Bibliographic record
Abstract
One Thing about TelevisionSimply put, I believe in the benign influence of the medium.I've been a TV viewer since the age of four and a TV critic for more than a decade.When I began writing about television there was still a widespread belief among educated, well-intentioned readers of The Globe and Mail that TV was an instrument to engineer conformity.It is nothing of the kind.As television has expanded from a handful of commercial-supported, over-the-air networks into a multitude of niche channels, and technology has changed every aspect of it, television has become an instrument of subversion and change.Raw, live news footage beggars language in its power to influence opinion and attitude.Dramas and comedies aimed at a discerning audience, and made for broadcasters that don't rely primarily on advertising support, have the freedom to tell stories that challenge rather than comfort an audience.The hostility toward television among an educated audience in Canada has always seemed peculiar, if not outlandish, to me.It was, after all, a Canadian academic, Marshall McLuhan, who pioneered the serious study of television and the manner in which the consumer participates in all that television achieves.McLuhan's legacy often seems thin in Canada while it prospers elsewhere.One can speculate that as Canada asserted a national identity and culture for itself, primacy was given to literature and art while the study of popular culture of all types was ignored or downgraded.And yet as a country so vast that, pre-Internet, one could justifiably claim that television and radio linked Foreword One Thing about Television and Ten Things about Canadian TV
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.003 |
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".