This is called a ``standard time zone,'' so naturally there must be multiple standards... Simplest is the ideal standard time zone: ideal standard time zone A is centered on the meridian 15° east of the prime meridian; specifically, it is the lune between 7.5° E and 22.5° E. Nautical time, used in radio communication by ships when they are outside territorial waters, is based on nautical standard time zones that coincide with the ideal time zones away from land (and apparently are not specifically defined within territorial waters). On land, standard time zone A is the union of those regions by or for which it is adopted. Time zone A includes most of western continental Europe and a continuous swath of countries in Africa.
In continental Europe the zone ranges from Spain to Albania to Norway. Standard time for this part of Europe is more frequently called by descriptive names like `Central European Time' (CET) or the equivalent (e.g., MEZ). The time-zone boundaries within Europe all coincide with international borders. In continental Europe, only Portugal is in time zone Z -- standard time the same as universal time. (The UK and the Irish Republic are also in the Z time zone.) In the northeast, the time-zone boundary runs along the borders of Norway and Sweden (A) with Finland (B). Finland is the northernmost land in time zone B; islands to the north are Norwegian or Russian, and keep the corresponding times. The line where Norway and Russia abut north of Finland is the border between time zone A and time zone C.
From the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, the time-zone boundary line runs for a ways along the border of Poland with the former Soviet Union. It starts generally eastward along the border of Poland with Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast to the north. (That bit of Russia is most of the northern part of old East Prussia, which included Prussia's historic capital Königsberg. The region was assigned to Russia at the Yalta conference. The capital city, and hence the region, was renamed for Kalinin, an old Bolshevik who finally kicked the bucket shortly after the end of the Great Patriotic War. The surviving German population of the region was deported, or allowed to flee. Hey, it just occurred to me: expelling people from their homeland is against international law!) Kaliningrad Oblast is the only part of Russia that keeps standard time A.
It's big world, so it's possible someone besides the author may read this entry.
The time-zone boundary continues east along the border between Poland and Lithuania (you know, those were a single kingdom not so many centuries ago), then south along the western borders of Belarus and Ukraine (time zone B) with Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (A). So far, it looks pretty systematic: former bits of the USSR, including the Slavic-language countries that use a Cyrillic alphabet, are all on the B side of the line between zones A and B, while former Warsaw-Pact members other than the USSR, including Slavic-language countries that use a Roman alphabet, lie in time zone A.
Further south, however, this convenient and mnemonic system begins to break down. It seems that some extraneous matter, such as longitude, was allowed into consideration. (That wasn't allowed to interfere on the west: Spain and France are almost entirely within 7.5 degrees of the prime meridian; most of the Portuguese-Spanish border runs just east of the 7.5° W meridian, so Portugal would be mostly in the N time zone, if astronomy mattered very much.) At all events, Romania (with Moldova) is the northernmost former Warsaw-Pact country (aside from the USSR) to be in time zone B. The time-zone boundary continues south along Romania's western border with Hungary and then with Serbia, making the latter southerly country (jugo- means `south-') the northernmost Cyrillic-using country in time zone A.
[This is by a little bit only. Bosnia, which extends almost as far north, uses both Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. A Bosnian immigrant who manages at a local Walgreen's told me that before the war (when she fled to Germany), television news in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina would alternate alphabets, using Roman characters for captions one day, then Cyrillic captions the next day. (As far as she knows, the practice continues.) She found the Cyrillic inconvenient: although she studied and used both alphabets in school, she was always more comfortable with the Roman characters. Her husband professes surprise that she could find the Cyrillic difficult. Her grandparents used a version of Arabic script adapted to the same language (Serbo-Croatian, called ``Bosnian'' in this context). But Arabic script is a challenge even for Arabic. Even though the whole family speaks the same language, the Arabic script was practically a secret code; grandma would leave a note for grandpa, and he was the only one who could decipher it. Nowadays I'm told that in the US, cursive is similarly impenetrable to schoolchildren.
The spelling of German by Yiddish-speakers may be regarded as a similar situation. My mother studies Yiddish every so often, despite her vow to stop learning new languages. I suppose Yiddish is a fair exception, since German is her native language and Hebrew is one of those languages she studied and half forgot.
Yiddish is mostly German, with quite a bit of Hebrew and some influence from Slavic languages, written in Hebrew characters. Of course, Germanic phonology, no less in the Yiddish language than in the standard German, was not a very good fit to the Hebrew script, originally. Heck, just think what the Greeks had to do with a related north Semitic script to write their own Indo-European language. The way the problem was solved in Yiddish was to give up a single set of pronunciation rules: Hebrew words in Yiddish retain their Hebrew spellings, and non-Hebrew words are written using a completely different set of rules and a somewhat different set of sound correspondences.
Something similar happens in many languages. Coming up with rules for the pronunciation of words spelled in English works better if one distinguishes Latinate and non-Latinate classes of words. (It was not always so. Latin words absorbed into Old English were pronounced according to their Latin spellings and common English pronunciation rules for Latin characters. Then again, since the pronunciations of the Latin characters were based on their pronunciation in Latin, the situation wasn't so bad.) Of course, Yiddish spelling is rather more phonetic than English, although you have to reason out the vowels in the the Hebrew vocabulary. A similar effect, but on a smaller scale, is the fact that patterns of vowel devoicing in Japanese are different for gairaigo than for Yamato and Sino-Japanese words.
Yiddish-speakers normally use the Ashkenazi (northern and eastern European) pronunciation of Hebrew. The main traditional alternative, the Sephardi pronunciation (originally Spanish, common around the Mediterranean in the modern era), was taken as the basis for modern Hebrew. When my mom was in school (in Nazi Germany), she learned the two pronunciations as liturgical and modern pronunciations. One indication that Sephardi pronunciation is not true to Biblical Hebrew is the fact that it uses the same sound for various alphabetic characters marked for different pronunciation.
Getting back to the writing-German-words-in-Yiddish thing... A big part of the problem is vowels. When you count long and short separately, standard German has 14 to (including diphthongs) 19 vowels, and Yiddish (``Yiddish'' is an English transliteration of the German and Yiddish word spelled jüdisch in German, meaning `Jewish') has not much less. In standard German this profusion is handled partly by digraphs and Umlauts, partly by using doubled consonants to indicate that a preceding vowel is short, by other onsonant-based clues, and occasionally by memorization. By contrast, Hebrew script represents vowels mostly by indirection. (Okay, and also by matres lectionis.]
The time-zone boundary continues along the western border of Bulgaria with Serbia and Macedonia (or FYROM or whatever), then west along the northern border of Greece with FYROM (don't even think of calling it Macedonia; Masodonia, perhaps) and Albania, on out to the Adriatic.
Gee, time zones are interesting. Time zone A in Africa (where it is typically called the ``West Africa Time'' zone, WAT) includes about 15 countries I know little about, from Tunisia and Algeria in the north to Namibia (a German colony before WWI) in the south. Among these only the Democratic Republic of the Congo (old Zaïre) is in two time zones. That is quite appropriate, as it's about the least unified country. Only Tunisia and Namibia observe Daylight Saving Time (DST) -- Tunisia in the Summer and Namibia in the Winter. Man, those guys are crazy. Please don't ask me about Antarctica.
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Personally, I prefer ``Aorta.'' If they ask you to repeat you can say ``Aneurysm.''
A Greek friend of mine has the surname Petr... He made a phone reservation at a restaurant (in the US), and when he arrived they couldn't find him listed: Because the ``p'' is unaspirated (in contrast with initial plosive consonants /p/ and /t/ in English) they had heard ``Etr...'' For a similar but more widely experienced misunderstanding, see the enema entry.
In a 1913 article in Annalen der Physik (Leipzig), I noticed the use of Å.-E., evidently for Ångström-Einheit, `Ångström unit.' The article was by Peter Paul Koch (fourth series, vol. 42, no. 11: ``Über die Messung der Intensitätsverteilung in Spektrallinien. II''). Other articles just used Å. Perhaps this was an earlier usage that was trailing off.
Late in the nineteenth century there was an equivalent expression that is now not only obsolete but unlikely to be understood by most scientists: ``tenth-meter.'' (Actually, I've only ever seen it as ``tenth-metre.'' I don't find much occasion to read 19th c. scientific journals from the US.) Tenth-meter meant 10-10 meter, and was part of a fairly systematic terminology pattern. It was particularly common in electricity and magnetism.
Don't you just hate it when writers do that (define important stuff [like a head term in its glossary entry, say] parenthetically)? Me too.
Another thing not to confuse A with is atomic number -- the number of protons in a nucleus. Don't be too embarrassed; I've been guilty of this myself, recently. At some point, I had stopped using the term (atomic number) altogether and started thinking of it as a quantity called ``zee'' (or maybe ``zed,'' by those folks from whom we are separated by a common language) and represented by the variable Z.
