reviews NON-FICTION THE SPICE OF CANDOUR
Bibliographic record
Abstract
begin by mentioning that Persky’s new collection of mem-oirs and opinion pieces is sup-posed to be modeled on Czeslaw Milosz’s two-volume work Milosz’s ABCs in which the late Polish Nobel Prize winner, in his mid-eighties, provided a miscellany of literary profiles, reflections and recollections, in alphabeti-cal order. Some reviewers will also men-tion that many of Persky’s ruminations and ramblings have been initially posted on the Dooney’s Café website managed by his friend Brian Fawcett in Toronto. Or they’ll quote Persky’s own obtuse explanation for his A-to-C litany. “An ABC book is perforce the short ver-sion of another, conceptually amorphous entity, just as life it-self is the short version of the dream of immortality. That en-tity is one that includes both a database—the sum of all my vo-cabularies—and the events of my life; together, they provide a lo-cus in which I experience the world.” All of which just gets in the way.
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 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.071 | 0.080 |
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".