Sherlock

• You are likely familiar with its methods and central plot lines, even if you don’t know what it is!
• Anonymous personal advertisements made up the Agony Column in the mid- to late- 19th century.

Power of encryption

• Encryption gave authors writing personal messages the ability to share private messages in a public forum.
• Personal dramas unfolding there day after day meant the Agony Column was widely popular in 19th-century English newspapers.

Longing, tragedy and the everyday

• Advertisements written by individuals from across the British Empire were dubbed “the agonies” by 1853 because they were full of longing, tragedy and profound misfortune shadowing the Victorian domestic everyday.
• They occupied prime real estate in the second column on the front page of The Times.
• Many were published anonymously or under pseudonyms, making it impossible for most readers to know who wrote them.

Fascination shaped novels

• During the Victorian era, fascination with the Agony Column shaped both newspapers and novels.
• Elements of sensational stories like the Constance Kent Road Hill House murder from front-page news began to appear in novels like Lady Audley’s Secret.

Comparing novels and ‘the agonies’

• This includes access to two data sets: Our research team scraped 650,000 sentences from the Agony Column of The Times between 1860 and 1879, and over 25 million words from a corpus of 220 Victorian novels from 1800 to 1920.
• We will use both computational analysis of those data sets, and close reading, to continue to explore ways newspapers and the Agony Column featured in and shaped Victorian novels and Victorian readers’ experiences.

Victorian detective’s perspective

• While the agonies and coded advertisements have captured some time in the spotlight thanks to the popularity of film productions of Sherlock and Enola Holmes, understanding just how popular or influential they were on Victorian society is difficult today.
• The game allows visitors to track coded clues in the agony columns by following fictionalized detective case notes.

Changing vocabulary

• How far has our vocabulary shifted since that time?
• Our research team created the Victorian Vibecheck to allow visitors to create period-appropriate text.
• Vibecheck quantifies how rarely, if ever, words in a given text appear in our corpus of more than 450 Victorian novels.

• With these opening words, Ian Fleming (1908-64) introduced us to the gritty, glamorous world of James Bond.
• Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, was published 70 years ago on April 13 1953.
• British readers, still living with rationing and shortages after the war, eagerly devoured the first James Bond story.
• It had expensive liquor and cars, exotic destinations, and high-stakes gambling – luxurious things beyond the reach of most people.

Ian Fleming, Agent 17F

• He only lasted a year at military college (where he contracted gonorrhoea), then missed out on a job with the Foreign Office.
• The director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Henry Godfrey, recruited Fleming as his assistant.
• Fleming excelled, under the codename 17F.
• They would obtain a German bomber, dress British men in German uniforms, and deliberately crash the plane into the channel.
• Fleming claimed he played against a German agent at the tables, an experience that supposedly inspired Bond’s gambling battles with Le Chiffre in Casino Royale.
• Fleming also pointed to Sidney Reilly, a Russian-born British agent during the First World War.

The changing world of Bond

• Bond novels still sold well, especially after John F. Kennedy listed one among his top ten books.
• From Casino Royale to For Your Eyes Only (1960), Bond battled SMERSH, a real Soviet counter-espionage organisation.
• The early Bond novels were Cold War stories.
• In the novels, Bond drove Bentleys – the Aston Martin was introduced in the 1964 film Goldfinger.
• Their female characters do more than just spend a night with Bond before their untimely deaths.
• But the revised Bond novels will include a disclaimer noting the removals.

Spies After Bond

• Le Carré introduced his readers to a more mundane, morally grey world of espionage.
• He thought Bond was a gangster rather than a spy.
• There’s a little more Bond in Mathews’ books than in those of le Carré or Rimington.
• The more tedious and banal aspects of spycraft – brush passes, broken transmitters, and dead drops – accompany the glamour and romance.

The wilderness of mirrors

• The real world of espionage is so secret that most of us only ever encounter it on pages or screens.
• We don’t usually look to Bond films for accurate representations of espionage.
• But the influence of Fleming’s spy and the general aura of secrecy surrounding intelligence work lend some glamour and excitement to the work of real spies.
• This is why the CIA invests time and money into fictionalisations dealing with its work.

• The newly granted patent covers a method for detecting nucleic acids leveraging the collateral cleavage activity of Cas12.
• Sherlock and its academic co-founders have already demonstrated the potential for flexible, high-accuracy, low-cost Cas12-based detection of diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis and COVID-19.
• Sherlock's CRISPR-based diagnostics rely on a key pair of technologies to detect diseases, covered by the patent: amplification and collateral cleavage.
• "With this patent, Sherlock has a clear, unimpeded pathway to commercialization for our CRISPR-based diagnostics," said Jim Collins, Ph.D., co-founder and board member of Sherlock Biosciences.

• LAS VEGAS, Jan. 31, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HARA Brands , the leading cannabis accessories and lifestyle brand known for revolutionizing the way customers purchase smoking accessories, announced the launch of its new brand KRYO , a high-end line of freezable glassware.
• “KRYO is another example of our focus on innovation, and we couldn’t be more proud of our newest brand," said Bryan Gerber, Co-founder and CEO of HARA Brands.
• Each hit from the KRYO Beaker Bong is cooled three times – once in the freezable bowl, once through the showerhead downstem, and lastly through the KRYO-Chamber.
• Bubbler & Sherlock Pipes: The familiar bubble-style and sherlock pipes are upgraded with the best of KRYO, providing the coolest hits possible from a dry pipe.