Maybe chemists prefer the long name (viz. atomic number). In chemistry and atomic physics, Z is vastly more important because chemical properties and atomic spectra depend primarily on Z, and much less on A. [The quantitative differences are typically on the order of the ratio of the electron mass to the nuclear mass, and so a fraction of a percent even in the extreme case of hydrogen.] In nuclear physics, A and Z are of comparable importance. (To take a well-knwn example, the liquid-drop model gives a nuclear binding energy whose dominant terms are powers of A, and Z only comes in as a smaller but important Z2/A1/3 correction.)
A very visible asymmetry between A and Z is that each Z has its own associated name (``hydrogen'' for Z=1, etc.), so the Z=3 nuclei, for example, can be referred to collectively as ``lithium isotopes.'' By contrast, since there is no specific name corresponding to an A value (other than ``nucleon'' for A=1). The composition of a nucleus is thus specified by the combination of a number for A and a chemical symbol for Z (e.g., 6Li and 7Li for the stable isotopes of lithium). I know of no elegant way of naming an isobar (the family of nuclei with a common value of A). At least, you typically have to specify a number. There are special cases, of course. You could refer to the A=3 nuclei as the ``tritium isobar.'' People would probably look at you funny for not just saying ``tritium and helium-three.''
There are rather many other words which A abbreviates in Latin inscriptions.
Because of some fussy alphabetical-order issues with å, this entry is probably as good a place as any to discuss the alphabets used in Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, and the Norwegian languages, with particular attention to the special vowel symbols.
We start with Swedish, either because the eponymous Ångström was a Swede, or because Swedish is the language for which I am aware of the fewest confusing details. In Swedish, the alphabet starts with the same 26 letters as the English alphabet, followed by å, ä, and ö in that order. I.e.,
The letters c, q, w, and z occur only in a few names. The letter w used to be treated as a variant of v, and alphabetization usually ignored the difference. (Words beginning in v and w could be mixed up in a dictionary the same way words beginning in v and V can be mixed up in an English dictionary.) Thus, while the Swedish alphabet was (sometimes) read off with v and w separately named, from the perspective of alphabetization, the alphabet was best regarded as just 28 letters:
In 2005, the Swedish Academy decreed or suggested or whatever that the v and w be thenceforth treated more distinctly for alphabetization purposes, so the w has its place as further above.
In Danish, æ is used where Swedish uses ä, and ø is usually used in place of Swedish ö. The symbol corresponding to Swedish å, and its place in the alphabet, have changed once or twice in the last couple of centuries. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the double-a was often treated as a distinct symbol on a par with single letters like a or b, the same way ch, ll, and rr were traditionally treated in Spanish. In some cases but not all, the double-a assumed the same position in the alphabet as å did in Swedish. Hence, the alphabet was either
or it was
and aa was alphabetized like a pair of letters a. By the 1940's the latter pattern had become common. In 1948, however, there was a spelling reform that replaced aa with å. The question of order was not immediately settled, but in 1955 it was decided to place that symbol at the end of the alphabet, yielding
This means that the word for river (aa) was once usually near the end of the dictionary (ordbog), then sort of drifted up to nearly the front, and then in 1955 got kicked even further back than where it began (as å). It must be discouraging to be an aa. (Cf. aa.) Just as in Swedish, w was once treated as a variant, and not distinguished for purposes of alphabetization. [Another item that is (or was) read off as part of the alphabet (in English) but which doesn't (and didn't) count equally in alphabetization: ampersand.] Danish practice was officially conformed to the international pattern (w distinct from v) in 1980.
Again as in Swedish, the letters c, q, w, and z are in fact rare. In addition, the x is also rare in Danish.
Norway had a distinct national language at one point, but over the course of four centuries of Danish rule, Danish became the national language -- both officially and for the creation of literature. After Norway finally became independent of Denmark in 1814, there was a broad desire to distinguish Norwegian from Danish, and to recover a distinct national language. It's a long and lugubrious story, but happily for this entry the Norwegians didn't tamper too much with the alphabet. It is the same now as the Danish alphabet, though they may have been quicker to adopt (and place at the end of the alphabet) the letter å. Hence, the order for Norwegian is again
Norwegian replaced aa with å in 1917. Presumably, commingled feelings of pride and resentment must have accompanied Denmark's conformation to å in 1948.
Icelandic has enough letters. Here is their order for the purposes of alphabetization:
I'm serious about the acute-accented characters: floti (`fleet') precedes fló (`flea'). The letter á corresponds to the å in Danish (so á means `river'). The é was only introduced in the twentieth century, to represent a palatalized version of e that was previously very reasonably written je. One is inclined to suspect that they did it just to have a complete set of acute-accented vowels. The acute marks were originally intended to indicate vowel quantity (i.e., accented vowels were of longer duration), but like the long-short vowel distinction in English, that's gone rather by the boards.
This list is a few too many letters long for schoolchildren to sing. The sung alphabet consists only of
(Although ð is the voiced version of þ, it is considered ``subordinate'' to d.) The letter z was abolished in 1974, but I left it in the alphabetization alphabet because abolished or no, it is part of names, and some people and institutions continue to insist on using it.
Try also Alicia Courville's Speech Disorders page or the National Aphasia Association (NAA).
The current use of the term affirmative action goes back to a 1965 executive order (EO) issued by US President Lyndon Johnson. The order required federal contractors to ``take affirmative action'' to see that ``employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.''
As initially understood, if it was initially understood, the term referred to positive efforts by employers (or educational institutions) to seek out and hire qualified applicants from under-represented groups and to be proactive in eliminating illegitimate causes of that under-representation. It was initially supposed that mere outreach efforts would suffice to right the historical imbalance.
The landmark Civil Rights legislation of 1964 (which does not use the term affirmative action) was intended to illegalize discrimination based on race alone (rather than any possible statistical correlates of race) and to encourage recruitment of minorities. When the crucial bills were being debated in the Senate, Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), later to be vice-president in the second, full LBJ administration, famously offered to eat the bill page by page if it led to preferential treatment for blacks. (At the time, blacks were the only group recognized as under-represented; afterwards, other groups were given official recognition as under-represented. This official recognition is not affected by the fact that the recognized group is -- as a mathematical necessity -- over-represented in some other field. It is virtually assured as a matter of probability that all groups are under-represented in some field, so we can look forward to a day when all groups enjoy the protection of equal-opportunity laws.)
Black representation in professional, managerial, and other kinds of employment deemed desirable or high-status had been increasing steadily for a number of years before the passage of equal employment opportunity legislation, so it was reasonable to suppose that aggressive recruiting and the elimination of artificial barriers to employment might substantially solve the perceived imbalance problem. In the event, progress was not deemed satisfactory, and during the Nixon administrations affirmative action took on a new meaning. A series of executive orders, administrative-law rules and landmark court cases led to a system of set-asides and quotas, and a supporting system of official lies and evasions. Concomitantly, the meaning of ``qualified'' was adjusted to meet the psychological and ideological needs of the political moment. People who think of themselves as liberal today, and who curse the memory of Richard Nixon, generally subscribe to the cynical vision of civil rights progress put in place by him.
The contradiction in meaning and in underlying assumptions, between AA as initially understood and as eventually implemented, offers the creative pollster the opportunity to prove any desired thesis. If you want to show that people favor affirmative action, you ask people whether they support the principles of the early, minimalist definition of affirmative action. If you want to demonstrate widespread opposition to affirmative action, you describe the most egregious examples of its implementation and ask whether the respondent approves.
Christopher Robin Milne was always uncomfortable with his fame.
The rights to the use of the Pooh characters and images are nowadays held by Walt Disney.
A. A. also got his son a teddy bear. That bear currently resides in New York City.
I wonder if these Milnes are any relation to E. A. Milne, the mathematical physicist and Bruce Medalist?
The same abbreviation is used in French (for Alcooliques Anonymes -- sounds kinda cool), German (Anonyme Alkoholiker or Gemeinschaft der Anonymen Alkoholiker) and Spanish (Alcohólicos Anónimos). The Spanish adjective alcohólico is slightly unusual: since the aitch is silent, the word has an o-o diphthong, the two component vowels clearly distinguished (in careful speech) by the stress on the second. FWIW, when the word alcohol was borrowed into Japanese, the -oho- was collaped into a long o: arukôru.
We have an Alzheimer's disease (AD) entry.
In one of his books, Bernard Lewis describes, inter alia, the history of newspaper publishing in the Muslim world. I think the book's title is What Went Wrong.
The words average and mean, if not explicitly qualified, both mean a sum divided by the number of its addends. This is, in general terms, a ``measure of central tendency.'' Two other measures of central tendency are the median and mode. One might call these discontinuous measures, since their values are discontinuous functions of the numbers whose distribution they describe the central tendency of. Other continuous measures of central tendency are usually named with the word mean. The most common such alternatives that I can think of are ``geometric mean,'' ``harmonic mean,'' and ``logarithmic mean.''
