âFailure is Not Acceptableâ: The Recollections of a Canadian in French Foreign Legion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I remember the day very well, a cold Tuesday in January 1989, and Pearson International Airport was bustling with travellers. I was amongst them, an inconspicuous 18-year-old middle-class Canadian boarding the plane as if it was a frequent occurrence. A seven-day vacation in France, that was the plan. I often wonder if I had known then what I do now—would I have boarded that plane? The trip lasted five years and it was no vacation, for within 24 hours of boarding the plane, I had become a member of the infamous French Foreign Legion. Life would never be the same again.
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.079 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".