CB

Cab-to-Body (distance). Precisely, the separation between the truck cab and the truck body (the body is the cargo area). Okay, that's not precise.

For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.

C.B.

Cecil B. DeMille.

CB

Cell-Based.

CB

Circuit Breaker. Serves the function of a fuse, but doesn't burn out each time it trips. See the GFCB entry for an example of how one kind of CB works.

CB

Citizens' Band. A range of frequencies used for two-way intervehicle radio communication. Popular fad in the 1970's.

Channel	Frequency (in MHz)
1	26.965
2	26.975
3	26.985
4	27.005
5	27.015
6	27.025
7	27.035
8	27.055
9	27.065
10	27.075
11	27.085
12	27.105
13	27.115
14	27.125
15	27.135
16	27.155
17	27.165
18	27.175
19	27.185
20	27.205
21	27.215
22	27.225
23	27.235

CB

Classical Bulletin. Cover date seems to lag real time by a bit. Maybe this is appropriate to the discipline. Catalogued by TOCS-IN. Published by Bolchazy-Carducci (BCP).

CB

Clubbell.

CB

Collector-Base.

Cb

ColumBium. Obsolete chemical abbreviation for obsolete name for Niobium (Nb). The term columbite, however, is not obsolete, and columbium is still used in commerce.

CB

Common Base. A BJT configuration in which the base is connected to the common ground.

C.B.

Companion of the Bath. In the U.K., this is an honor bestowed by the King or the, uh, Queen. They also have something called the ``Order of the Garter.'' They're pervy.

French Kings Louis XIII and XIV used to, uh, maybe this isn't appropriate for a family glossary.

CB-

Computer-Based (whutzitz). Overly productive prefix, though not half as egregious as CA-.

CB

Conduction Band (of a semiconductor or semimetal). Cf. VB.

C.B.

Confined to Barracks. This is used as a punishment in the army. It might be hard to arrange in the navy.

CB

Cornelius Bennet. A Buffalo Bills linebacker (LB) for nine years until 1996, when as a free agent he took a better offer to go elsewhere. Also known as `the Biscuit.' I think that one of the major fast-food chains had a local (that meant Buffalo-area when I wrote it) promotion for a CB burger in the early nineties.

According to ongoing research conducted by someone who once sat next to me on an AA flight (OKC to O'Hare), most people can't name twenty active football players. My suspicion is that most of the twenty active football players they can't name are linemen.

CB

Corner Back. A defensive position in American football.

CB

Crossbar.

CB

Cumulo-nimBus cloud. Abbreviation apparently used by airplane pilots.

CBA

Cell-Based Array. ASIC architecture.

CBA

ChloroBenzoic Acid. Some aerobic biphenyl-utilizing bacteria can convert toxic PCB's into CBA's. Other bacteria exist that break down CBA's further.

One barrier to the practical utilization of this biodegradation process is the fact that PCB's are hydrophobic (i.e., nonpolar, not water-soluble), whereas the bacteria live in moist sections of the soil. In order to accelerate the process, surfactants such as QS have been considered (see F. Fava, D. Di Gioia: ``Effects of Triton X-100 and Quillaya Saponin on the ex situ bioremediation of a chronically polychlorobiphenyl-contaminated soil,'' Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, vol. 50, #5, pp 623-630 (1998)).

CBA

Christian Booksellers Association.

CBA

Christian Brothers Academy. A Catholic high school in Albany, NY.

CBA

Collective Bargaining Agreement.

C band

Conventional BAND. The conventional band for fiber-optic communications, wavelengths in the range 1530-1565 nm, also called the 1550 nm band. Cf. L band.

CBB

Cattlemen's Beef Board. Common name for the Cattlemen's Beef Research and Promotion Board. How blithely they assume that advocacy and the disinterest demanded by research can cohabit.

``[O]versees the collection of $1.00 per head on all cattle sold in the U.S. and $1.00 equivalent on imported cattle, beef and beef products and is responsible for approving the annual budget for its national checkoff-funded programs.''

CBBB

The Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc.