In Hong Kong, the phrase ``AA <system>'' (with AA pronounced as an English initialism and <system> representing a Chinese or Cantonese translation of the English word system) is the practice of splitting a restaurant or entertainment bill. Presumably this arose specifically from the practice of dividing the bill equally, so each person paid the AA cost. I'm not sure whether the term is still used strictly in this sense or may also now refer to an arrangement in which all individuals pay their own expenses. The latter is called ``Dutch treat'' in English-speaking countries (and ``pagar a la americana'' in South America). I needn't have explained my uncertainties. I could have just said the AA system means ``to go Dutch'' without further specification and left it at that, but I wanted to share.
(In China as in the US, Chinese restaurants usually serve dishes to the table, and individuals serve themselves. Hence, there is only one straightforward way to share the expenses, and no ambiguity.)
Mail bound for the AA region used to be (and I believe still is) routed through processing centers at Miami, and used to be nominally bound for Florida. Using FL (for Florida) instead of AA still works for mail, but will probably cause problems with credit-card verification, so don't do it. For more on MPSA/USPS military mail, see the MPO entry.
If shoulders are back in fashion and you're thinking about fixing up your old blouse but can't find the right-size shoulder pad in the ``Home Fashions'' section, experiment with bra cups. This reminds me of the scene in the movie theater from Summer of '42. Now let's get back to...
This just in (from Reuters, dateline May 2003, Taipei): ``Villagers in southern Taiwan are strapping bras to their faces to guard against the deadly SARS virus due to a shortage of surgical masks.'' A local factory is actually recycling its own colorful bras, cutting them and sewing on new straps. I don't understand why the factory has to cut anything to begin: don't they have a supply of cups or something? I should probably say that I will be following this story as closely as is decently possible, but I won't.
The first sports bra was invented in 1977 by Lisa Lindahl, a jogger, and her childhood friend Polly Smith, a costume designer. Lisa's sister dubbed the project ``a jockstrap for women.'' While Lisa and Polly were working on a prototype, Lisa's husband came in and playfully pulled a jockstrap over his head and around his chest. They were inspired, and Polly fashioned a model constructed of two jock straps sewn together. (The story here is condensed from this page.) From (the general vicinity of) athletic cups to bra cups, and from bra cups to shoulder pads, it seems fashion moves ever upwards. The German word for glove is Handschuh (yes, literally `hand shoe').
In the US in 1999, 130,000 women underwent breast augmentation surgery, a factor-of-four increase from 1992, the year that silicone implants were banned for cosmetic use. (In November 2006 the FDA reapproved them for all uses where saline implants were approved.) To any mathematically competent person, it had already been clear in 1992 that silicone implants are just as safe as saline implants, but people are stupid about statistics. Silicone is also more natural-looking unless there's a leak. (If saline leaks, it's absorbed.) During the dark ages (1992 to 2006) silicone remained legal to replace a failed saline implant and in certain other applications. Also, the shell that holds the saline solution in saline implants is made of silicone, meaning that most of the time, the total surface area of living tissue exposed to silicone is the same whether the prosthesis contains saline or silicone.
But you know, those implants require more upkeep than the sealed battery on my old Honda, and they don't necessarily last much longer. Research has been ongoing; alternatives studied have included polyvinylpurolidone (PVP) implants and reconstruction using fat from elsewhere in the body. (I guess moving it from the wrong places to the right places kills two birds with one stone. Liposuction is gaining in popularity too, you know.) Last I heard, the clinical trials were being conducted in Europe, where the litigation risk is lower. Apparently the only alternative that has been widely commercialized is the gummy-bear implant, which is an incremental modification of the regular silicone implant: the filling is silicone polymerized with more crosslinking monomers, resulting in a rubbery gel rather than a viscous one.
Sixty percent of women getting augmentation in 1999 were aged 19-34. Thirty-five percent were aged 35-50. (The other 5% includes about 1% under 18.) Often the augmentation is to achieve symmetry or for prosthetic purposes after other surgery. A smaller number of women go under the knife to decrease their size.
Dr. Judith Reichman, regular guest physician on the Today Show, wants you please to understand that ``Very few women do it [get augmented, that is] to please a male figure in their lives. When we say that, we are under-valuing a woman's concerns.'' It's not about that at all! It's about looking good in clothes or looking good out of them. As you know, women dress for other women. Men don't matter. Women engage in competitive dressing -- that's what public events are for.
[A brief shot of realism: an ad (noticed 1993 or earlier) for Bodyslimmers once included this text: ``While you don't necessarily dress for men, it doesn't hurt, on occasion, to see one drool like the pathetic dog that he is.'' I guess this is aiming low.]
There was something relevant in the December 2006 issue of Psychology Today. (That should have set off your BS monitor, of course, so you won't be perturbed that the article contradicts Reichman's PC pieties.) It was an article by Marcelo Balive on page 19 (in the INSIGHTS section; you may find it helpful to raise the trip level on your BS monitor) entitled ``A Model Society: South America's Obsession with Plastic Surgery.'' More than half of the article's real estate is taken up by a very informative illustration of Miss Venezuela 2005 Monica Spear apparently literally disrobing. Color caption: ``Latin Americans have won 11 of the last 25 Miss Universe titles.'' In the booooody of the article: ``Although no official statistics are compiled, Argentina is among the top-ranked countries in per capita rates of cosmetic surgery, says Guillermo Flaherty, president of the Argentine plastic surgeons' association.'' The article ends with the recollection of an American woman who had recently lived in Argentina: her gym's locker room was an exhibition hall of breast implants. It reminds me of an American I knew who spent his last year of high school in England (ca. 1979). He was the only one circumcised. I mean, he was the only one who was circumcised. I mean he, oh never mind. He said he felt like an alien -- which, of course, he was.
In theater seating, X, Y, Z may be followed by AA, BB, CC. I'll have to check next time, if I arrive before the lights dim. Dang! I was at an amphitheater that seated eight hundred, and the top row was K. I'm going to have to choose more popular events.
The desire to look good in clothes, and not for a male figure in one's life, is sometimes called the ``Academy Awards Effect.'' Another Academy Awards effect is that the stars who attend them are often too poor (in money) or not poor enough (in judgment) to buy the million-dollar jewelry and hundred-thou duds they wear there. Those're on loan from jewelers and fashion designers, who sell them to less or more poor customers who only wish they were movie stars. See the AD entry for more on the male figure.
AA also occurs in a kind of positional numbering scheme based on letters. These differ from ordinary positional systems (such as the decimal system, say) because there's no zero. In this kind of numbering, or labeling, X, Y, Z are followed by AA, AB, AC, .... Ordered lists can be numbered using this scheme in HTML (see our example), as well as nroff and troff.
The term was adopted by geologists (C.E. Dutton in the first place, in 1883) from the Hawaiian language. (Geologists like to do that. They adopted cwm from Welsh, when they could have used an English cognate like coomb. Obviously, geologists are closet Scrabble freaks.) In the original Hawaiian, this (aa, not cwm) is spelled a'a. In Hawaiian, Hawaii is spelled Hawai'i. That apostrophe represents a glottal stop consonant, something like the sound that substitutes for intervocalic /t/ in Cockney as well as in some words (e.g., cotton) in much of the US. The name of the capital of Yemen (.ye) -- Sana'a -- has a similar sound.
I wonder if a'a didn't get its name from the sound people make when they try to walk over it barefoot. Then it would be an onomatopoeia'a. No wait, don't blame me, I didn't make it up, honest! Apparently the opportunity to neologize with as many as four or more consecutive vowels overcomes all restraint. See this posting by David Lupher (to the famous classics list) for other examples.
Much nicer stuff than aa is pahoehoe, which has a smooth, lined surface that looks like thick rope or driftwood. It gets this appearance from the cooling process: the surface cools and begins to harden while the interior is still fluid. As the interior moves and drags the surface along with it, the outer surface is stretched, giving rise to the lines. This is possible only if the interior is not very viscous, so it continues to flow even when it is close to solidifying. The smoothness of the surface is also a consequence of the low viscosity (equivalently, the high fluidity): surface tension acts to smooth exposed surfaces, and is most effective when it has to overcome a smaller rather than a larger viscous resistance. Another difference, again consistent with the viscosity trend, is that aa tends to come in larger blocks, while pahoehoe is thin (and fast-moving while molten, get out of there!).
The difference in viscosity that determines whether aa or pahoehoe will form corresponds to a slight difference in silica content, and a single eruption can produce both (usually pahoehoe precedes aa). High silica content (60%) gives a viscous magma and aa. Because the high viscosity prevents gases from escaping easily, this is associated with explosive volcanoes like Mount St. Helens. Magmas with low silica content (50%), like those of Hawaiian island volcanoes, are more fluid and less explosive. That's why the Hawaiians have lots of cool-looking (or hot) pahoehoe.
See also John Ascah's Aged Anaesthesia page.
