Escaping the straight line of progress felt almost subversive.
In his view, there had been in human history a line of progress from magic to religion and on to science.
"There's some evidence that reminds us that this is not going to be a straight line of progress," said a senior official, reflecting the White House view.
It is hard to turn to this new volume in Penguin's History of Europe and not reflect on how profoundly different the subsequent seven books in the series would have been had the line of progress from the time of, say, Hadrian only continued on a smoother course.
"It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment," he wrote, continuing: "It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress".
Almost universally, then, the modern West was regarded as the latest point in a line of progress that was single and unilinear and on which all other peoples in the world could be fitted as illustrations, as it were, of Western man's own past.
As those files reveal, Uber's month-over-month metrics aren't exactly a steady line of progress, more a jerky sort of stumbling toward its goal of self-driving reliability.
It has been demonstrated again and again during the last one and a half centuries that there is a line of progress in which new ideas, particularly disruptive ideas, can lead to fundamental changes in products and services upon which commercial markets thrive.
Michael Holroyd: When you write biography or history or non-fiction you always look for a way of escaping from the prison of chronology before you come back into it, and sometimes what I try to do is to have two lines of progress in a narrative: one is the "and then and then and then", 1900, 1901, 1902.
Despite the above-mentioned lines of progress in automated diagnosis, an important concern is that the varying properties of images, due to acquisition settings [ 19, 25] and staining [ 26], may affect the classification results substantially.
