I'm aware that .ac. is used (in addition to the U.K. and Japan) in Austria (.at), Belgium (.be), Costa Rica (.cr), Israel (.il, South Korea (.kr), New Zealand (.nz), and South Africa (.za).
Under national domains that don't have an .ac. second-level domain, like those of France (.fr) and Germany (.de), universities very often have domain names indicating the type of institution.
Most US universities, and a number of non-US universities, have subdomains in the .edu top-level domain.
The conventional sense of acute is broader, and includes extreme, or severe.
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You know, this looks like a somewhat slow-news part of the glossary, so I'm going to take the opportunity to lay out our grand plan. Briefly, our long-term objective is to reach the point where every entry is necessary for every other entry -- i.e., every entry is reachable by a sequence of links from any other entry. Just think how convenient it will be! With just a few thousand mouseclicks, you'll be able to get from any entry to any other entry. Wow and amen. To achieve this vision in a short amount of time, we're going to start inserting a few more links whose relevance is not immediately evident.
As you may have noticed, none of the AC entries is for a word as such, but rather for an abbreviation pronounced as an initialism (typically ``ay cee'') or a symbol. Hence, none of them is a valid Scrabble® word. Gratifyingly, all three major Scrabble dictionaries agree. Robert Frost observed that writing blank verse is like playing tennis without a net. Playing Scrabble with all marginally defensible words allowed is similar sport.
Cf. ack-ack.
This isn't meant as a criticism, but it's interesting to note that ``inside and outside the US'' is not uninformative. And that's true whether or not ``inside'' and ``outside'' are understood as the mathematical interior of a proper set and its complement (so their boundary in ordinary topologies is a nonempty closed set).
According to Aerosmith's ``Living On The Edge,''
There's somethin' wrong with the world today --
The light bulb's gettin' dim.
There's meltdown in the skah - ah - eye!
Personally, I would have preferred nonsense syllables. I mean -- nonsense syllables that don't sound like they're supposed to mean anything. Nonsense syllables that don't mention Chicken Little. Ideally, it would be an instrumental with or without howling noises. They also state: ``Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah....'' Yeah, well: living in the edge -- now there's a challenge.
I never thought of myself as a consumer of aviation service. Is this something that might get used up? Get a load of me -- I'm consuming aviation!
In an alternate world, Nick is bouncing the cash drawer in and out. ``Hey, get a load of me! I'm givin' out wings!''
Cash registers were originally invented to make sure the hired help didn't embezzle. The bell was added to make non-use of the register obvious (by silence).
The expression ``adjusted cost base'' is also used loosely elsewhere for total cost base and average cost base.
They claim to be ``the nation's leading membership organization of blind and visually impaired people.'' They also claim that ``[i]t was founded in 1961 and incorporated in the District of Columbia'' as if this was anything I had a hankering to know. People should have a sense of proportion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bermuda?
ACBL ``is the governing body for organized bridge activities and promotion on the North American continent'' as far as the WBF sees it. That is, the ACBL is the WBF's zonal organization for zone 2, the second-largest zone, membershipwise, after Europe (vide EBL).
There's a separate organization called the American Bridge Association (ABA). In the bad old days, ACBL was for whites and ABA was for blacks. Both still exist as independent leagues.
I found this entry and the next while trying to see if there wasn't a bomber version of the ACFP.
Oh great: in 1998 there was a reorganization. ACTR and ACCELS became councils under an umbrella organization called ``American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS.'' Frequent name changes and the creation of multiple sealed acronyms (or names that, confusingly, may or may not be sealed acronyms) are usually a sign of poor planning or at least poor branding, but the group claims here that it's a sign of success. During this period of great success, Russian has maintained US high-school student enrollments in the range of 10 to 15 thousand. (Due to a surge in Japanese language study, Russian fell from sixth-most-studied foreign language in US high schools to seventh.)
Acute: ´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´ Grave: ``````````````````````````` Unsorted: ´`´``´```````´°´´```´"´``´`In case of emergency, smash screen and affix as needed.
Vietnamese has upwards of forty (40) (!) distinguishable vowels. You better believe Vietnamese are not always fastidious about accents. Vide VISCII. (Okay: what happens is that the vowels carry diacritical marks to indicate tone. I think it's fair to assign the tone to the vowel. English and German don't have this kind of semantic tone; the tone is used quasisyntactically to indicate questions or assign emphasis. Both languages have about 14 vowels in the standard dialects.)
Seriously, I find that sometimes (like right now) I'm on a public machine that has been cleverly sabotaged to prevent me from easily entering special characters. For such moments, it's useful to have those characters together to cut and paste from a single place.
For Spanish, I need
¡
¿
Á
É
Í
Ó
Ú
á
é
í
ó
ú
ü
ª
º
Ñ
ñ
Maybe this will turn out to be more convenient over time:
¡¿ÁmásÉnéstÍpísÓnósÚrúngüi
1ª 2º Ñañ güe ación
German:
Ä
Ö
Ü
ä
ö
ü
ß
ÄuÖlÜberschäuönülaß
Japanese transcribed to Romaji:
â
î
û
ô
ê
I should probably concede that there are a couple of subtle difficulties here: To discuss how many meanings a word has, one has to try to be precise about what constitute distinct meanings, and what constitute distinct words. If one can't answer the first question, one can't say whether a word has multiple meanings. If one can't answer the second question, one can't say whether the different meanings belong to the same word. What is worse, the question of distinguishing meanings complicates discussion here more fundamentally: one could regard English acception and Spanish acepción as having the same meaning, and claim that only the contexts differ. This is probably one of the worst entries in which to ponder this issue, since the words being examined are part of the vocabulary of the discussion. (Philosophers call this ``building a boat at sea.'') When I discuss it, or find a discussion, at some other entry, I'll place a link to that discussion here.
The second difficulty, what one means by the word word, is not so straightforward to address as one might at first suppose. There is some support for views at opposite extremes. For example, different spellings usually imply different words, but some English words have multiple accepted spellings. Moreover, it is accepted to say that the different conjugations of a verb are different forms of a single ``word'' (e.g., eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating). (You guessed right, I'm eating this, I mean writing this, on an empty stomach.)
Back later.