The presence of the above name in this glossary does not imply an endorsement of that last word. The presence of the acronym does not imply an endorsement of the entity, of whose existence, happily, little sign appears to remain on the internet. This page by Steven Barrett, M.D., provides some interesting information on Jay Holder, perpetrator of addictionology seminars, president and cofounder of American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders (ACACD), graduate of assorted non-accredited quackery mills, and apparent inventor of ``torque-release technique.'' Jay Holder is a legitimate holder of a DC degree from National College of Chiropractic, which might say something about that degree. (For some reason, perhaps including the esteem in which the word chiropractic is held, that college has taken a new name.)
The word ``addictionology'' has come to be widely used. It may well be that some nonquacks use it.
They're not trying to promote it.
Actually, fox-hunting almost doesn't qualify, because the hounds do all the work of pursuing the fox and killing and eating it (except for the comb, mask, and pads, of course). It might be called a human-assisted activity, since a human (the master of the hounds or his assistant) trains and may otherwise assist the hounds -- by, for example, sealing off before the hunt some foxholes that the fox might try to escape to. (They say there are no atheists in foxholes? How could they be sure?) But it is animal-assisted, in fact, because in the classic English fox hunt, the human activity is trying to keep up with the hounds, and horses assist in this activity by carrying the humans as they perform it. That's how I see it, anyway.
Seeing-eye dog work is the only AAA I have even the slightest direct experience of. One day on the main ASU campus, I saw a man a few yards ahead of me, standing patiently before a chain-link fence that closed off part of the sidewalk. A dense traffic of students was flowing around him. I came up and said ``...your dog stopped because they tore up the sidewalk.'' ``Can you lead me around it?'' ``Sure. How does it work?'' ``Just talk to me, and the dog will follow you.'' So we did that, and as I described our surroundings it turned out that we almost immediately overshot his next turn.
The dog's behavior surprised me, because the section of sidewalk closed off was only about four feet in diameter. The street had negligible traffic (it was sealed off by a card-entry gate) and one could actually continue by walking along the curb or by going only slightly off the sidewalk on the side away from the street. The dog could easily see how to go around, but was apparently trained not to take that initiative. (I wondered whether the dog conceived the task in terms of a destination and a preferred path, or in terms of an unmotivated sequence of specified paths.) On the other hand, the dog was expected to respond appropriately to its perception of the owner's social interactions. I guess I'm not surprised if dogs are better at understanding social interactions than pedestrian traffic. Still, for a long time afterwards I was haunted by the idea that I might have retrained the dog to overshoot the next turn and then do a dog-leg to get back to it.
The training of a seeing-eye dog has elements resembling the design of an interactive computer program. So many possible inputs! So many failure modes! Actually, the main resemblance to programming is that it rarely works correctly the first time. Both must be debugged or whatever. I gather from what I've read that part of the training involves focusing on isolated situations (e.g., how to exit a bus). So that would be like teaching ``methods.'' It seems that at least the terminology of OOP is a better fit to dog training than to programming. It typically takes about three years to program a new pup into a seeing-eye dog (a/k/a guide dog).
I remember reading a news item some years back, maybe around 2000, about a seeing-eye dog that was abused by its owner and that killed him by leading him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The dog survived, so I recall. This story has its improbabilities, and it resembles a widely retold joke (in which both dog and owner survive) that you can find on the Internet. I've checked Lexis-Nexis and Google (News, Web, and Blogs) with a variety of search strings, and I've failed to turn up the story. You can take it for what it may be worth: either I have an extremely retentive memory for obscure and evanescent news stories, or I'm a highly creative author of fiction without even knowing it.
Here's another kind of AAA that I'm not very familiar with: picking up members of the apposite sex. I remember, or at least I think I remember, that Freud mentioned this somewhere. He referenced the idea that prostitutes were well-known to walk their dogs, as a way to start conversations with prospective customers. I was a child when I read this; perhaps there was also the idea that walking a dog excused what might otherwise be loitering. You could look it up, I suppose, by reading enough of Freud's works. (There's a list of the ones you can skip below.) Anyway, I was reminded of this by an AFP news item on July 31, 2008: ``Saudi bans sale of pet dogs and cats.''
The previous day, according to the report, Othman Al Othman, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, known as the Muttawa, told the Saudi edition of the Al Hayat daily that the commission had started enforcing an old religious edict against selling pet cats and dogs or exercising them in public. The reason for reviving the enforcement of this edict was an alleged rising fashion among some men of using pets in public to make passes at women and disturb families. No further explanation was offered. It seemed that the new enforcement of the old edict might be restricted to Riyadh only, but one never knows.
Here is a list of the works of Freud for which I can easily find complete etexts (mostly Gutenberg) in English or German. The observation mentioned above doesn't appear to be in any of these.
- The Interpretation of Dreams. [Die Traumdeutung -- perhaps better translated as `the meaning of dreams'.]
- Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners.
- Das Motiv der Kästchenwahl.
- Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.
- Über Psychoanalyse: Fünf Vorlesungen.
- A Young Girl's Diary. [Tagebuch eines halbwüchsigen Mädchens.]
- Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens: Über Vergessen, Versprechen, Vergreifen, Aberglaube und Irrtum.
If you're a writer looking for an agent, try the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (this link may be more robust), the SoA, or the ALCS. The US organization corresponding to the AAA is the AAR. More general discussion of agent associations there.
Selected Letters of James Thurber, p. 209, has a letter of August 15, 1959, rejecting a request for Thurber to participate in some project of the A.A.A.A. While he pleads ill health and lack of time, his contempt for the organization is not entirely concealed. He seems to go off on a tangent:
... Youngsters now bring babble boxes for me to talk into, as we sink further and further into the new Oral Culture. The written word will soon disappear and we'll no longer be able to read good prose like we used to could. This prospect does not gentle my thoughts or tranquil me toward the future.
Thanks anyway and I hope those creative spirits learn how to get through to people the literate way.
As of January 5, 2004, there were 85 entries whose head terms included the letter A and no other letter. Oh sure, we could expand this number considerably, but we're very selective. Cf. AAAAAA.
The official publication of the AAAD is the Asian Journal of Aesthetic Dentistry, published in Singapore. Articles are in English, and the first volume was published in 1993. The AAAD holds a general meeting biennially; with the first meeting apparently in 1990.
Cf. Achoo! -- The Medical Search Engine. (Gesundheit!)
Related entries: AAAC and AAAASF.
The AAAL passed resolutions opposing ballot initiatives in California and Arizona to end the ghettoization of Hispanic students in bilingual education programs, although that isn't exactly the way the AAAL sees it.
The AAAM was founded in 1957 ``by the Medical Advisory Committee to the Sports Car Club of America by six practicing physicians whose avocation was motor racing.''
Bring back Eric Burdon.
A constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview.
The current (early 2004) officers of the AAAS are distributed among an Institut für Amerikanistik (`Institute for Americanistics') at Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz, an Institut für Amerikastudien at Universität Innsbruck, and units called Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (* Englistics -- what a word! what a word!) in Salzburg, Klagenfurt, and Vienna. Recent AAAS conferences (including the EAAS conference 2000, held in Graz) have been in these cities. Why have you got a problem with this? It's a small country.
According to itself, AAASS is a ``nonprofit, nonpolitical, scholarly society which is the leading private organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and Eastern and Central Europe.''
As it happens, not everyone in these areas is a Slav, so the statement constitutes a political, nonscholarly statement that does not advance knowledge. People who think you can't please everybody are optimists; you can't please anybody.
Not infrequently, video games involve one or more moving images representing objects, and often it is necessary to determine whether a collision appears to occur between such objects -- i.e., whether certain regions of different images overlap. This collision detection becomes computationally expensive as the borders of the regions become complex. A first step in the process is to define AABB's. For 2D graphics, AABB's bounding rectangles aligned with the screen axes for moving objects and for any objects, moving or not, that they might collide with. (In 3D, AABB's are the natural generalization: right rectangular prisms aligned with, you know, whatever. This is very obvious, but I just like to use ``right rectangular prism'' instead of ``cuboid.'') rectangles needn't be minimal, and for a sprite (loosely, for an object represented by different images at different times), it can be efficient to use a single AABB rather than a time-varying one. It is easy to check for collisions between AABB's.
If AABB's don't overlap, no collision has occurred and no further collision detection is needed. The cheaper the game, the faster the object movement, or the faster the game development, the likelier it is that AABB collisions will be treated as equivalent to object collisions.
The <realtimerendering.com> website has a page with a comprehensive list of links to resources for computing the intersection of many simple objects, including AABB's. As of late June 2017, it was updated just a couple of months ago.
``Promoting the evolution of flexible models of responsive cost-effective ambulatory behavioral healthcare.''
Based in Alexandria, Virginia -- conveniently close to the nation's capital.
It's good to have a ready comeback when she says ``You're such an animal!'' Cf. AASP.
