Book Review of Skidmore, Patricia. (2018). Marjorie: Her War Years. A British Home Child in Canada. Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Her War Years" recounts her mother's life and harrowing experiences as an involuntary participant in the British Home Child program; this practice consisted of removing the children of England's poor "from the streets" and deporting them to the colonies under the guise of improving their prospects (p.24).Much of the book focuses on the hardship and abuse the author's mother, Marjorie, experienced as she was removed from her home at the age of ten and sent to the Fairbridge Farm School in British Columbia.Skidmore thoroughly conveys the repercussions of child deportation as the book covers the span of Marjorie's life and explores themes of family, resiliency, and intergenerational trauma.Skidmore's judicious use of primary sources, combined with her expressive tone and diction, underlines her criticism of child deportation and evokes reader empathy.The author convincingly portrays the gravity of child deportation through her comprehensive analysis and depiction of the matter.Skidmore establishes the book's premise by describing her motive and method for her work, the rationale behind child deportation and her rebuttal for the practice.The reasoning behind the deportation of poor British children essentially was that their lives were worth more as an "imperial investment" to the colonies, to be trained as
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.059 | 0.030 |
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".