Book Review of Thistle, Jesse. (2019). From the Ashes: My Story of Being Metis, Homeless, and Finding my Way. Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the Ashes" recounts the author's personal experience of family turmoil, drug addiction, and homelessness.The author uses his gift for storytelling coupled with family photos and real lived experiences to paint a vivid and unflinching recollection of his personal struggles growing up estranged from his parents.The book begins with Thistle recounting a cherished memory of him and his grandmother that soon becomes dark as he shares with the reader how his parent's relationship was sullied with domestic violence.Thistle goes on to tell us about growing up with a drug addicted father in extreme poverty.Despite his parent's inability to provide a stable home, Thistle feels immense love and loyalty to them, especially his father.This loyalty and longing for his father will become Thistle's greatest demon and deeply impact his ability to maintain healthy, meaningful relationships in adolescence.Another source of tension for Thistle is understanding and making meaning of his Metis identity while growing up in a predominantly white suburb of Toronto.The key themes that emerge are of identity, belonging, addiction, and reconciling the ideals of family life with reality.Thistle begins "From the Ashes" by introducing us to his maternal grandparents, who live on property the Canadian government allocated to them using the road allowance system in Erin Ferry, Saskatchewan.Immediately that indicates to the reader the tension between being Canadian
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.063 | 0.038 |
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".