You know, I'm really impressed with the passion, dedication, and faith of these, um, zealots, errr, re-reforming crusaders, err, whatever. I'm considering burning in hell for eternity so that they can be right.
The University of Michigan used to host a site for AACAP, and still has a useful page.
Just offhand, I'd have to say that <americanacademyofbehavioralpsychology.org> is the longest domain name I can recall.
The county seat of Anne Arundel County is Annapolis, which was settled in 1649 by Puritans who had fled Virginia. They originally called their settlement Providence. The Puritan town successfully revolted against the Roman Catholic government of Maryland in the 1655 battle of the Severn River, but lost its independence after the English Restoration. In 1694 the settlement, which had come to be known as Anne Arundel Town, became the provincial capital of Maryland and was renamed Annapolis in honor of Princess Anne. As Queen Anne in 1708, she granted the town its first charter.
Too little too late, I guess. On Oct. 19, 1774, Annapolis staged its own Tea Party (seems to have been a fad). Once Philadelphia was occupied by the British, the Continental Congress met in Annapolis, making it the effective US capital (all major cities were under British control). Sir Robert Eden, the last royal governeur of Maryland, lies buried in the graveyard of St. Anne's Church in Annapolis; he was an ancestor of the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Today Annapolis is best known for the US Naval Academy, founded in 1845.
Annapolis became the state capital after independence. Information on the city is offered by The Mining Company and by Covesoft.
The largest city in Maryland is Baltimore. Further Maryland information in this glossary can also be found at the MD entry.
There's also an American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry. Go read the AAED entry. If you can figure out from that what the difference between aesthetic and cosmetic dentistry is, then you're a better man than I, unless you're a woman, in which case you're a better woman than I, even if you can't tell the difference (between aesthetic and cosmetic, of course).
Read it here now! (The rest of this entry will probably be transferred into a stool entry as soon as I feel like it.)
For me, the expansion of AACDP evokes an image of a warehouse piled high with four-legged instruments of discomfort. Which reminds me -- in German there is a word Stuhl meaning `stool.' It's cognate with the English word, of course. [It's pronounced something like ``shtool.'' The difference in the initial consonants reflects a regular sound shift that took place in German, and the similarity of the vowels represents luck, although there are other instances (e.g., cool and kuhl, shoe and Schuh, school and Schule).]
I find it interesting that the words stool and Stuhl, in addition to their principal meanings, both mean ``a unit of feces,'' not to put too fine a point on it. It's obviously an instance of metonymy, but the question is whether it is two instances of metonymy. In English the, um, let's call them eliminatory meanings, are plentiful, but the OED has no instances before 1410. The Grimm describes the instances of the corresponding senses in German as being since the fourteenth century [seit dem 14. jh], with the earliest specific instance dated to 1513. It looks as if it might have been borrowed, but both languages contain some intermediate meanings that explain the connection locally. For example, German has expressions corresponding to `go to the stool,' and English has many recorded instances of stool referring specifically to the stool in a certain little room. (And speaking of small enclosed spaces, the German cognate of stove, Stube, means room -- as in bedroom.)
The proverbial use of stool, in expressions like ``falling between two stools,'' is also paralleled quite precisely in German with Stuhl, but this figurative use doesn't strike me as needing to be borrowed.
It reminds me of Einstein's comment about ``hormones of general circulation.''
The same twenty-volume dictionary lists arigato (a-ri-ga-to-u, English: `thank you') in hiragana. There's a good reason for this. Although it is widely thought that arigato is a borrowing of the Portuguese obrigato (cognate of English 'obliged'), it clearly is not. There are recorded instances of arigato from before Portuguese contact, and the Japanese would more likely have been something like o-bu-ri-ga-to. In fact, the etymology of arigato is known, follows regular Grimm's-Law-type rules for Japanese, and is encoded in the two-kanji way of writing the word. (See the 2001 discussion on the Linguist List, summarized in this posting.)
Kyoudou (`common, general') is also written kyodo -- the o's are long, and in a strict version of the Hepburn system I think they require macrons. One of the girls' names that is transliterated Yoko is written with hiragana characters for yo-o-ko, but I've never seen it transliterated (as would be appropriate, just as with kyodo) as ``Youko.'' Probably too confusing.
Shijou (or shijo) has various of the noun senses of the English word market, but common market is also sometimes rendered by the somewhat pleonastic kyoudou doumei (doumei is `union, confederation').
A very informative web page for a Monash University course explains:
``While the Editors are at pains to point out that it is not a 3rd Edition, some consider that it should have been called a 3rd Edition.''
AACSB accredits 672 business schools world-wide as of June 2013; a bit over 500 of those are in the US and Canada. I admire the deft maneuver by which they eased the obsolete or undesired qualifier ``American'' out of the name. But they never replaced either A with ``Accreditation'' or a similar word. It seems that all the names beat around that bush. In the US, AACSB is in fact the premier accrediting organization for MBA programs. (Actually, they accredit the institution, so that, say, a management program in the industrial engineering department of an AACSB-accredited university may be part of the accreditation process. See this page for details.)
It may be that the absence of ``accreditation'' in the name prevents confusion of AACSB with the second-most prestigious B-school accreditation group, which is called the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP). The AACSB, ACBSP, and straggler IACBE can refer to themselves as the Association, the Council, and the Assembly without risk of confusion, little though the latter might mind. But that's probably not the intent.
Nota bene: Membership in the AACSB is not the same as accreditation by the AACSB. Some member schools describe themselves as candidates for accreditation.
AACSB is based in Tampa, Florida, and maintains an office in Singapore. Internationally, the three largest and most influential business-school accreditation associations are AACSB, AMBA (Association of MBAs, based in London), and EQUIS (European QUality Improvement System, based in Brussels). Writing about accreditation makes me groggy, so entries for AMBA and EQUIS will have to wait.
From a faculty POV, this is an organization of administrative types who seek to wrest from faculty types the power to control curriculum, the method being to weaken and de-emphasize majors. So I've read, from third parties, anyway.
Hmmm, les'see here... I notice that the annual meeting of 2006 was held in conjunction with the American Conference of Academic Deans. The conference title was ``Demanding Excellence.''
The organization was established in 1915 as the Association of American Colleges (AAC) at a meeting of college presidents in Chicago. There were 179 founding member schools. It changed its name to the current one in 1995.
To judge from its website and publications, the organization itself prefers the initialism with an ampersand. In unofficial contexts, others generally use plain AACU.
Mission Statement: ``To serve as a resource by providing a national forum for exchange, development and dissemination of information to assist dental regulatory boards with their obligation to protect the public.''
The successor was RAPID, Inc. Details can be found quickly at our RAPID entry.
I visited the homepage of the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech in 2003 and was invited to join in celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary. Eagerly, I followed their link to a history of the department, divided into the first thirty years, and the second thirty years. Uh... Oh, of course, that document is from 1997. Umm... Ah, clarification (inferred from intimations on pages six and seven): the department was founded in 1921, so in 1996 began its seventy-fifth year. Almost. Actually, VT has probably had agricultural economics faculty since 1921 (one that year), and a list of ``Course Requirements for First B. S. Degree Program in Agricultural Economics'' survives from 1924, although there was only one student. It was apparently an optional curriculum within the School of Business Administration. In 1927, a Department of Agricultural Economics was finally established within the School of Agriculture. Documents celebrating the 75th anniversary were scheduled to remain on the website until April 5, 2004. (Ah, what the heck -- leave it up.)
I have to say that we are so used to thinking of education in formalized and institutionalized terms that it is often surprising to return to the beginning and see how loosely things initially came together. Often the most important conceptions and intentions of the initial participants, and basic facts about entities and members, are lost in the recycle bin of history. The history of universities and colleges generally, dating back to the schools in Paris and Bologna at the end of the twelfth century, are similarly uncertain.
The sixty-year history also explains subsequent department name changes:
In 1929, rural sociologists were added to the faculty, and the name was changed to the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. The rural sociology faculty were transferred to the new Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1964, and the department's name was again changed to the Department of Agricultural Economics. To better describe the scope of department's work, the name was changed to the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in 1993.
So perhaps the ``Agriculture and'' form is an unofficial variant. Whatever.
TTU has a Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, also (as at VT) abbreviated in course offerings as AAEC.
UGA has one too. Oh no! They want us to celebrate their 75th anniversary too: ``The Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2004. Professor William Firor organized and chaired the department in 1929.'' Ahh -- now that's the way to do it. Everyone should have such foresight.
Okay, I think I've made my point by now, whatever it was.
Incidentally, I think in most places AAEC is called informally ``Ag Econ.''
Founded in 1934 as the National Institutional Teacher Placement Association. Teachers complain of lack of respect, but it doesn't help when the AAEE describes itself as ``comprised of colleges, universities, and school districts whose members are school personnel administrators and college and university career services officers.''
