“You Should Not Need to Go to a Table in the Corner”: Experiencing Transitions with Jim Mann, Dementia Educator and Advocate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On April 5th, 2022, the author, Dr. Josephine McMurray, sat down with Jim Mann, former Director of Government Affairs at Air Canada, who in 2007 at the age of 58, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Since then, Jim’s transition from retiree to “person living with dementia” was swiftly replaced with “advocate and educator” after observing and experiencing the sharp stings of stigma and stereotyping that can accompany a dementia diagnosis. Since then, Jim has dedicated his life to living positively with his diagnosis. He has appeared before federal and provincial Parliamentary committees, been interviewed for radio, television, and podcasts, and spoken throughout Canada to large and small groups as a keynote speaker or discussant at conferences, meetings, and in classrooms. He also collaborates with researchers across Canada on grant applications and academic publications. Above all, Jim’s message about dementia-awareness is one of education and hope. In 2020, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia (UBC) for his advocacy on behalf of the rights of people with dementia. The University noted, “he has been acknowledged as the single-most influential person in Canada for countering negative stereotypes and promoting an inclusive society in which persons with dementia can make an active and meaningful contribution.” Jim Mann is a Canadian national treasure, and after reading our conversation with him (presented verbatim but divided into sections for clarity to highlight key aspects of transition), we are confident you’ll agree that his personal transition to dementia advocate and educator has been our gain. At the conclusion of the interview, the author provides a reflection on the interview and its possible interpretation situated in the context of contemporary transitions theory.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".