Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anderson, M.T. and Eugene Yelchin. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge. Candlewick Press, 2018. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge throws the reader into a topsy-turvy wonderland with the gripping adventure of two unlikely heroes, Brangwain Spurge and Werfel the Archivist. These two historians find themselves caught in a myriad of misunderstandings as they meet at the crux of a diplomatic mission between their warring nations of elves and goblins. An elfin historian turned diplomat and spy, Spurge must confront his own deeply entrenched prejudices against goblins, while his enthusiastic and well-intentioned goblin host, Werfel, attempts to guide him through an unfamiliar culture. Through a series of entertaining mishaps and cultural misunderstandings, M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin use their vivid characters and narrative style to craft an enjoyable story with underlying messages about cultural conflict and the ways in which prejudice colours our view of others. Most commendable in this book is the authors’ brilliant use of visual and text media to craft a work showing how individuals can understand the same events in wildly different ways. The mixed media drawings not only add a striking visual force to the novel, but they also serve a narrative function by showing the world through the eyes and imagination of Spurge. It becomes clear that Spurge’s understanding of his experiences conflicts with the more objective third-person account of events, illustrating how Spurge’s view of the world has been heavily skewed by his institutionalized prejudices. As Werfel quite wisely says: “Isn’t it so fascinating how in different countries, we have different views of the same events?” This book is appropriate for the intended age group of individuals aged ten to fourteen, but it can also be enjoyed by older teens and adults. With its compelling design and timely messages, this book would be an excellent addition to school and public libraries. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Arwen Thysse Arwen Thysse is a graduate of the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Arts program and the University of Toronto’s Master of Medieval Studies program. She is also an avid musician, and enjoys children’s books.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.004 |
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.
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".