Actually, the name accordion is somewhat curious. I would have thought that it was somehow parallel to harmonium. That instrument, invented by Alexandre-François Debain circa 1840, takes its (French and identical English) name from the Latin word harmonia (< Gk. harmonios, `harmonious'). At least one other instrument was, in fact, named on a similar pattern. The melodeon (commoner US usage, based on the inferred Greek original) or melodium (British) takes its name from the French orgue mélodium. The latter term was coined by J. Alexandre, who purchased the right to make harmonium-type instruments from Debain in 1844. Debain stipulated that the name harmonium not be used. These instruments were reed organs (they used air pressure from a foot-operated pump).
There was also a short-lived German Melodium developed by H. Bode and O. Vierling of Berlin. It was a ``monophonic electronic keyboard instrument,'' which I suppose means it played only one pitch at a time and would therefore, have been more appropriate for playing melodies. Bode performed on the instrument on radio and in theatre and films, but in 1941 the parts were apparently cannibalized in work that led to the Melochord.
So back to the accordion. A forerunner of the accordion was invented in 1821 by Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, and in 1829 the Accordion (also Akkordion) was patented in Vienna by Cyrill Demian (not Debain).
One of the fellow German-Jewish refugees that my mom knew in Argentina back in the 1950's was a fellow who had been a concert pianist in Germany, iirc. A pianist, anyway. He went looking for work as a musical instrument salesman, and a merchant told him there wasn't much demand for pianos, but accordions sold well, and as the accordion was another keyboard instrument, the man wouldn't have any trouble picking it up. He picked up the accordion, and he never looked back.
I presume that the popularity of the accordion in Argentina is bolstered by its importance in music for tango, the national dance. Accordionists play a role in tango orchestras that string bass players do in Chicago jazz: they are required to emote crazily. When Styx performed ``Boat On The River'' for a music video in 1979, both the string bass and accordion players were cool, but then it wasn't jazz.
Accordion music is also important for movies set in France. Accordion background music means the scene is set in France or a nominally French area like the French Quarter of New Orleans. The 2011 movie Hugo was set in 1930's Paris, and has been described as Martin Scorsese's ``tribute'' and ``love letter'' to silent movies, which just goes to show how far ``paean'' has fallen from currency. I don't think there were any accordions audible or visible in the aggressively 3D opening sequence, but it certainly took me in: I was momentarily taken aback when the first words were eventually spoken in English. Perhaps the British accents played a role in this, but it's not easy to rerun the experiment with North American accents. It is needless to say, and I'll say it anyway, that any southern accents (southern US, Indian, Australian) would have been a severe distraction.
Most fields of scholarship generate terminology that helps them to do their work, but in philosophy the work is giving accounts, so the terminologies are largely an end in themselves. Philosophy is about generating and displaying terminologies. Different philosophies use different terminologies that have essentially no points of contact between each other. Every major German Idealist philosopher created his own terminology, and because the terms did not have a clear meaning, if any, they couldn't be translated and had to be borrowed into other languages. This is why so many German philosophical terms are in use in English. Same thing with Greek.
Although I have been encountering the ``give an account of'' locution for years whenever I would venture into the morass (a word with an almost perfect spelling), the particular thing that inspired me to write about philosophical terminology here was Empirical Philosophy of Science: Introducing Qualitative Methods into Philosophy of Science (Springer, 2015). The ``qualitative'' methods of the title are not meant to be contrasted with quantitative methods; they are contrasted with thinkological methods: ``Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific pracitices.'' I love that ``resorting'': In desperation because methods not based on observation have failed to give a satisfactory account of how scientific practices are practiced, philosophers have been driven to use other ``methods, such as interviews and field observations.''
In the introduction, the editors don't say, but come as close as one can reasonably expect to saying, that even some philosophers consider a nonempirical approach absurd. All this really means, as the editors also come close to admitting, is that philosophers of science are trying to horn in on the turf of sociologists of science. I suppose that ``scholars of'' will always seem like parasites on ``doers of,'' but this really is beginning to look like an infestation.
In this instance, moreover, the more verbose version is generally wrong. People are not generally accused of allegedly doing anything. Cf. high rate of speed.
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In the Clinton administration, the former ACDA came under the policy oversight of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, its activities split among four bureaus: Arms Control, Nonproliferation, Political-Military Affairs, Verification and Compliance. The State Department maintains ``a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to'' dubya's inauguration. The current (April 2003) page for that Under Secretary seems to imply that the Bureau of Verification and Compliance reports to the Under Secretary but is not under that official's policy oversight. (This probably reflects its intended independence as the source of reports to Congress, including the ``President's Annual Report to Congress on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control Agreements.'')
The editorial we used to use the expression ``AC/DC'' to mean `swing[s] both ways.' We meant ``swing'' in a highly specific way.
AC/DC can also refer to the standard alternatives in electric power: alternating and direct current (AC and DC, resp.). In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and probably quite a few other Romance languages, AC/DC suggests the standard alternatives in dating, but not swinging.
This is brilliant! Given that community colleges award ``college credit'' for what is essentially remedial education in high school subjects, why not begin remediation before it's necessary?
The next bright idea: cut out the junior-college middleman! Allow high schools, usually on their own high school campuses, to offer HS-level courses to high school students! Brilliantissimo!
ACE develops the GED tests, which allow someone to demonstrate high-school-level academic proficiency. They were originally created by ACE for the United States Armed Forces Institute, to help WWII veterans, but are now used very widely.
The surprising thing is that aceite, which also refers to a fluid added to salad, is not related to those words. Aceite (like azeite in Portuguese) means `oil' and `olive oil.' Besides Spanish and Portuguese, most major Romance languages take their word for oil from Latin oleum. This root gave rise, mostly through French, to the English words oil and olive, and hence to olive oil (and, for that matter, the name Olive Oyl). The systematic chemical suffixes -ol and -ole arose from the fact that, before there was any clear understanding of microscopic chemical structure, virtually any fluid other than water was liable to be called an ``oil.'' Old Spanish had the word olio, meaning `[olive] oil,' but it probably would have evolved into a near homophone of ojo (`eye') in Modern Spanish. Spanish got aceite from the Arabic word zaite. (The initial a- presumably represents the Arabic definite article al.) Spanish also has the words oliva and olivo for the olive (fruit of the olive tree) and the olive tree, respectively. For the fruit, however, the word aceituna is much more common than oliva, while for the tree, olivo is the standard word.