Whoops! AAEM namespace is gettin' ta be as crowdid as AAEE! In these hyar prairies, when you can see your neighbah's fahm, it's tahm to move on. Now they're AANEM.
Couldn't they just say they obey the law? By pointing out that they obey these particular laws, aren't they implying that whether they obey other laws is a matter of discretion? Did you ever wonder what really would happen if the ob-AA/EOE or equivalent information were somehow omitted from an advertisement? The experiment has been performed! In the August 18, 1986, edition of C&EN (p. 63, center bottom), a help-wanted ad appeared that only described the qualifications sought and instructions for applying (by the following October 1). The vigilant AA apparatus of the employer (Arizona State University) sprang into action, managing to get the following emergency correction into the September 15 edition (p. 64, right bottom):
The advertisement for the position of MATERIALS TECHNICIAN in the ... which appeared in the Academic Positions Section of the August 18, 1986 issue of Chemical and Engineering News inadvertantly [sic] did not include the facts that Arizona State University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and minorities are encouraged to apply. Application deadline extended to October 15, 1986 or until filled. Submit resume and 3 references to...
It is certainly true that the AA/EOE status of ASU is a ``fact'' distinct from the encouragement of minorities to apply. Still, the ability to deduce the latter fact from the former would not be surprising in someone with the required B.S. or M.S. degree in chemistry or a related field (let alone the ``highly desirable'' ``experience on the synthesis and characterization of solid state materials, including a working knowledge of crystal growth, vacuum system and inert atmosphere techniques'').
Okay, now for a pop quiz. Everyone loves a quiz! Here are two percentages: 3.0% and 4.4%. They represent the fraction of physicians who were black, based on the US censuses of 1960 and 1990. Here's the quiz question: which year had the lower percentage, 1960 or 1990? Think it over, take your time.
They're back! Yippee-aye-ayy!!! Cool horsehead-shaped yin-yang logo, too.
``The American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) is the world's largest professional association of equine veterinarians. The AAEP's mission is to improve the health and welfare of the horse, to further the professional development of its members, and to provide resources and leadership for the benefit of the equine industry.''
There's also an international association (IAEP). Donkeys still don't get any respect.
``A multidisciplinary network of professionals who are committed to the advancement of intervention for survivors of trauma. The Academy aims to identify expertise among professionals, across disciplines, and to provide meaningful standards for those who regularly work with survivors. Today, the Academy's international membership includes individuals from over 200 professions in the health-related fields, emergency services, criminal justice, forensics, law, business and education. With members in every state of the United States and over 45 foreign countries, the Academy is now the largest organization of its kind in the world.''
(Is D.C. counted among states or foreign countries?)
AAETS defines traumatic stress as ``the emotional, cognitive and behavioral experience of individuals who are exposed to, or who witness, events that overwhelm their coping and problem-solving capabilities.''
Squaring the circle using only compass and straight-edge, finding the roots of a general quintic equation, expressing the indefinite integral of the Gaussian in closed form, finding a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a traveling-salesman problem, solving the quantum measurement problem, combining all four fundamental forces in a GUT. Oh yeah, I'm a survivor. (See Eric Zorn's report at the FLT entry.)
``Traumatic stress has many `faces.' In addition to the devastating effects of large-scale disasters and catastrophes, the Academy is committed to fostering a greater appreciation of the effects of day-to-day traumatic experiences (e.g., chronic illness, accidents, domestic violence and loss [and nonintegrability]). Our aim is to help all victims to become survivors and, ultimately, thrivers.''
It is well known among artists that the way to get your work in the public eye and establish your name as you're starting out is to give your work away for free to established collectors. They then turn around and lend it for free to galleries. (Galleries would never display work that an artist tried to fob off on them directly. After all, curators have taste and perception, and one thing that just screams bad taste is giving it away for free.) That's one way the rich get richer and the poor poorer, but the real salt in the wound is that the poor have no place to display this ugly stuff except their own homes.
Remember, the escape key turns off moving gifs (in Netscape, anyway).
They have
- ADDY awards,
- an Advertising Hall of Achievement, and
- an Advertising Hall of Shame, er, Fame.
- remove with water,
- remove with bleach,
- remove with scissors.
The Hall of Achievement is for those under forty, and the Hall of Shame is for those who are dead or soon will be (``[t]hose men and women who have completed their primary careers''). The Hall of Shame is unusually repulsive, as befits AAF.
``Upon induction into the Advertising Hall of Fame, each honoree receives a `Golden Ladder' trophy signifying membership in the Advertising Hall of Fame. This trophy, designed by the late Bill Bernbach, carries an inscription created by the late Tom Dillon, both of whom are members of the Hall of Fame.'' Both indeed.
The inscription: ``If we can see further, it is because we stand on the rungs of a ladder built by those who came before us.'' This inscription is a perfect epitome (epitomy) of advertising crassness. Firstly, because like typical advertising copy it is derivative. Specifically, it is derived from an expression that dates back at least to the twelfth century. The original form involves seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants (midgets seeing further in the standard versions). Secondly, because it is clumsy. (I'll come back later and express as elegantly as possible the inelegance of Dillon's locution. Now I have to move the computer.)
Target stores are right rectangular prisms with a minimum of windows or architectural interest. Bauhaus Kaufhaus, sorta. Your average 1940's brick schoolhouse seems an ornate cathedral by comparison. A common quick orientation to some engineering disciplines not unrelated to architecture: civil engineering makes targets, mechanical and aerospace engineering destroys them. The thought that this might not be a bad thing withal was expressed by John Betjeman in 1937, with Slough as the contemplated target. (This was not John Bunyan's parabolic Slough of Despond, but instead a hyperbolic Slough for desponding of in a real England.)
Two teams -- the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, took the names of existing local baseball teams (see Dodgers). What makes this unusually confusing is that there were just previously, or would soon be later, NFL teams with the same (or similar) baseball-team names. But first some general history...
With the end of the post-war boom in 1948, the AAFC could not sustain its battle with the NFL, and scrappy AAFC Commissioner Kessing -- I'm sorry, that was AAFC Commissioner Scrappy Kessing -- sought terms. At the end of the '49 season, the NFL merged-in three teams from the AAFC -- the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts -- and held a special draft for players from the four other surviving AAFC teams.
The Colts francise folded after one season (1950) in the NFL and the 49ers endured many lean years, but the Browns, which had dominated the AAFC and won all four AAFC titles, went on to win the 1950 NFL title against the LA Rams (formerly of Cleveland) in Cleveland. Cleveland continued to be dominant in the NFL, though less overwhelmingly than in the AAFC.
Now about those NYC-area teams... The NFL's Brooklyn Dodgers changed name to the Tigers for 1944 (please don't ask me about Detroit) and merged with the Boston Yanks for 1945. The owner of the defunct NFL Brooklyn Dodgers/Tigers became a founder of the AAFC and owner of the AAFC Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946.
For 1946-1948, there were two AAFC teams in the five boroughs: the New York Yankees and the sorry Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team was eventually offered a chance to buy their ailing namesake but passed. For 1949, AAFC Dodgers merged with the stronger local AAFC team to become the Brooklyn-New York Yankees, the same year that the NFL's Boston Yanks moved and became the New York Bulldogs. With the folding of the AAFC, the Bulldogs changed their name back in 1950, becoming the New York Yanks.
It happens that the first regular-season game ever played by the San Francisco Forty-Niners (and the first played by a California pro football team) was a 21-17 loss to the (AAFC) New York Yankees in September 8, 1946. In 1950, with the AAFC Yankees defunct and many of the players distributed by draft to other NFL teams, the San Francisco Forty-Niners played their first regular season game in the NFL on September 17 -- a 21-17 loss to the New York Yanks.
The NFL's Yanks did poorly and were sold to a group in Dallas, where they failed by midseason (1951, I think) as the NFL's Texans. They stayed on the road for the rest of the season and went to Baltimore for 1952 to become the new Baltimore Colts. Don't hold me to the precise years, or names or anything, 'cause I just blew a brain gasket.
Someday when you're older and have plenty of spare RAM, I'll tell you about the White Soxes.
AAFHV is also ``the United States constituent of the World Association of Veterinary Food Hygienists; the only professional food hygiene group represented in the AVMA House of Delegates.'' The AVMA ``House of Delegates''? It sounds so 1776.
A constituent society of the ACLS since 1941. ACLS has an overview.
We are the leading subject association for art history and visual culture in the UK. The AAH plays a key role in helping shape and secure the future of art history. We support those involved in teaching, learning and research.You can inhale now.
They seem to work with rather a long timeline. I received a general announcement for the 2018 annual conference, to ``be co-hosted by the Courtauld Institute of Art and King's College London on 5th-7th April 2018,'' on April 2, 2017. Then again, the ``theme of the conference is `Look out!'.''. (Kind of them to single-quote that for me.) The expectation is that they'll attract ``around 1000 researchers, practitioners, museum curators and heritage partners'' whatever that last is. Isn't it amazing that huge events like this occur and don't make the news?
