Bibliographic record
Abstract
For several years I was obsessed with the corporate takeover of the North American funeral industry.I'd encountered mortality studies during my BA in Anthropology, and continued this work into my MA.It began with a basic interest in the relationship between funeral director and client.But then I met Tom Crean, a funeral director in Vancouver.He became the subject of my thesis, as well as a 20-minute documentary film I made as a companion piece.Tom is a third-generation, independent funeral director in Vancouver, BC.He was in his last term at UBC studying for a philosophy degree when he received a fateful phone call.It was 1975 and his uncle, the owner of the family funeral business, had died suddenly of a heart attack.His mother called him up and told him that if he didn't take over the business she would sell it.Tom quit school the next day and has never looked back.Tom is a man who draws you in.He can be caring, professional, sympathetic, and has a deep, authoritative voice.He's also an experienced activist and community organizer, full of fire and passion.I first approached his funeral home to ask if I could do some ethnographic fieldwork within its walls.By the end of my first meeting with him, I had been recruited.Tom wasn't interested in my academic theorizing.I told him I was also a filmmaker, and so he decided that we would make a film together.He wanted me to help fight back against the corporate takeover of the funeral industry, which he'd been resisting for years.This was a matter of social justice, he told me, not academic requirements.And the power of film would be our medium.The film was eventually titled Tom Quixote.It was as much a biopic of Tom and his fascinating history as it was about the rise of corporate "deathcare" and the movement to fight its encroachment into the industry.Tom was engaged in legal battles with Service Corporation International (SCI), the world's largest provider of deathcare services.Under the moniker of "Dignity Memorial," SCI has acquired thousands of previously
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.185 | 0.040 |
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".