Sentencing judges weren’t able to see into the internal workings of the model because the code was proprietary.

2016 report from the Obama-era Office of Science and Technology Policy warned that the impact of artificial-intelligence-driven algorithms on workers has the potential to worsen inequality, and noted that bias buried in computer code could disadvantage individuals in a host of fields.

The potential for underyling bias in software is not an easy issue for political leaders to tackle, in part because it’s so deeply technical

Crucial pieces of software can have big societal effects, and their biases can often go unnoticed until the results are already being felt.

artificially intelligent software, the stuff we count on to do everything from power our Netflix recommendations to determine our qualifications for a loan, often turns out to perpetuate social bias.

In this sense, it is both bond and weapon. Lorenz also thinks in Whiggish style that humour has progressed historically – that we are funnier now than we were in antiquity, and that contemporary humour is in general subtler and more searching than that of our ancestors.

Alenka Zupančič writes with rash generality of how comedy ‘sustains the very oppression of the given order or situation, because it makes it bearable and induces the illusion of an effective interior freedom’. Konrad Lorenz also treats the comic as essentially conservative, remarking that ‘laughter forms a bond and simultaneously draws a line’. He means that the solidarity humour breeds is inseparable from a sense of one’s difference from others, and may thus breed a certain antagonism towards them.

Finally, Ihave included chapters on two novels by Charles Brockden Brownbecause I wanted to show that texts already in the canon, whichmodern critics have considered artistically weak or defective, as-sume a quite different shape and significance when considered inlight of the cultural "work" they were designed to do

canon

And this led to the observation, again not original withme, that popular fiction, in general, at least since the middle ofthe nineteenth century, has been rigorously excluded from theranks of "serious" literary works.

Onepurpose of this book is to ask why these works, many of whichdid not seem at all deficient to their original audiences, have cometo seem deficient in the way I have just described. Another is toquestion the perspective from which these deficiencies spring tomind.

None is thought to have a distinguished prose style or toreflect a concern with the unities and economies of formal con-struction that modern criticism seeks in great works of ar

n fact, what all of these texts share, from the perspective of mod-ern criticism, is a certain set of defects that excludes them fromthe ranks of the great masterpieces: an absence of finely delineatedcharacters, a lack of verisimilitude in the story line, an excessivereliance on plot, and a certain sensationalism in the events por-trayed.

more fit for children thanfor adults.

modernist point of view, which tends to clas-sify work that affects people's lives, or tries to, as merely sensa-tional or propagandistic.

the last thirty years

beard

foolish story

‘Father will tell you, sir. He’s a wonderful man for his age; and he expresses himself beautifully.’

On the night before the assault on Seringapatam, he was absurdly angry with me, and with others, for treating the whole thing as a fable.

A similar superstition was once prevalent, as I have heard, in ancient Greece and Rome; not applying, however (as in India), to a diamond devoted to the service of a god, but to a semi-transparent stone of the inferior order of gems, supposed to be affected by the lunar influences

Yellow Diamond begin with the eleventh century of the Christian era

A Romance