Phew! Okay, now that I'm convalescing I'll be needing a malpractice specialist.
According to a partner organization, it ``is the premier professional organization in healthcare administrative management. AAHAM was founded in 1968 as the American Guild of Patient Account Management. Initially formed to serve the interests of hospital patient account managers, AAHAM has evolved into a national membership association that represents a broad-based constituency of healthcare professionals.''
The AAHE has been described as ``kind of like the Association of American Colleges but with a higher pulse rate.'' Hmmm -- interesting metaphor. On March 24, 2005, AAHE Board of Directors announced that ``the Association will cease operations later this year.
In a statement to AAHE members, board chair Bernadine Chuck Fong, president of Foothill College, said, Despite vigorous efforts, president Clara M. Lovett and the board concluded that the organization no longer has the resources to continue its historic leadership role in higher education.`The spirit of AAHE must and will continue,' said Dr. Lovett, adding that plans are under way to continue the Association's work in Assessment, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Electronic Portfolios, Campus Program, and other initiatives under the leadership of other associations and academic institutions. She said that discussions are already under way with the Lumina Foundation concerning relocation of the BEAMS (Building Engagement and Attainment of Minority Students) Project and with Heldref Publications, publisher of Change magazine. Since 1985, AAHE has provided editorial leadership for the magazine.''
James Simon Kunen's The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Random House, 1968) is about the author's experiences at Columbia University, which in those days was also known as Guerrilla U. It includes the author's parody of a literary analysis of a very short poem, reproduced in its entirety here: ``Them? / Ahem!''
(Okay, just kidding.)
One of their members is the United States Sports Academy (USSA).
The AAL is divided into an upper sublayer called a convergence sublayer (CS) and a lower sublayer called SAR for segmentation and reassembly.
AAL uses different protocols for different kinds of data. See AAL1 through AAL5.
A.A.M. are also the initials of Albert Abraham Michelson, famous for measuring the speed of light very precisely.
For some mild coincidences involving two initials and three scholars, instead of vice versa, see this A. E. entry.
The trade group was initially being bankrolled largely by six members with full voting rights: General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen. (``Industry maverick'' Honda rejected overtures to join the new alliance.) BMW, Volvo, and Mazda would participate in meetings and discussions as associate members. Membership has varied a little bit. By January 2001, FIAT, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, and Porsche had joined.
Here's a nice correct use of the verb comprise, from the alliance's about page (browsed in July 2007; lower-cased for readability): ``The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is a trade association of 9 car and light truck manufacturers including BMW Group, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mazda, Mitsubishi Motors, Porsche, Toyota and Volkswagen.'' Oh sorry, that was just an odd use of the verb include.
(As of July 2007, ``DaimlerChrysler'' was correct. The previous May, an affiliate of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., New York, agreed to buy an 80.1% equity interest in a future new company, Chrysler Holding LLC, with DaimlerChrysler to hold a 19.9% equity interest in the new company. The closing of the transaction took place on August 3, 2007. It may have taken a couple of months for the various name changes to become official. DaimlerCrysler was renamed Daimler AG and its stock ticker symbol (it's listed on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart stock exchanges and the NYSE) changed to DAI.
In February 1997, negotiations between the new management and the UAW went to the eleventh hour, eventually settling on wage and bonus terms similar to the union's pact with GM, with wages to rise to $25/hr in the third year of the agreement. At the time, industry analysts said the agreement would put American Axle at a substantial cost disadvantage relative to other component makers.
Nevertheless, in September 1997, AAM announced a deal to sell a majority stake to the Blackstone Group, a New York-based investment group. American Axle concentrates on components for rear-drive vehicles and makes axles for nearly all GM trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUV) produced in North America, and that sector was booming even as car sales declined.
Membership is open to any nurse -- male or female -- to better facilitate discussion and to meet the most important objective of AAMN -- strengthening and humanizing health care.''
The expansion of AAN is sometimes written with ``di'' (`of') in place of ``in'' (`at, in'). This sometimes reflects the influence of the APh abbreviation list (that was the case for this very entry, originally) or the history of the society, which was founded in 1808 and was known as the Società Reale di Napoli until the end of the last monarchy (except that it was Società Reale Borbonica di Napoli from 1817 to 1861). There is some apparent disagreement regarding whether the ``di'' was officially changed to ``in'' on February 19, 1948, when -- on instructions from the two-year-old republican government -- ``Reale'' was struck from the name. (See a detailed history in English here.) In any case, the journal is not just for the arts of, at, or in Naples; it just happens that Naples is the location of Italy's national academy of sciences. I'm not absolutely sure this is Italy's only national academy of sciences, and I don't know if this journal is still published. I have begun research into these questions, however, and I am already able to inform you that my library doesn't and never has received the journal.
Also, one sometimes sees the name ending in ``Arti di Napoli, Napoli,'' but that's just a bit of informational sugar, as the computer scientists would say. It's like the ``London'' in ``London Times'' or in ``Nature (London).'' Or it would be if, say, the London Times were called the London Times, and somebody for some reason wrote the ``London London Times.'' Not to mention the London [Manchester] Guardian.
I am reminded of ``Neo-Spanish,'' which is discussed at the 40 entry.
The AAP sponsors NPM.
``Diverse'' is a general-purpose word meaning ``it's all good.''
I remember in Mr. Warnock's ninth-grade Geometry class, how often when I would make a clarifying observation, there would be a commotion and a feverish scrawling, and with some ceremony a condisciple would soon present me with an ``Al Kriman Award.'' Judy was one of the more frequent presenters. She went on to be a TV news producer. I believe the award was in recognition of my obscurity, but neither I nor anyone else can recall any of my award-winning words. Eventually, someone who was also taking Print Shop printed up a tear-off stack of Al Kriman Awards with blue sans-serif lettering. It was a somewhat unruly class. Mr. Warnock used to plead wearily (not to me in particular, I think) ``you don't have to listen, but PLEASE SHUT UP!'' I don't think I ever gave a very long acceptance speech. I always thought it was peculiar to receive an honor named after oneself, but according to the program for AAPD's 2004 Leadership Gala, ``AAPD will also present the first-ever Linda Chavez-Thompson Award to Linda Chavez-Thompson, in recognition of her longstanding leadership towards inclusion of people with disabilities and their families within the labor movement.''
In the context of associations, the word adhere is often used in the sense of conform to a rule or convention.
Cf. ACMP.
- PIN number.
- VIN number.
- UPC code.
- HIV virus.
- ATM machine.
- MIDI interface.
- GUI Interface.
- Cisco Ccie.
- ABS System.
- or OBO.
- ABS Braking System. (What is it? A sense of déjà vu? You think this entry is...redundant?)
- CableACE Awards.
- PILOT payment.
- Saab AB.
- VCH Verlag; Wiley-VCH Verlag.
- MOSFET transistor.
- HRL Laboratories (or Labs).
- ECL logic.
- FET transistor.
- HARM missile.
- BTU unit[s]
- IUPUI (strictly speaking, this is an acronym with built-in pleonasm).
- BJT transistor. Has lost a lot of ground to MOSFET's, even to JFET's.
- For FPO.
- RTL level.
- FRED diode.
- TTP program.
- Software ISV.
- OT Topic.
- YELT Test.
- MECL logic. Very obsolete technology.
Deserving of special recogition is the extravagantly redundant BUILT Informationstechnologie AG.
First-runner-up: LIRA-Lab, apparently also an official pleonasm.
Honorable Mention: ``The NAVE Virtual Environment'' An AAP pleonasm constructed from a XARA.
Repeated, reckless use of AAP pleonasms is PNS Syndrome. If acronym AAP pleonasm is a problem, then perhaps sometimes XARA's are the solution. Indeed, if ``Acronym-assisted AAP Pleonasm'' were the expansion of AAP (it isn't, I think), then AAP itself would be a XARA. Look, just follow the link, already!
What, still here? Feeling sympathetically contrarian? See the false pleonasm entry.
Begun as the Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools, it changed name in December 1922 to National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI). The name was favored in part because nabi is Hebrew for `prophet.' Personally, I would distinguish between a biblical instructor like Samuel or Isaiah, say, and a Bible instructor like Ismar J. Peritz of Syracuse University, who conceived the idea of the modern organization in 1909. The current name was adopted in 1964.
AAR is closely associated with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).
The central reality to be understood here is that there is a large pool of frustrated wannabe-published hacks. Note the hyphen: they are hacks, what they want to be is published. Perhaps they've already had their manuscripts rejected by a few or a few dozen publishers. The cream of the crud may have had a few helpful criticisms in reply, but usually the assistant editor charged with processing the slush pile has read and discarded it on the basis of one or two paragraphs, and isn't going to bother attempting to educate the hopelessly ineducable. Many ``unpublished authors'' get the idea, or are mischievously given it, that their problem started at the transom, whereas really it started at the keyboard. Specifically, PEBCAK.