The main thing that one can say about acepeciones in Spanish (as opposed to what one can say, as above, about the word acepción itself) is that typically, Spanish words have a lot of them. I have fun with this at various parts of the glossary. (See ABRA, for example.) It seems natural to me that Spanish would have a word like acepción -- it's needed. Moreover, appropriately, the word acepción has only una acepción.
The term ``acetic acid'' is about as etymologically redundant as it sounds. The Latin verb acere, `to taste sour,' yielded the word acetum, `vinegar.' It also yielded an adjective acidus > French acide, meaning `sour.' The word vinegar itself comes from the Old French vyn egre, from the Latin vinum, `wine,' and acrem, accusative of acer, `sharp.' (Never mind those final ems. They were already being elided in Late Latin. Obviously, the same colection of acer words yielded the English words acerbic and acrid. The Old French egre or aigre yielded the English eager, now applied to persons, with a somewhat different sense than the original French word. The word keen is not quite capacious enough to cover the earlier and current senses of eager, when applied to living beings, but the way a knife can have a keen edge suggests the connection between sharpness and the current meaning of eager.)
All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept acetum and its nominative plural aceta. The OSPD4 explains that it means `vinegar.' Sure -- in Latin. Even the OED doesn't list acetum as an English word. Look, as long as we're going down this road, can't I use the genitive singular aceti?
H C
3 \
\
C == O
/
/
- ACF/NCP
- Advanced Communication Function/ Network Control Program (NCP)
- ACF/TCAM
- Advanced Communication Function/ TeleCommunications Access Method
- ACF/VTAM
- Advanced Communication Function/ Virtual Terminal Access Method (VTAM)
There was a Wrangler Jeans commercial on TV during 2001 that sounded a patriotic theme. Music accompanied the words ``Some folks are born, made to wave the flag / Ooooh -- they're red, white, and blue.'' Those are the opening lines of ``Fortunate Son,'' a Vietnam-era protest song by CCR. The song continues ``And when the band plays `Hail To The Chief,' / Ooooh, they point the cannon at you.'' It's not the celebratory patriotic song that it starts out sounding like. Perhaps ACFP might have considered using a carefully edited version of ``Sky Pilot'' in the same, uh, spirit: ``You're soldiers of god, you must understand / The fate of your country is in your young hands.'' As it happens, ACFP has its own theme song -- ``Brothers In Arms.''
I love this stuff, because Jesus is Love. Incidentally, the last line of ``Sky Pilot'' goes ``Remember the words `thou shalt not kill'.'' This is not a precise translation. Both of the Hebrew versions (at Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17) use a word that should be (and elsewhere in the Bible usually is) translated `murder.' The wording of the KJV repeats that of the Coverdale Bishops' Bible of 1535. Coverdale didn't know Hebrew, so this is probably an English translation of Luther's German translation (which at both places uses töten, `kill') or borrowed from one of Coverdale's friends, such as Tyndale. In any case, the prescription of capital punishments elsewhere in the Bible makes clear that not all killing is proscribed.
The words kill and murder had pretty much the same semantic ranges in Elizabethan English (``Early Modern English'') as they do today. Besides fealty to the original, however, another goal of the KJV creators was to preserve English that had become familiar. (The same motive probably explains why kill has continued to be used in some of the repackagings of the KJV -- like the ASV -- that have been marketed as ``new translations.'') Certainly, they understood the plain meaning of the original text, and might have changed the wording if it had occurred to them that anyone might be confused. At the time, however, a Christian would no more have supposed the commandment to forbid any killing of humans than to forbid killing of any animals. It was a question of how much of what might be implicit needed to be in the translation. I doubt that anyone before the twentieth century seriously suggested that the commandment was meant to forbid all killing of humans. That interpretation is only possible for those who are thoroughly ignorant of the Bible.
A few centuries ago the pronunciation of Ach could have been rendered
agh in English, but agh! now means something more like
aieeee or ack.
In real life, precision is often impossible in principle.
Strictly speaking, the R/n statement above is true only under the assumption of strong mixing. That is, it is assumed that the solute is uniformly dispersed in the interior environment, so air exhausted contains a concentration equal to the average concentration in the interior. It also assumes that there are no other sinks for the solute. A sink could be a loss of solute through reaction, precipitation, condensation, or adsorption to solid surfaces. If it's not a solute -- if it's in suspension rather than solution, then technically it could not come out of solution, which is what ``precipitate'' normally means in technical non-meteorological usage. We could say it might settle out.
In 1998 ACH had a joint conference in Hungary with ALLC. In 2001 they have one at New York University with ALLC. This is part of a pattern described at the ALLC entry.
In Spanish, there is no word spelled acha, but hacha, q.v., has the same pronunciation.
What I want to know is whether this rhymes with FACHE® (Fellow of the ACHE). An ACHE Diplomate is a Certified Healthcare Executive, or CHE®.
ACHE was earlier known as the American College of Hospital Administrators.
What a plausible concept! For details, simply become an NRHA member.
This reminds me of Disraeli's infamous comment about his wife.
``The centerpiece of the Institute is its student program, known as LatinSummer. LatinSummer, a summer enrichment program for students in grades three to five, is a joint project of ACICS and Augusta County Public Schools. It is one of the largest of the County's many summer programs. Each year, LatinSummer accepts approximately 100 students from the Augusta County public school system. These students then take part in two weeks of exciting, hands-on classes covering topics such as Mythology, Roman Culture, Classical Latin, and Conversational Latin. The students also participate in an activity period each day, which allows them to delve deeper into Classics through hands-on and critical thinking activities.''
Of course that's not Disraeli's comment. I figured you'd just know that. You didn't? There is more than one version, and possibly more than one is accurate, but in the form I've seen most, Benjamine Disraeli is said to have remarked to a friend after her death that ``She was an admirable creature, but she never knew who came first, the Greeks or the Romans.''
In general, acids taste sour. Indeed, European languages typically use the same word for the chemical and gustatory properties. One can translate the first sentence of this paragraph into Spanish as: En general, los ácidos tienen gusto ácido. It detracts a bit from the impressiveness of the insight. Ditto German: Im allgemein, die Säuren schmecken sauer.
