Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the summer of 1958, when I was growing up in Calgary, I was hired as a cub reporter by the editor of a local paper, the North Hill News.I was a sixteenyear-old Jewish boy.Although I didn't know it at the time, the editor, Roy Farran -a British war hero who would go on to a become a member of the Alberta legislature -was widely suspected of anti-Semitic views and conduct, including the torture and murder of a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy in Palestine during the last days of the British mandate.The scenes that follow recall my relationship with this dashing, enigmatic man who, apart from my parents, has probably been the single most influential figure in my life.xii m au r ice yacowa r That sounds like a memoir, doesn't it?Well, it is and it isn't.Two stories are juxtaposed here.My remembrances of my early forays into journalism -Roy and his North Hill News, along with my adventures as founding editor of my university newspaper -run down the left side of the page.That much is memoir.But over on the right side is the kind of shameless fantasy that has no place in a self-respecting memoir.There I compose a Roy Farran out of other material -his novels, his memoirs (sometimes drawing on his words, sometimes using my own).The notes acknowledge my use of Farran's published writings, which I habitually paraphrase.Thanks to my flypaper memory, in the conversations I recall, I quote him verbatim -his voice filtered, of course, through five decades of dead flies.Other scenes and speeches are entirely my invention.On his role in the Jewish boy's murder, I've also drawn on David Cesarani's revelations in Major Farran's Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948.1 Given Roy's politics, there's a certain poetic justice in that allocation of space -my story on the left, Roy's to the right.But I'm looking for another kind of justice.I'm trying to weigh the conflicting aspects of that remarkable man's life, if only to renegotiate what he meant to me and how he influences me still.Nor I was in London when Roy Farran died."Shit," I said, when on my return I heard the news."I missed his bloody funeral."I'd been looking forward to it.Not that I wished to see him dead; I just wanted to say hello to a few of the living.I hadn't seen the guys from the North Hill News for some fifty years.Like the crew from the print shop, foreman Milt Knight, his successor, Dick, the pressman, Frank, the linotype operator, George Volk.No, he's dead, his wife told me, a wonderful, funny man taken tragically young.But his brother, Bill, is still alive.Then there was young Billy, who would bellow "Mule Skinner Blues" ("Good mornin' cap-tain") to punctuate the boredom.Bill MacCallum is gone too.He did the leg work to start the Calgary Winter Club.Limp and all.There's a legacy for you.Now Graham Smith, who took over from Roy as editor, he has just passed away too.And the soon-to-be
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.008 |
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".