Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: North to Benjamin by Alan Cumyn Deborah Stevenson Cumyn, Alan North to Benjamin. Dlouhy/Atheneum, 2018 [304p] ISBN 978-1-4814-9752-7 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-7 Yet again, Edgar's flighty mother is bolting from a boyfriend to start a new life (and find a new man); this time she and eleven-year-old Edgar are moving from Toronto to Dawson, in the Yukon, where they'll be housesitting and dogsitting. [End Page 115] Dawson turns out to be an everybody-knows-everybody town, and Benjamin, the Newfoundland dog Edgar is tasked with caring for, is actually staying with helpful Ceese and his daughter, Caroline, who befriend Edgar and his mother. Shy Edgar bonds with Benjamin and quickly grows fond of the old Gold Rush town and its people, so he's angry and unhappy when it becomes clear that his mother is setting her sights on Ceese (who has a kind long-term girlfriend), which is sure to lead to a blow-up and yet another departure. Veteran Canadian author Cumyn brings a frosty helping of Arctic magical realism to this sympathetic novel of a boy's increasing distress at his dysfunctional family life, as Edgar develops the ability to communicate with Benjamin and other animals while finding his attempts at human speech come out only as barking. The book treats this development with full seriousness, acknowledging it as an imaginative boy's response to the situation without undercutting the authenticity of the experience. In fact, it's heartening that Edgar, who's made his way through life by trying to pass unnoticed while attention focuses on his mother, finally disrupts that pattern. Ultimately, this is an original and deeply atmospheric outing, haunted by Jack London and chilled by a Yukon spring, that will especially intrigue readers with their own affinity for dogs. DS Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.398 | 0.276 |
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".