Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Dewpoint Show Deborah Stevenson Howard, Barb. The Dewpoint Show. Fitzhenry, 2010. 231p. Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-55455-156-9 $12.95 R Gr. 6-9. "It's not as though Leonard Pierson can't hear his mother. … But right now there is important stuff going on outside." Those two sentences pretty much encapsulate the life of thirteen-year-old Leonard, who has just moved with his family to a new house in the country. There Leonard takes up his old pastime of avidly watching nearby happenings out the window, and his other old pastime of finding his parents largely irritating. His new home offers more than just cinematic-style entertainment, however, as he sorts out peer relationships (with a bullying frenemy on the soccer team and a brash, unconventional girl who likes him at school) and finds himself drawn slowly into friendship with the old lady next door. The plot in this Canadian novel is a subtle underlay to the sharp and humorous observations of [End Page 133] Leonard's daily life. The third-person narration captures with wry yet acute vividness an early teen's haplessness, as Leonard can't quite figure out how to be an active operator of his own life rather than simply flailing in surprise as other people's lives carom off of his. The occasional interpolation of episodes framed as if they were movie scenes doesn't really add stylistic dimension, but the additional viewpoints are illuminating. Characterization comes in revealing slices, with Leonard's parents (who "don't do well with advice") poignant, believable, and occasionally annoying as individuals clearly facing their own obstacles (Leonard's tightly wound mother is having second thoughts about the house move she herself instigated, and Leonard's father is suffering a mild mid-life crisis). The portrait of the next-door neighbor generally avoids clichés of adorable eccentricity or septuagenarian wisdom, and her relationship with Leonard develops with credible unpredictability. Leonard will be ruefully recognizable to many young people, even those who haven't had a moose heart dropped unexpectedly into their laps, and they'll snicker at his view of the world even as they applaud his eventual willingness to participate in it. Copyright © 2010 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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.105 | 0.041 |
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".