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Record W2185731738 · doi:10.3138/cjpe.19.001

The Role of the Evaluator in a Political World

2004· article· en· W2185731738 on OpenAlexvenueaboutno aff
Ernest R. House

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Program Evaluation · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicEvaluation and Performance Assessment
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsPower (physics)SimplicityArgument (complex analysis)EliteAmbiguityServantSociologyIndependence (probability theory)FundamentalismEnvironmental ethicsLawPolitical sciencePolitical economyEpistemologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Ernest House has continuously stressed the moral responsibility of evaluators. His social activist perspective has time and again alerted us to the dangers of being seduced by the agendas of those in power. (It was this stance that made him a particularly appropriate keynote speaker for Saskatchewan’s first CES annual conference; he is well versed in Saskatchewan’s history of co-operatives and social initiatives.) In his keynote address, he points out that the current political climate in the United States presents a threat to the independence and utility of evaluation, that is, the threat of becoming a servant of the power elite. Using Janice Gross Stein’s analysis of the cult of efficiency, he shows how political fundamentalism and methodological fundamentalism are intimately linked. As he wrote over 25 years ago in his monograph The Logic of Evaluative Argument (1977): “There are those who try to force simplicity atop the complexities of life and thereby eradicate ambiguity ... Often in positions of power, they impose arbitrary definitions of reality for the sake of action” (p. 47).

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)0.058
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.052
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.058
Threshold uncertainty score0.309

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0580.052
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0040.004
Science and technology studies0.0180.091
Scholarly communication0.0410.023
Open science0.0020.008
Research integrity0.0060.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.229
GPT teacher head0.520
Teacher spread0.291 · 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 designTheoretical or conceptual
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

Citations28
Published2004
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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