Bibliographic record
Abstract
Davies, Nicola. The Promise. Illus. Laura Carlin. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2014. Print.This is a picture book that may be read again and again. Its meaning and message has several layers and needs to be peeled like an onion. Davies and Carlin work together seamlessly to create and build tone and mood throughout the book while the reader is taken on a journey.The Promise is the story of a young girl living and growing up in a “mean and hard and ugly” city who has a chance encounter with an old lady. A promise is made that will change everything.Davies, a zoologist, is an award winning author and has written several other children’s books about nature and animals. In The Promise she develops a story that emphasizes the importance of our relationship with nature, particularly in the urban setting. The illustrations by Laura Carlin, are beautifully crafted from mixed media. For a children’s book, they are at first shockingly gloomy and depressing. This however, perfectly matches Davies descriptive and figurative language of an ugly city where, the “streets were dry as dust… never blessed with rain” and “a gritty yellow wind blew constantly, scratching around the buildings like a hungry dog.” The pages are initially dark, moody and mysterious, playing with various shades of gray and sepia. As the story line becomes more uplifting and lively, so do the pictures with pops of colour. Bright reds, greens, oranges and yellows, show bright displays of life and activity as “Green spread through the city like a song”. Carlin’s illustrations not only enhance the messages portrayed in the words of the book, but also build mood and evoke emotion.The Promise is a story of hope and how one person can be the change in this world. This book is appropriate for all ages, but the depth of the messages and multiple layers make it well suited for upper elementary. Teachers and librarians will want this book in their library.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Michele Wilson McCuneAs an elementary school teacher for Edmonton Catholic School Division and a mother of four, Michele loves reading and sharing literature with the important children in her life. She is currently working on completing her master’s degree in Elementary Education with a focus in Language and Literacy.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.109 | 0.089 |
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".