The IB&M Initiative: Reflections on 20 Years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I was asked to submit a brief article to the Society Record highlighting the 20th Anniversary of the Indigenous Blacks & Mi’kmaq (IB&M) Initiative at Dalhousie Law School. Not long after that request, Donald Marshall, Jr. passed away. I had hoped that Mr. Marshall might be able to attend our 20th Anniversary celebrations, however, we will still include him by honouring his sacrifices and legacy. So upon reflection, and rereading the book Justice Denied, the report of the Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution [Marshall Commission Report] and the 1990 Special Edition of the Micmac News, the original focus of this article changed. These sources provided a glimpse into the experiences of Donald Marshall, Jr., a Mi’kmaq man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and imprisoned for 11 years; and Sanford (Sandy) Seale, a promising young African Nova Scotian who was killed during the same initial incident. Both men were from loving and hard-working families. I cannot say with certainty whether the IB&M Initiative would have been created were it not for the Marshall Commission. I can say that Mr. Marshall’s experience and the resulting Commission contributed significantly to the development and ongoing support of the IB&M Initiative. Recommendation 11 of the Marshall Commission Report states: We recommend that the Dalhousie Law School’s minority admissions program for Micmacs and indigenous Blacks receive the financial support of the Governments of Canada and Nova Scotia, and the Nova Scotia Bar.1 Consequently, the IB&M Initiative collectively “stands on the shoulders” of Donald Marshall, Jr., Sandy Seale and the supporters and allies who continue to believe in justice.
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 | 0.025 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.040 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".