But getting back to the point (and ``sharp'' taste is often sourness), the sour taste sense detects chemical acidity, but there is no equivalent taste sense for basicity. Just so you can calibrate your mouth, the pH of lemons is around 2.2, and vinegar is around 2.9. Acid taste is not a perfect measure of acidity, however. For example, apples and grapefruit have comparable acidity (3 to 3.3). Apples taste much less sour because another important factor in determining sour taste is sugar: sweetness masks acidity.
Moreover, if your sausage-and-plantain tastes too sickly sweet, a dash of hot sauce will fix the problem.
``a multidisciplinary scholarly organization with approximately 1500 members in the United States, Ireland, Canada and other countries around the world.Each spring the ACIS holds a national conference attended by 300-400 people from the academic community and the general public. Each fall, meetings are held in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Western regions; the Southern regional takes place in the winter. [You know, these guys have something on the ball!] The ACIS also sponsors joint sessions with the American Historical Association [What? The Irish have something to do with US history?] and the Modern Language Association at their annual conventions. Both national and regional meetings include plenary speakers, academic sessions in all fields of Irish Studies, poetry and fiction readings, films and performances of Irish music or plays. In recent years the ACIS has met in Boston, Madison, Omaha, and Philadelphia, as well as Dublin, Galway, Belfast and Limerick. ...''
Active little group, aren't they!
``The ACIS was founded in 1960 as the American Committee for Irish Studies [an interesting coincidence]; it is incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia as a non-profit organization.''
I'm not sure if ACIS is a singular ``conference'' because it originally had only one (almost) annual meeting (the 38th, in Limerick, was not until 2000) or if it's singular in the same way that the United Synagogue (see USCJ) or the Roman Catholic Church is singular.
A mass-ack is a mass acknowledgment, typically a newsgroup posting in acknowledgment of the receipt of many emails or email votes.
The Philosophical Lexicon edited by Daniel Dennett offers an uncannily similar meaning in philosophical discourse, based on a completely unrelated etymology (Ackerman eponym).
I read so few books that in order to appear literate, I make a point of discussing extensively in this glossary every book I do read. This one is mentioned at the command entry.
In articles for technical journals and conference proceedings, a separate paragraph or two is typical, tucked between the end of the text and the beginning of the list of references, with the section heading ``Acknowledgments.'' This is the place to mention people who participated in ``useful discussions'' but who didn't make the cut as coauthors. It is also a good place to thank any private or public agency that funded or facilitated the research. Acknowledgments in papers are usually brief, but a 1997 conference paper by John K. Yoh has two-and-a-half pages of acknowledgments, ending with ``[and thanks] ... especially to our funding agencies (ERDA, NSF) and the American taxpayers.'' Awwww... he remembered! [The quoted paper is ``The Discovery of the b Quark at Fermilab in 1977: The Experiment Coordinator's Story,'' presented at some conference at Fermilab in 1997 (January or March, apparently).]
Serious nonfiction books normally have acknowledgments in the front matter (see also forward), either as part of a preface or as a separate section. (Acknowledgments in some form are actually required, but since jerks and geniuses are exempted, we're off the hook.)
It is not uncommon for the end of a book's acknowledgments to be a sort of ``dis-disclaimer'' (awkward neologism, sorry) or ``reclaimer'' (hackneyed joke, sorry) in which the author accepts responsibility for all errors, despite the involvement of others who might have prevented them. Here's an unusual version of this, in Orrin W. Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages (Stanford University Press, 1992). Its Preface (pp. v-vi) ends thus:
It hardly needs to be said that I would like to blame the above people for any defects remaining in the book. Unfortunately, I can't. O.W.R.
A somber note also occurs at the end of ``Stuperspace,'' the last article in a special proceedings issue of Physica 15D, pp. 289-293 (1985):
We would like to thank A. Einstein; unfortunately, he's dead.
The preceding examples probably expressed greater regret than was felt. That's better than the alternative situation. Here's how Simon Varey begins the Acknowledgments page of his Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought 7):
In New York City on 1 May 1984, a thief took every one of my notes for an earlier incarnation of this book. I refer him to Tristram Shandy, book 3, chapter 11. Because of him I have written a different book, and probably a better one, but I wish I had not been forced to do so much of the research twice.
(The entire cited chapter is given over to the reading of an extremely thorough and ecumenical anathema.)
Let's have another writer's nightmare: Ernest Hemingway's first wife Hadley once put all his typescripts together with all the carbons in one suitcase. She forgot the suitcase on a train platform; it was stolen and never recovered.
``Acknowledgements'' is a variant spelling. I want to thank other reference sources for setting me straight on this. See also dedications and NORAD.
I just happened to find my copy of a (probably the) biography of Robert L. Vann, and noticed that the scratched-over handwriting inside the front cover is a vague dedication by the author. (``In appreciation for what I am attempting to do. Thanks, Andrew Buni. September 20, 1974.'') I suppose it's possible that this was written at a signing, but the text and the presence of a date suggest otherwise. Also, back in those days university presses didn't engage in much, if any, of that sort of promotion. I figure Buni sent this as a complimentary copy, possibly as a promotion.
Taking Buni's presumed gesture as an acknowledgment of moral support, at least, we might describe it as an intermediate level of acknowledgment: the person to whom the dedication was inscribed is not explicitly acknowledged in the front matter. This raises the question whether persons acknowledged get a complimentary copy. I received one book this way, and I'm not aware of any other book in which I have been acknowledged. With very long acknowledgment lists, however, and with certain kinds of corporate entities, I imagine complimentary copies are rare. It's probably up to the author, and publishers probably balk at too many complimentary copies unless they can be justified as realistically promoting sales.
With textbooks, however, things get a bit twisted. Since professors can ``require'' a book for courses they teach, textbook publishers consider the ``examination copies'' sent free to them a sensible expense. The word ``required'' is enclosed in quotes because many students don't buy (or rent) the texts their professors think they require. University book stores place orders for fewer books than professors ``order'' from them, partly anticipating this and partly to account for competition from off-campus book sources and from nominally inappropriate older editions still in circulation. Problems occur whenever (and that's often) book stores guess wrong as to the number of books that will really be required. Students may want to keep this in mind, and not wait too long to buy books for smaller courses. It is my impression that this is a particular problem for engineering courses, but that might be biased by my limited experience. I hope you read this paragraph carefully. At any time it's liable to be removed to ``examination copy'' or ``university book stores'' or some other entry, and you'll have a hell of a time finding it again.
