The Freedom Machine

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Remi Martin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Final Decision ◽  
Second Nature ◽  
Making Choices ◽  
Service Representative

If you could have a tool always whispering in your ear the best choices, would you use it? Is being the best version of yourself the point of life? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Kiki has a problem, the computer program that continually whispers the best choices, the Infinity System, is broken. She has been using it for years and simply doing what it says. Following its advice has become second nature to her. She heads into the shop to get it looked at, and finds out it must be sent off for repairs. She will be making choices on her own for a few days. The friendly “Mastermind” service representative at the shop asks her out on a date. Without her Infinity System giving her advice, she decides to take a chance and say yes. She ends up getting drunk and sleeping with him. When she heads into the store to check to see if her Infinity System is repaired, she sees the same “Mastermind” using the same pickup lines on a new woman. She storms out. Finally, after several lost days, her repaired Infinity System is repaired and sent to her house. Now she is stuck with the final decision, will she start using it again?

Abrama's End Game

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 98-117
Author(s):  
David Shultz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Short Story ◽  
General Public ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Computer Game ◽  
Computer Code ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Computer Hackers ◽  
Closed World ◽  
New Information

What does it mean to be alive? Can a computer program be sentient? What would it need to do to prove it? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Abrama is summoned to the Grand Temple by Sir Gödel. Gödel informs Abrama that he is living in a simulated world (a computer game) created by her people as a place to play in their free time. She also informs Abrama that the game is not as popular as it once was and is scheduled to be permanently turned off. It turns out Gödel is an AI researcher that was given permission to test out her AI by implanting characters like Abrama into the game. Over 100’s of versions, the AI continued to improve, and now the researcher feels an ethical obligation to tell her creations their world is coming to an end. Abrama, using this new information, organizes the AI characters in the game and starts trading virtual goods for real-life services from computer hackers that play the game. The computer hackers create computer code and sell it to Abrama. If triggered, or if the game is turned off, the code would expose top secret information to the general public. A bargain is struck, the game will continue on a closed world for the AI characters and, in exchange, the sensitive information will never be made public.

THE MAN WHO WROTE A NEW WOMAN NOVEL: GRANT ALLEN'STHE WOMAN WHO DIDAND THE GENDERING OF NEW WOMAN AUTHORSHIP

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Vanessa Warne ◽  
Colette Colligan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Grant Allen

IN1895,GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVELentitledThe Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton'sKeynotes(1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman.The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

scholarly journals Collapsing the Courtship Plot

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Beller
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Woman's Sphere ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Improved Model

The New Woman writing of the 1890s grappled with the legacy of mid-nineteenth century constructions of romance and gender ideology. In their bid to promote a new vision of heterosexual relations between the sexes, New Woman writers often explicitly engaged with earlier ideals of Separate Spheres and the “Angel in the House.” The short story provided an ideal form for exploring these issues, freeing writers from the generic conventions of the traditional three-volume novel. This article examines the ways in which three women writers of the 1890s attempted to rewrite the script of mid-Victorian courtship through the short story genre. In different, but related ways, Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s “One Doubtful Hour” all offer a challenge to the doctrine of separate spheres. Yet, while each of these texts critique what they present as outmoded views of woman’s sphere and nature, they also articulate the difficulties experienced by both genders in imagining an evolved and improved model of sexual relations. These short stories represent the collapse in New Woman fiction of the traditional “courtship plot” through a failure to re-imagine and re-map the mid-Victorian gender ideology they seek to dismantle.

scholarly journals Visual Binary Orbit Calculation with the Help of a PC: One Possible approach

1992 ◽  
Vol 135 ◽  
pp. 217-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. Ćatović ◽  
D. Olević
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Orbit Determination ◽  
Original Method ◽  
Double Star ◽  
Final Decision ◽  
Visual Binary ◽  
Binary Orbit

AbstractIn this work we suggest one possible approach to “computerization” of the process of the visual double star orbit determination. Our computer program, based on the original method (Olević 1989), is interactive which means that the calculator of the orbit makes the final decision about the choice of the best orbit.

“A BEAUTIFUL TRANSLATION FROM A VERY IMPERFECT ORIGINAL”: MABEL WOTTON, AESTHETICISM, AND THE DILEMMA OF LITERARY BORROWING

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Anderson Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Own Name

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton's short story, “The Fifth Edition” (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, “If you really think there is any good in it . . . it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or . . . you must take it” (179). Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, re-writes, and then publishes it under his own name, he hasn't done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby's subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden's actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton's fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the “shady commerce between art and truth” (6) makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde, and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.

The Machine

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 35-39
Author(s):  
Harman Burgess ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The Future ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
Do So

A review of "Newcomb’s paradox" and "Roko’s Basilisk," asks the question, it is better to help build a super AI when failure to do so might later get you punished by it? This work of philosophical short story of fiction is written as a letter to a friend. The letter writer was told about, and is now working on, a computer program that will infiltrate and merge with other computers, eventually created a singularity of a super intelligent, conscious AI. This AI, the author argues, will have mastered time travel and will naturally want to go back in time and punish anyone who failed to help it come to life. The author concludes the letter by requesting $3,000 and making clear that failure to send the money might be viewed by the future AI (if it is ever created) as a punishable response for failing to help it get built.

Reading Failure in(to) Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Lady Jeune's “New Woman” Essays, 1885–1900

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Type I ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Jude The Obscure

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

scholarly journals ‘An Adventuress I Would Be’: Originality in Miss Cayley’s Adventures in The Strand Magazine.

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-122
Author(s):  
Mercedes Sheldon
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Grant Allen ◽  
Detective Genre ◽  
Negative Connotation

When read straight through as a novel, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1898-99) appears to reside singularly within the detective genre; this reading limits our understanding of the ways in which Grant Allen challenges the anxieties regarding gender held by the contemporary, conservative readership of The Strand Magazine (1891-1950). Allen integrates multiple popular genres into the short story serial, including the detective stories which frame the narrative, as well as cycling romance, mountaineering, typist, and travel stories. Gordon Browne’s illustrations underscore Allen’s manoeuvres, visually inviting the reader to trust the protagonist and by extension to accept her “artless adventures.” I contend that, when read within its original, illustrated periodical context, Miss Cayley’s Adventures does not present the magazine’s readership with a New Woman detective but rather with a female adventurer, an adventuress. The letterpress and illustrations rely on and subvert the negative connotation of the word, using it as a critical means to interrogate the New Woman trope and to show the middle classes an original way to view womanhood.

A Model of Categorization for Use in Automated Failure Analysis

1988 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-563
Author(s):  
J. P. Morrill ◽  
D. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Computer Program ◽  
Failure Analysis ◽  
Bayes Theorem ◽  
Final Conclusion ◽  
Final Decision ◽  
Set Membership ◽  
Determining Set

Categorization is the procedure of determining set membership based on either necessary or statistically suggestive conditions for membership. This procedure lies at the heart of automated metallurgical failure analysis, controlling the accuracy of the final conclusion. This article examines the tradeoff between the number of questions posed by the computer during data collection and the certainty of the final decision. After a brief overview of failure analysis decision making, a model of categorization is proposed which is derived from Bayes’ theorem that asks questions in order of relevance and stops when an adequate level of certainty is achieved. This eliminates irrelevant questions without significantly compromising the accuracy of the final conclusion. The model has been implemented as part of an artificial intelligence computer program.

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