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Record W2997484600 · doi:10.1093/notesj/gjz189

Dickens, Longfellow, and the Mills of God

2019· article· en· W2997484600 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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueNotes and Queries · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMigration, Policy, and Dickens Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Lethbridge
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAllusionMillPhilosophyLiteratureHistoryClassicsArtArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, book 1, chapter 9, ‘Sissy’s Progress,’ Mr Gradgrind despairs at his young pupil’s intellectual attainments: ‘after eight weeks of induction into the elements of Political Economy, [Sissy] had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three feet high, for returning to the question, “What is the first principle of this science?” the absurd answer, “To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me”’. Though sufficiently obvious, most editors of the novel point out here the allusion to the Catechism of the Church of England in the Book of Common Prayer, based on Matthew 7:12. I am concerned with a further allusion contained within Gradgrind’s immediate response: ‘Mr Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad; that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge, as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular statements A to Z; and that Jupe “must be kept to it”’.1 In Hard Times, Dickens not infrequently satirizes the materialist assumptions of Utilitarianism and laissez-faire economics via an ironic inversion of biblical injunctions, as when Gradgrind is described ‘writing in the room with the deadly-statistical clock, proving something no doubt – probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist’.2 Similarly, the ‘infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge’ in Gradgrind’s model school serves as an ironic displacement of the ‘mill [or mills] of God’ or ‘of the gods’, with the phrase ‘tabular statements A to Z’, a possible mocking of the Alpha and Omega. This metaphor has a venerable pedigree in western culture. In addition to various classical sources, for example, the idea was translated into English by George Herbert as one of his Outlandish Proverbs: ‘Gods Mill grinds slow, but sure’.3

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 categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.503
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

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 studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.008
GPT teacher head0.264
Teacher spread0.256 · 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