Other academic publication quirks have to do with doctoral and master's dissertations. These are bound, but hardly published. (Their content does often see publication, however. In science and engineering, the dissertation is often cobbled from short papers the student authored or co-authored for journal publication. In the humanities, a recent graduate's doctoral dissertation typically forms the core of a book that a newly-minted tenure-track professor hopes will lead to tenure. For the extremely unusual instance of a dissertation eventually published over 40 years later, see the case of Frank Bourgin at the ABD entry.) In any event, dissertations are now mostly available in cheap photocopies that University Microfilms will produce from its archives. Most of them have acknowledgment front matter, and the degree candidate -- if not too stupid to earn a degree -- first acknowledges his academic advisor (or occasionally advisors), and then others (especially orals committee members). The university library always, the department if required, the advisor or advisors certainly, and the other members of the committee often get a bound copy of the final version of the dissertation. (The library may require more than one.)
Based in Oxford! Oh. Sorry, I mean ``Oxford, OH!'' So is the Campanian Society, come to think of it.
In 1990, it ``began its operations in Virginia Beach, Virginia -- where the ACLJ was founded by Dr. Pat Robertson, a Yale Law School graduate [better known, I believe, as a Christian broadcaster]. Over the years, the ACLJ has expanded its work and reach with the creation of the European Centre for Law and Justice, based in Strasbourg, France,'' and ``the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice, based in Moscow, Russia. Today, the ACLJ has a network of attorneys nationwide and its national headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. -- just steps away from the Supreme Court and Congress.''
Thirty-four out of its sixty-one constituent societies have names beginning in the letter A.
`` 'cademy'' -- that sounds kinda pointy-headed. Shore would be nass if'n they got togethah witha computin' machin'ry folk fer a joint hoot'n'anny!
In ``The Blues Brothers,'' Elwood (Dan Ackroyd) asks ``What kind of music do you usually have here?'' He receives this immortal reply:
Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.
Y'know, this is just the sort of attitude that could explain how there has to be a CMA as well. (Interestingly, even though SBF has a full-time banjo expert at the alpha chapter [Buffalo], we only learned about ACM and CMA through a videotaping mishap at our Ontario research facility.)
Whatis?com offers a handy list of their special interest groups (SIG's).
Acetonitrile is a byproduct of acrylonitrile production. Acrylonitrile is also abbreviated ACN.
The following is from a newsgroup posting by Martin Ambuhl:
The Acol system evolved from discussions by Jack Marx and S.J. Simon at the Acol Bridge Club in Acol Road in Hampstead. These were fueled by the 1933 Culbertson's America vs. England match. Marx and Simon formed the first Acol Team with Harrison Gray and Iain Macleod in 1935. They completely dominated the previously preeminent teams (Ingram, Beasley, and Lederer), winning everything in sight. The Acol team, augmented by Leslie Dobbs and Kenneth Konstam, won the 1936 Gold Cup. Shortly thereafter Terence Reese joined the Acol group. By the time the Germans invaded Poland, half the tournament players in England had adopted the new methods, including such players as Boris Shapiro, Niel Furse, Nico Gardner (head of the London School of Bridge).
There is an Acol Bridge Club in that part of London today, specifically at 86 West End Lane, West Hampstead, London NW6 2LX. That's at the corner of West End Lane and Compayne Gardens. From there along West End Lane it's about 3 blocks south (counting streetcorners on the left) to Acol Road. Some newsgroup postings claim it's the same club and some claim it isn't. There ought to be some reason why this bridge club is named for a short, somewhat distant side-street. Moreover, as of 2005, the club's homepage has a marquee that scrolls ``The Home of English Bridge for over 60 years!'' It's plausible that the page author wanted a round number, and that ``over 70 years'' wasn't yet appropriate when the page went up. OTOH, FWIW, the club's pages seem nowhere to come out and make the plain assertion that the Acol system was named after the club and not, say, vice versa.
Today Acol in various variants (including one called Stone Age Acol, presumably the closest to what was played in the 1930's) is the dominant bidding system in Britain.
Here's a manageable set of webpages on Acol, served by Bridge Guys (dot com).
A wage of $8 an hour may not buy very good work, and many of the ex-cons they managed to hire didn't follow proper procedure. They helped non-existent and therefore ineligible citizens, named them fancifully or with help from newspapers and TV, and helped these fictitious persons fill out voter-registration cards by, for example, listing their addresses as homeless shelters. They must have been surprised when they were found out, but persons named Tom Tancredo, Dennis Hastert, and Leon Spinks turned out not to be as obscure as they must have supposed, and names like Fruito Boy Crispila not so credible. Just to put some numbers on this: in 2006, ACORN registered 1800 new voters in the state of Washington, and all but 6 of them were fake. According to Fox News, state investigators were told by one worker ``[that] it was a lot of hard work making up all those names'' and another ``said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.'' I guess that could explain Mr. Fruito Crispila.
Hey, why not? Here's proof that I didn't make this one up myself. If I had made it up, it would have been more specific, like Angola, Cuba, and Portugal or Purgatory (somewhere in the southern Hemisphere or New Mexico). [Let me clarify that: there's a town of Purgatory in New Mexico. For all I know, it might be a center for laxative production. Also, according to Dante's Divine Comedy, Purgatory is at the antipode to Jerusalem.]
In EC usage, ACP is a set of developing countries signatory to the Lomé convention (1975), a reciprocal trade-and-aid agreement.
The ACP is pleased to have a street address of
One Physics Ellipse,
College Park, MD 20740
The Observer is ``The Independent Student Newspaper Serving Notre Dame and Saint Mary's.'' The issue of Monday, February 25, 2001 had the following front-page story, modestly placed below the fold:
Observer takes top honors at ACP national convention.
The article was written by one of the senior news editors. Here are the first two paragraphs, faithfully transcribed:The Observer took home its first ever Newspaper of the Year award Sunday from the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP).The story continues on page 4. Half of the World & Nation page (p. 5) is devoted to an AP wire report from London: Foot-and-mouth cases on the rise.``This was the result of many long hours in the office four our staff and is proof that The Observer is continuing it's long legacy of excellence,'' said Noreen Gillespie, managing editor of The Observer.