The comforting idea is that you need an ``in'' with the publishers -- a clubby, exclusive bunch consistent with your fantasies of the glamour of the publishing universe. The agent is your ``in.'' This delusion creates an opportunity for scam artists, who promise eventual publication and charge fees that are ultimately their main source of income. Reading fees, evaluation fees, marketing fees, office expenses, travel expenses, submission fees, shmooze-with-editors-at-expensive-French-restaurant expenses, etc. The SFWA has a nice long informative page on not getting stiffed. Damn! I wish I'd read that first! The AAR and similar organizations play a useful self-policing role for the agenting industry, by establishing codes of conduct which assure that their members, at least, are dealing honestly.
The AAR's code of ethics is called ``the Canon of Ethics.'' Similar organizations are the AAA in the UK (with a ``Code of Practice''), NZALA in New Zealand (``Code of Behaviour''), and AALA in Australia (just starting up as of this writing: founded in 2002; ``Code of Practice'' still in draft form). Canadian literary agents listed (not necessarily recommended) by TWUC do not list any AAR- or AAA-like memberships, and I'm not aware that the relevant laws in Canada are considerably stronger than in other English-speaking countries.
I know one fellow who submitted his novel (directly -- without an agent) to only a dozen or a score of publishers and actually got a nibble. The house sent the novel to two, then two more, and finally another two outside readers for review. (Maybe it was just the first chapter; I forget.) The first four, and one of the last two, liked it. Once they got a don't-like-it from a reader, they rejected it. The author never received any specific comments on the work. This all doesn't strike me as the most efficient way to do business, but maybe they're just a front or something. I guess you need an agent. (For an alternative approach, read this AAF entry.)
Aarhms maintains a site called LIBRO.
In the movie Absolute Power (1997), Clint Eastwood, in the role of an aging thief (Luther Whitney), says
Go down a rope in the middle of the night? If I could do that, I'd be the star of my AARP meetings.
Generations hence, multimedia audiences will marvel at the many-layered subtlety of today's golden age of film dialogue. Cf. VCR entry.
It turns out that AARP no longer stands for ``American Association of Retired Persons.'' It's just a name now, it doesn't stand for anything, okay? It's what we call a sealed acronym.
In January 2005, accepting his New York Film Critics award for Best Director (for ``Million Dollar Baby'') Eastwood commented that ``Outside of the AARP sticker on my trailer, I'm no different than any other director.'' He needs to retire his gag writer.
ACLS has an overview, according to which their principal activity is ``[m]aintenance of a national research library [ (hours) (directions by horseless buggy) ] focusing on all aspects of American history and culture through 1876.''
AAS says it ``specializes in the American period to 1877, and holds two-thirds of the total pieces known to have been printed in this country between 1640 and 1821, as well as the most useful source materials and reference works printed since that period. Its files of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American newspapers, numbering two million issues, are the finest anywhere.''
Also: ``AAS is the third oldest historical society in this country and the first to be national rather than regional in its purpose and in the scope of its collections.''
Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech (VT).
ASOR has two other book series as well as various periodicals: a bulletin (BASOR), Near Eastern Archaeology (NEA), and the ASOR Newsletter (all quarterlies) as well as an annual Journal of Cuneiform Studies (JCS).
AASOR's editorial offices were originally (I believe) in New Haven, Conn., and later (through the 1970's) in Cambridge, Mass. From the 1980's through 1992, the series was published by Eisenbrauns. (This is a small academic press based in Winona Lake, Indiana. Founded by Jim Eisenbraun in 1975, it specializes in ancient Near Eastern studies, archaeology, Assyriology, and biblical studies.) From 1993 the series was with Scholars Press in Atlanta, Georgia (i.e., at Emory University, mentioned at this S.P.D. entry). We all know what happened to Scholars Press at the end of 1999, but since 1998 AASOR has been based at Boston University and published by David Brown Book Co.
Theoretical explanation in terms of weak localization is associated with alternating destructive and constructive interference of time-reversed scattering paths of individual diffusing electrons. (The paths are only approximately time-reversed, because magnetic field breaks the invariance. This becomes an issue at larger fields.)
Theoretical paper: B. L. Al'tshuler, A. G. Aronov, and B. Z. Spivak, Pis'ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 33, 101 (1981) [JETP Lett. 33, 94 (1981)].
Experimental paper: D. Yu. Sharvin and Yu. V. Sharvin, Pis'ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 34, 285 (1981) [JETP Lett. 34, 272 (1981)].
``Unmarried America engages in education and advocacy for America's 86 million unmarried adults. Our group includes people who are ever-single, divorced, or widowed, and who have a variety of living arrangements (solo singles, single parents, domestic partners, roommates, and unmarried families). We are seeking fairness for unmarried employees, consumers, and taxpayers as well as more recognition of unmarried voters.''
I guess ``ever-single'' is a euphemism to protect the feelings of people who have never ever been married. This is so silly it defeats any effort at parody.
A June 2004 Wall Street Journal article by Jeffrey Zaslow (no, I don't know if he's available) began thus:
When Thomas Coleman visits legislators in Washington, D.C., to lobby for the rights of unmarried Americans, he isn't always taken seriously. People learn the name of his organization -- the American Association for Single People - ``and they immediately snicker,'' he says. ``They'll ask, `What's a dating service doing here in the Capitol?' ''
The article explains that the ``association ... also goes by Unmarried America to avoid the singles-club stigma....'' Everybody's a linguist these days.
Oh -- a veterinarians' group. And they gave up this cool name to become the AASV? Keep the faith, AABP!
Affiliated somehow with the AVMA.
What about sheep?
Of course, the old claim goes that it takes twenty-five more muscles to frown than to smile, or something like that. So if it's strong face muscles you want, a real facial work-out, ill-humor is the face-healthy way to go. Grimace and snarl your way to strong, sexy lips!
Snopes has a page for this proverb, and includes a compilation of the putative respective numbers of muscles. Here are just the numbers (update of 2004.04.08):
muscle cnt.: ratio
smile frown
________________
17 41 2.4117647058823529
________________
17 43 2.5294117647058823
______
13 33 2.538461
______
13 50 3.846153
_
15 65 4.3
4 35 8.75
10 100 10
20 317 15.85
4 64 16
1 37 37
What we can see from this is that when both muscle counts are composite numbers, they almost always have a common factor.
I can't seem to find a homepage for the organization (contact information on this page served by the Asociación Física Argentina, for AFA's nuclear and other divisions). I hope I can make it up to you with all necessary information. I'll just touch on the highlights. As they seem to me. The initially popular nationalist dictator Juan Perón was a great one for colorfully exaggerated turns of phrase. He famously boasted that Argentina would develop nuclear power and would sell it in 1 and 1.5-liter bottles (``en botellas de litro y litro y medio''). Mark this well: specificity adds bite. For other examples, also in the fiction genre, read Dickens. During the dictatorship, my father (Ing. Oscar Kriman) gave a public lecture on peaceful use of nuclear energy, as they used to say, and a government agent attended the lecture to make sure he said nothing that put Perón in a poor light.
People who know nothing of Argentine politics besides the Evita soundtrack wonder how anyone could fail to be charmed by a whore-turned-philanthropic-shakedown-artist and her fascist husband. It is hard to understand if you insist on remaining utterly ignorant, I guess. Oh wait: the prostitution charges, as well as any sense of historical reality, are denied on this worshipful webpage at the Eva Perón Foundation.
Now where was I? Oh yeah, well, Gabriel (another physicist of Argentine origin, like me) told me in 1980 that before the dirty war, Argentina had had more physicists per capita than any other country on earth. I haven't had a chance in the last quarter century to check that, but it seems credible. The dirty war began as the government of Isabelita Perón (J.D. Perón's third wife and vice president, then widow and president) was coming apart in the mid-1970's. The homepage of the AFA has a link to a list of 24 disappeared physicists, but many more left before they could be disappeared.
``The Association of African Universities is an international non-governmental organisation set up by the universities in Africa to promote cooperation among themselves and between them and the international Academic community. ...formed in November 1967 at a founding conference in Rabat, Morocco, attended by representatives of 34 universities who adopted the constitution of the Association. This followed earlier consultations among executive heads of African universities at a UNESCO conference on higher education in Africa in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1962 and at a conference of heads of African universities in 1963 in Khartoum, Sudan.''
Leave this site and read the Constitution and Bye Laws!
``Founded in 1900 to advance the international standing of US universities... today focuses on issues that are important to research-intensive universities, such as funding for research, research policy issues, and graduate and undergraduate education.''
See more at the YWLS.
Hmmm. I seem to remember Winnipeg is a pretty big city. Why can't I find it on the map? There it is! What's it doing as the capital of Manitoba? This has been a very confusing day.
Until I hear different, I'm going to assume this is an Asian Workshop for people who write in the or an (which one isn't clear) American language.