerjee, who was head of aid for CIDA in Afghanistan when Alexander was ambassador, said he was the best ambassador I've ever worked for. Brig.-Gen. Dave Fraser, a Canadian who commanded NATO forces in south of Afghanistan, referred to him as an amazing man.There is a single, less happy theme, though Alexander shies away from discussing it. A number of observers say that some in Canadian government resent Alexander's youth, success, and creativity and prevented him from advancing, with result that he left foreign service (albeit on a leave of absence) for United Nations.BACKGROUNDChris Alexander grew up happily as only child of Andrea and Bruce Alexander, a lawyer, in Toronto, where he attended Oriole Park Public School. The family was athletic, and Alexander was a good student. He moved on to UTS, private University of Toronto Schools, where he made many longtime friends, including James Appathurai, NATO spokesperson with whom he made joint appearances in Ottawa and Toronto in early 2007 to press case for Afghanistan. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.014 |
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".