If you didn't read the rest of the paper, you might imagine that the elementary spelling errors and international news sense were jokes, like the full-issue salute to Saint Mary's women that once ran on Labor Day (1996, I think it was).
The Observer won in the ``Four-year [college] Daily [more than once per week]'' category. In addition to first- through third-place winners, there were two honorable mentions (HM's). That sounds like a higher honor.
If you believe what you read in the paper, then here's some further information on the ACP: it ``is a division of the National Scholastic Press Association [NSPA] and is the oldest and largest organization for college student media in the United States. Founded in 1921, the ACP today has nearly 800 members, including close to 600 student newspapers.'' As the ACP page explains, it was the NSPA that was founded in 1921, with some college members; the ACP was founded in 1933.
Originally founded (1932) to accredit pre-service education, in 1975 its scope expanded to include accrediting providers of continuing pharmacy education. That's the general direction, isn't it? Professionalization up the wazoo. But the cure probably isn't worse than the disease. In continuing legal education, a lot of the commercially-offered credits are regarded as worthless.
``An open industry specification co-developed by Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba.ACPI establishes industry-standard interfaces for OS-directed configuration and power management on laptops, desktops, and servers.
ACPI evolves the existing collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management (APM) application programming interfaces (APIs), PNPBIOS APIs, Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) tables and so on into a well-defined power management and configuration interface specification.
The specification enables new power management technology to evolve independently in operating systems and hardware while ensuring that they continue to work together.''
Of practical consumer interest:
OSPM provides a new appliance interface to consumers. In particular, it provides for a sleep button that is a ``soft'' button that does not turn the machine physically off but signals the OS to put the machine in a soft off or sleeping state. ACPI defines two types of these ``soft'' buttons: one for putting the machine to sleep and one for putting the machine in soft off.
This gives the OEM two different ways to implement machines: A one-button model or a two-button model. The one-button model has a single button that can be used as a power button or a sleep button as determined by user settings. The two-button model has an easily accessible sleep button and a separate power button. In either model, an override feature that forces the machine off or resets it without OS consent is also needed to deal with various [putatively] rare, but problematic, situations.(See section 1.5 of the ACPI spec.)
Here, we do not distinguish "learn" and "acquire," making no claim as to whether conscious language learning or unconscious language acquisition are involved.[The quote is footnote 2 of ``Age, Rate and Eventual Attainment in Second Language Acquisition,'' by Stephen D. Krashen, Michael A. Long, and Robin C. Scarcella, in TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec. 1979), pp. 573-582. (Krashen is extremely prominent in the field of SLA, and Scarcella is no slouch either.)]
An acre is one 640th of a square mile, or 0.40468564224 ha.
See also notarikon.
Acronyms are a vast topic and a good jumping-off point for everything, so anything I said about them here would be just a gob in the ocean. So why even hawk up to spit? Nevertheless, I should probably mention somewhere that within this reference work, I tend to favor the word initialism for any acronymic construct whose pronunciation is based entirely or mostly on the names of its component letters.
A demonstration of the importance of having a robust armamentarium of acronyms is adumbrated in this sentence from conservative opinionator Victor Davis Hanson (March 22, 2017, ``Does Europe Treasure NATO Again?''):
We are still waiting to see the fruition of a European External Action Service; so far there are lots of impressive acronyms for various forces and programs, but no brigades in action.
Hey -- well started is half done, no?
Here are instructions on how you can use acrylic to protect yourself.
Du Pont originally began research in acrylic plastics in order to find a use for its surplus isobutanol byproduct. Plexiglass is polyacrylic.
- Birmingham-Southern College (Birmingham, Ala.) They were once ranked the number-one Southern Regional Liberal Arts College by U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR). Then the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching elevated them from the ``Regional Liberal Arts'' category to the ``National Liberal Arts I'' category, where they rank ``in the top eighty.'' Uh, thanks, guys.
- Centenary College of Louisiana (Shreveport)
- Centre College (Danville, Kentucky)
- Davidson College (the town of Davidson is just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina) It was founded in 1837 by Charlotte Presbyterians to prepare young men for the ministry. According to Terry Eastland, publisher of the Weekly Standard and father of a student there, it ``is now widely regarded as one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country, and certainly it is one of the hardest to get into.'' The quote is taken from his contribution to the January 2006 issue of First Things, entitled ``God and Man at Davidson'' -- an evident allusion to William F. Buckley's famous book critical of his own alma mater (``God and Man at Yale''). The article is about private colleges', and this college's, general slide away from church affiliation, and the latest slip in that direction that took place at Davidson in 2005. At first I thought he might cheer the college's decision to put some distance between itself and those crazy leftists in the PCA, but the article is something of a lamentation. Get over it, or jump off the sinking ``mainline.''
- Furman University (Greenville, S.C.)
- Hendrix College (Conway, Arkansas) Almost 73.8% of its students chose to attend out of a vague notion that Jimi went there. (Statistic estimated by SBF.)
- Millsaps College (Jackson, Miss.)
- Morehouse College (Atlanta, Ga.) An HBCU, brother school of Spelman.
- Rhodes College (Memphis, Tenn.)
- Rollins College (Winter Park, Fla.)
- Southwestern College (Georgetown, Tx.)
- Spelman College (Atlanta, Ga.) An HBCU for women, sister school of Morehouse. I can imagine why they chose to spel it this way, but I still wish they hadn't.
- Trinity University (San Antonio, Tx.)
- University of Richmond (Virginia)
- University of the South (Sewanee, Tenn.)
- Washington and Lee University (Lexington, Va.)
Northern Syria is also the area where reportedly, on September 6, 2007, Israeli planes attacked a facility where North Korean engineers were helping their Syrian friends with some cement they had shipped in from North Korea. Recently modified ship manifests prove that it was cement, but some people wonder why Israel attacked a cement shipment. That's all the sense I can make of the conflicting stories regarding the Korean-flagged ships.
Another version of events has it that Israel attacked military supplies for Hezbollah, but that's ridiculous because (a) under the terms of the 2006 ceasefire, Hezbollah is not to be rearmed, and (b) under the supervision of the UN-hatted international peace-keeping force charged with preventing Hezbollah from rearming, Hezbollah was fully rearmed long before the September attack. In short, no one believes the Hezbollah arms story.
