Book Review: The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison, 1856-1878, by Peter Oliver (ed)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison may have been a conventional man, but he was far from ordinary.Only forty-five years old at his death, he had already been chief justice of Ontario for three years, having been appointed straight from the bar, where he was recognized as the province's top common law practitioner.One might guess that such a high achiever got off to a fast start and this diary confirms the supposition.Only twenty-two years old at its opening, he was already running the office of Attorney General for Canada West John A. Macdonald, having received the job two years prior from Macdonald's predecessor.He was also writing articles (sometimes two a day) for a leading Toronto conservative newspaper, taking a prominent part in debates at the city's Literary and Debating Society, and working at full spate on the latest in a series of legal manuals.The first of such manuals was a comprehensive digest of Upper Canadian common law reports, which appeared in 1852.To this workload Harrison soon added a leading role as writer and co-editor at the newly founded Upper Canada Law Journal, a progenitor of the Canadian Bar Review.After work he danced into the small hours, was the life and soul of many drinking parties, and still found a few hours in the day (or night) for sleeping.But sleeping, it appears, is not what he was best at.Harrison's fast start brings to mind another high-flyer, Ontario Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, who became acting Attorney General of Upper Canada at the age of twenty-one and chief justice before he was forty.But Robinson's career was accelerated by the wartime S[The Conventional Man]. 2 Baltimore.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.012 |
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".