Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Black Hole of Public Administration is an important book. It deals with the current imperfect state of the Canadian Public Service, and offers a plausible explanation for much of what ails it. The authors have been studying these issues for a decade, as a practitioner and an academic, respectively, and this book brings their ideas together and offers a far-reaching original framework for understanding what is happening. “Our intent, ” they say, “[is] to draw attention to important governance challenges unmet as well as to some provisional diagnoses about the sources of the present difficulties. ” But The Black Hole goes beyond diagnosis; it also offers some sharp criticisms, and suggests ways of improving things. The book is rich in content, displaying the authors ’ exhaustive knowledge of the public service, and their familiarity with relevant thinking in the social sciences. It is illuminating, but not an easy read. The preface is excellent in introducing the key ideas, but the bulk of the book is long (nearly 500 pages), sometimes repetitive, and in places difficult to understand. Nevertheless, it held my interest to the very end since it deals with situations that I have encountered in my own working life. It is a challenge to write a review of such a long and complex book, and make it short and simple. Therefore, I tried only to introduce the key ideas in the book and give the readers of the review enough of a taste of it to decide whether to read the whole thing, as I have done. In doing this, I had to omit
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".