Interestingly, the only countries that have condemned the attack are Syria and North Korea, which have also denied that the planes bombed a military research facility that was storing North Korean nuclear material, shortly after North Korea again finally agreed to abandon its nuclear enrichment program. So if North Korea is not playing a Syrian shell game with its nuclear weapons program, why did the Israelis bomb?
On September 29, Syrian Vice-President Faruq Al Shara showed photos of some damaged building somewhere and explained that the Israeli attack hit ACSAD. The next day, a statement was issued by ACSAD, attacking the Zionist media for claiming that the attack hit ACSAD. The Arab League headquarters in Cairo was unable to confirm that the photos shown by Al Shara were of ACSAD.
Well, here's something curious. In January 2006, the Directors-General of ACSAD and the Arab Atomic Energy Agency signed a memorandum of understanding. I don't know the details, but it had to do with agriculture.
- Geographic and Land Information Society,
- Cartography and Geographic Information Society (formed from the former ACA, possibly with some members of the GLIS,
- American Association of Geodetic Surveying,
- National Society for Professional Surveyors.
In the 1970's, ACT successfully pushed for legal restrictions on commercialism in children's TV programming, and claimed credit for the prohibition of product promotions by children's-show hosts and other commercial practices. ACT also successfully pushed for a ban (implemented by FCC regulatory action) on vitamin-pill ads, when it was found that children were poisoning themselves with overdoses. (Iron is very dangerous; some vitamins, particularly the oil-soluble ones, can produce some of the same symptoms when taken in great excess as when not available in sufficient quantity.)
ACT's advocacy helped pass the Children's Television Act of 1990, which required the FCC to impose some limits on commercials in children's programming (in 1991 they set these at 10.5 minutes per hour weekends, 12 minutes/hour weekdays) and required commercial stations to report on efforts to provide ``educational and informational'' programming as part of their license renewal applications. Products with direct tie-ins to a children's program are forbidden to be advertised during the program (so, for example, GI Joe dolls can't be advertised during the GI Joe show), though they can be advertised at any other time, such as immediately afterwards. You're not the only person who thinks this particular restriction is toothless. There are also restrictions on 900-number ads aimed at children.
ACT president Charren did something surprising in 1992. She decided that with the FCC's new rules, there was no important work for ACT to do that could not be done better by other organizations, particularly local advocacy groups, so she folded it. Remaining assets of $125,000 were donated to Harvard University Graduate School of Education for an annual fellowship and a lecture series on children's TV. ACT was supported over the years by a series of grants -- the first for $165,000 from the John Markle Foundation in 1970, later grants from the Ford and Carnegie foundations. Some saw the end of ACT as simply a reaction to a funding fall-off. The organization had a $500,000/year budget and a staff of 15 in its 70's heyday, and was down to four employees and $125,000/year in 1991.
ACT always opposed censorship, as she saw it, and that's about right if you accept the conventional legal views that (1) commercial speech does not enjoy the full protection that the first amendment grants to noncommercial, press, and individual private speech and (2) that children have special vulnerability that the state has a significant (or ``compelling,'' Supreme Court decisions turn on such distinctions) interest to be balanced against free-speech concerns. In any case, the Federal Communications Act is the most explicitly socialist document in US law, recognizing the frequency spectrum as a limited resource belonging to the people collectively, and hence subject to regulation by the FCC. ACT opposed the boycotts and what Peggy Charren saw as censorship advocated by conservative groups like the Moral Majority, and indicated that their declining influence also allowed her to disband ACT. ACT joined on the plaintiffs' side in a suit by broadcasters against the FCC's ban on indecent broadcasts.
There was a sister organization called the Media Fund, similarly funded and defunded by the same pair. Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, the DCCC Chair for the 2006 elections, gave an interview to the New York Daily News in August 2006 in which he transparently criticized Soros and Lewis: ``In the 2004 election there were some very active players who, as far as I can tell, have now decided they're neither going to be involved in the field, advertising or anything. ... Do you know where they are?'' Some commentators commentated that dissing some of the party's most generous contributors might not be wise.
During WWI, my grandfather was an officer in the Kaiser's army, on the western front. As an officer, he rode a horse, of course. On some occasion, with most of the details lost to history, a farmer went away and left him with a mare that was about to drop a foal. The farmer must have supposed that as an officer and a horse rider, he knew his way around a horse. Maybe my grandfather should have pointed out that in civilian life, he was a lawyer (actually a Rechtsanwalt, which is perhaps better translated as `barrister,' but in any case a city-slicker lacking the relevant hands-on experience). In the event, the mare had a difficult birth, which my grandfather didn't realize until too late, and the foal died.
Apart from the general organization website linked above, ACT has a short-words-and-simple-sentences ``student site for ACT test takers.'' Cartoons and photographs are ``diverse'' or ``balanced.'' (I.e., if there are fewer than ten student models in a page view, then any white male must be able to pass for Hispanic. The color-calibrated society. I'm sure that the people involved in these travesties don't suspect they are pandering, disingenuous, or sneakily offensive. Where are the redheads!? Why aren't there any redheads?! They didn't include redheads! We're being objectified! Oppression! Oppression!)
The ACT must be one of the most superfluous of college entrance exams. Competitive schools rely on the SAT.
Jervis is a name like Berkeley. In both cases, the eponym (British admiral
John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent; Bishop George Berkeley) has a
first-syllable er that was pronounced like the word are,
and in both cases the toponym (Jervis Bay, Australia; Berkeley, California)
has regularized the sound to er.
ACTH levels in the blood vary over the course of the day. The normal range is up to 80 pg/ml at 8-10 AM, unless you keep weird hours like me. (Yeah, the units there are picograms per milliliter. When you're talking hormones, a little bit goes a long way.)
Activated temperature dependence is also called Arrhenius behavior. See more at the Arrhenius plot entry.
Of course, any digital filter is active, but the term active filter tends to imply an analog filter.
Fat Bob used the elevator.
I want to take a moment here to apologize to readers who are radially challenged, or whatever the current euphemism is. When the sentence is cast into the passive voice, it becomes
The elevator was used by Fat Bob.
