Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Word Nerd Deborah Stevenson Nielsen, Susin; Word Nerd. Tundra, 2008; [256p] ISBN 978-0-88776-875-0 $18.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6–9 When Ambrose’s overprotective mother realizes the depths of her son’s unpopularity, [End Page 38] she takes Ambrose out of seventh grade and starts him on homeschooling. Spending all his time at home, he becomes fascinated with Cosmo, newly released from prison and now living in the upstairs apartment with his parents. Ambrose discovers that Cosmo is, like Ambrose himself, a Scrabble aficionado, so he wheedles Cosmo into secretly driving the both of them to the meetings of a Scrabble club. Thus begins a new chapter in Ambrose’s life, wherein Cosmo’s mentorship gives him a perspective he needs, his developing Scrabble (and social) skills provide him with new feelings of competence and acceptance, and his daring to do something that would be forbidden by his mother stiffens up his backbone. While this has many of the hallmarks of slapstick-touched boy books—bathroom humor, mammary appreciation—Canadian author Nielsen resists such titles’ usual tendency to pad their realistic edges, and she instead marries an age-appropriate jokiness to genuinely thoughtful writing. Ambrose isn’t merely a put-upon bullied lamb but a sometimes annoying kid who has, until Cosmo, lacked somebody with both the authority and perspective to knock him back when he’s being a jackass, and their brotherly, unstatedly affectionate relationship is well drawn. Secondary characters are also sturdily crafted: Cosmo, a youthful screwup making a serious effort to turn over a new leaf, isn’t romanticized, and Ambrose’s mother is sympathetic even as she’s overanxious and short-sighted. There’s humor and poignancy enough here for both fellow word nerds and those who just enjoy seeing a kid blossom under unlikely circumstances. Copyright © 2008 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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.246 | 0.155 |
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".