MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W7132345246

RIP RBP: Robert B. Pynsent Is Dead

2023· article· cs· W7132345246 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCU Digital Repository · 2023
Typearticle
Languagecs
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTwentieth Century Scientific Developments
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNothingWifePublicityPoliticsCzechGovernment (linguistics)AntisemitismCriticism
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Today, I cannot really imagine never having had the opportunity to get to know Robert Pynsent .But actually, thirty-five years ago I almost didn't go to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES).While at the University of Toronto from 1984 to 1988, I had befriended Gordon Skilling, professor emeritus, whose area of specialization was Czechoslovak politics and dissidents.When I told Gordon and his wife Sally that I had been accepted into master's programmes at Michigan, Glasgow and London, I asked Gordon's opinion of each to help me decide.He had obtained his PhD from SSEES in 1940.'Well, a big part of your university years is the place where you'll be studying.And nothing compares to London.But that terrible man is there -Pynsent.'That was Skilling's reaction partly to the infamous Pynsent-Bruk-Short letter to The Times, in which, in less than 140 words, they bemoaned the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Jaroslav Seifert in 1984, and partly to Pynsent's not inviting Czechoslovak dissident historians to a 1986 Masaryk conference in London but inviting some regime-approved ones.'Oh, don't listen to Gordon,' said Sally.'Pynsent's all right.Don't worry.He and Gordon just crossed swords on occasion.That's all.'And that was enough, I suppose, to help me decide.In the autumn of 1988, when I first went to SSEES, few people of my acquaintance were interested in Czech history, politics, or literature, let alone Slovak.That was, I think, true despite the international publicity the country could enjoy with Seifert's receiving the Nobel Prize only four years earlier, Forman's great success with Amadeus the same year, and Kundera still being all the rage, particularly with the film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being released in 1988.But telling someone, say, at a party, that I was off to study Czech things in London was the perfect way to send that person looking for a way out of the conversation.It was hardly a surprise, then, to find when I got to SSEES that I was the only student enrolled in Robert's 'Czech Prose Fiction from 1958 to 1988', which I think he had to make because I was coming.And my Czech was so poor that he finally agreed to let me take the course largely thanks to David Short telling him that I would soon manage, particularly after a bit of help, which David generously provided.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Scholarly communication, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.107
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0040.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.015

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.227
Teacher spread0.204 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it