Now in both Fat-Bob sentences above, Fat Bob is the ``agent'' of the action performed by the verb. He performs the action, even though the action may not seem like much of a performance. It's true that the elevator does the heavy lifting, but the verb is not ``lift.'' The verb is use, and it is Bob who does the using, so Bob is the agent.
Sorry to break off like this, but the entry is under construction. Fat Bob is the ``subject'' or ``agent'' of the sentence. He performs the action, even though it's not much of a performance
Cribbed from Brian Sack: In the Event of My Untimely Demise (HarperOne, 2008), near the bottom of p. 96.
The law of mass action in its simplest form expresses equilibrium in terms of concentrations or partial pressures. This is a kind ideal-gas approximation; the correct formulation replaces concentrations with fugacities. (This doesn't instantly solve the problem, of course, since one has the problem of determining the fugacity function.)
Does sound vaguely reminiscent of Lovecraft's Cthulu, doesn't it? Not even a little bit?
Update January 2005: obviously thanks to God, the page loads much faster now. Thank you for your prayers -- they were obviously effective.
The January 1987 issue of Laboratory Animal Science was a special issue on ``Effective Animal Care and Use Committees.'' Thumbing through it to titillate my uh, to satisfy my curios..., uh, to investigate research into animal pain, I found a couple of titles that whispered heresy! Richard J. Traystman, Ph.D., asked ``ACUC, Who Needs It?: The Investigator's Viewpoint'' (pp. 108-110), while Joseph R. Geraci, V.M.D., Ph.D. and Dean H. Percy (no picture) asked ``Are Animal Care and Use Committees Really Needed?'' (pp. 111-112).
Let me give you a hint about reading scientific papers besides ``don't'': after the title, read the concluding paragraph. The introduction is just a build-up to demonstrate that the topic is more serious, important and interesting than it seems, despite being one of 300,000 published that week. Also, if the article is reviewed, it is good to cite the previous important and excellent work of anyone who may be referee for the article. Asphyxiating as I bated my breath, I cut to the chase.
Geraci and Percy's concluding paragraph begins ``In answer to our original question, ACUCs really are needed.'' Let me take a moment here to point out that the only justification for the use of italics in a scientific paper is to distinguish vectors from scalars.
Breathing more easily now, I notice that the next sentence contains some meaningful information: ``While to some observers their functions may appear to be mundane and unimportant, active ACUCs ...'' I commend the syntactical virtues of this admission to your attentive attention. Recognize that writing, like any game, has both offensive and defensive maneuvers. In the first place, defensive writing requires that one not write anything one would regret having quoted back to one. Crafting effective defensive prose requires one to anticipate the offensive maneuvers of the opponent or ``quoter.'' The ``quoter'' pares away words, like a sculptor chipping away excess material, ultimately leaving a work of art. Thus, any sufficiently long piece of prose can be edited to something like ``... I ... like ... [young boys] ....'' The rules of the game more or less require the ellipses and brackets, so the ``quoter'' prefers to be able to use big slabs of text without square-bracket interpolations. Returning, then, to the defensive task at hand, remember: Conjugation is your friend. That is, if a predatory quoter wants to twist your prose into a demonstration that you believe a proposition that you have merely stated as a straw man, inconvenient syntax protects you. In this instance, for example, the text might have read ``Some observers think that the functions of ACUCs are mundane and unimportant, but ....'' Such phrasing is vulnerable to editing into ``ACUCs are mundane and unimportant.'' As defensively organized, however, the verb is appear, and the copula is in infinitive form, so predatory quoters are forced to use more evident modification.
The English language draws its strength from active verbs. How much better ``Dick ran'' than ``Dick was in the process of running''! Hence, if the authors had been writing with no other purpose in mind than to produce clear, taut prose, the ``to be'' in the sentence should have been discarded: ``... functions may appear mundane and unimportant...'' There is no sanction in defensive wording for not compressing the sentence in this way, but flabby writing is a hard habit to break.
According to Traystman's concluding paragraph: ``The answer of course is, all of us need it!!'' You know, some authors of papers in scientific journals seem not to be aware of it, but the use of exclamation marks for emphasis WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!!!!!!!!! The only reason for exclamation marks is to indicate factorial and double factorial. If t is a positive integer,
t! = t * (t-1) * (t-2) * ... * 3 * 2 * 1
t!! = t * (t-2) * (t-4) * ... * (4 or 3) * (2 or 1).
For more on lab animals, see the AWA entry.
In medical usage, the sense of acute is sharply restricted. It refers to health effects that are sharply restricted in time -- of sudden or rapid onset and brief duration. If you imagine a graph of pain or some other measure of morbidity plotted as a function of time, then a sudden onset with rapid decrease immediately after will look like a ``sharp'' spike, so the term is etymologically reasonable in more than just a loosely transferred sense.
On the other hand, use of the term ``acute'' does imply some level of severity: if the pain is not very intense, or the symptom not severe, then the spike will not be very high, and would look not sharp but stubby.
There are a lot of interesting mathematical things one could say about the maximum, topology, coarse-graining, natural scales and dimensional analysis, but physicians rarely think about these wonderful things. Suffice it to say that it is reasonable from the perspective of a scientist's use of language that ``acute'' should mean of rapid onset and short duration, given that the thing described exceeds some threshold level of noticeability. Most decisively, however, the usage is an established convention.
Note that there is no special term implying brief duration without sudden onset. The reason is tautology: if the onset is not rapid, then the duration can't be brief.
Acute is contrasted with chronic.
There are three Clarions in Pennsylvania: Clarion County, and Clarion Township and Clarion Borough, which are in the county. Clarion Borough is almost completely surrounded by Clarion Township, though the borough shares perhaps 150 meters of border with Highland Township. The borough of Clarion is the county seat of Clarion County.
Emlenton Borough straddles the border of Clarion and Venango counties. Children of that borough and some other villages and unincorporated areas attend public schools of the Allegheny Clarion Valley School District. This school district has the unique distinction of being the only school district in Pennsylvania to span parts of four counties (Armstrong, Butler, Clarion and Venango). The ACVSD seems to be the only official government entity to bear the ACV moniker; I would guess that the region was named after the school district.
R
\
\
acid: C == O
/
/
HO
R
\
\
acyl: C == O
/
/
For the specific case of R a methyl group, the acyl is acetyl.