CBC

Canadian-Born Chinese. Cf. FOB.

CBC

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The French initialism is SRC.

(To talk back to As It Happens, email <aih@toronto.cbc.ca>).

I have seen the CBC described as the party organ of the Liberal Party. To the extent that parallels can be drawn, the Liberal Party of Canada corresponds to the Democratic Party of the US.

On January 22, 2008, the CBC sponsored a debate among candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination, ahead of South Carolina's Democratic primary on January 26. Neil Young and the NHL, Mark Steyn and now this! We're being recolonized! Sound the alarm, it's... Oh, it's the Congressional Black Caucus, sponsoring a debate on MLK Day.

CBC

Complete Blood Count.

CBC

Congressional Black Caucus. Hey! I just noticed this: there are no Republicans in the CBC. What are they, prejudiced or something?

For our serious, solid-information-seeking glossary readers (at least the ones we haven't driven off): any actually useful link or content has been segregated in this CBCF entry.

CBC

Corrupt Bastards Club. In March 2006, the regular trickle of stories about government corruption in Alaska began to flow a little faster with stories about 12 lawmakers who had been receiving graft from VECO, an oilfield services company. One day that Spring, a man walked into a bar where Alaska's House Finance Committee Co-Chairman Mike Chenault (R-Nikiski) was sitting with some fellow legislators who, like him, were implicated in the scandal. The man walked up and said ``You corrupt bastards.'' As Chenault said later, ``that name stuck.'' They even made up some hats with the device ``CBC'' on them. (Yes, ``device'' is a rather old-fashioned word for this. That's why I used it.) I assume they were hats of the baseball- or feed-cap type.

CBCF

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. (Opposes breast cancer in Canada.)

CBCF

Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Inc. (Favors blacks in congress. I know, this proliferation of CBCF's is very confusing. We're here to help!)

CBCI

Central Bank Certificate[s] of Indebtedness.

CBCU

Centralized Broadband Control Unit.

CBD

CannaBiDiol. Psychoactive element in pot.

CBD

Cash Before Delivery. As the saying goes, ``In God We Trust, all others pay cash.''

CBD

Central Business District.

CBD

Commerce Business Daily. Where DARPA posts the authoritative versions of its BAA's. Also at this site.

CBDS

Connectionless Broadband Data Service.

CBE

Charting By Exception. A documentation system developed in 1983 by staff nurses at St. Luke's Hospital in Milwaukee. In CBE, only significant findings or exceptions to norms are recorded.

CBE

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering.

CBE

Chemical Beam Epitaxy.

CBE

Commander, Order of the British Empire.

CBE

Competency-Based Education. Also called performance-based education. A movement, or a trend, or a BIG NEW IDEA every few years, that educational accomplishment should be measured not by number of courses (somehow) satisfactorily completed, but instead by the acquisition of identifiable competencies.

CBE

Conduction Band Edge. The energy of the lowest-lying state in the conduction band (CB).

This entry used to claim the CBE was the ``energy surface of the conduction band as a function of momentum coördinate.'' WHAT WAS I THINKING?! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! Viewed in momentum space, the conduction band is all surface: at any point in momentum space (more precisely in the space of crystal momentum or quasimomentum), there is a discrete set of energies that an electron may have.

CBE

Council of Biology Editors. The expansion with Biological in place of Biology seems to be quite common, but when you think about it, this is an instance in which the attributive noun is clearly to be preferred, if you're not trying to distinguish, say, human from robotic editors.

The CBE was founded in 1957, as the Conference of Biological Editors, by a joint action of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and the US government's National Science Foundation (NSF). The Conference was changed to Council some time between 1964 and 1972.

A major activity of the organization is the production of a style manual. Interestingly, or perhaps not so interestingly, while the issuing entity had Biology in its name, the manual's original title was Style Manual for Biological Journals. A case can be made for that, I suppose.

The sixth edition, published in 1994, broadened the scope of its style recommendations beyond biological disciplines (``microbial, plant, zoological, and medical sciences'' -- why not botanical and animal? why exclude clinical medical research?) to science generally. The cynical view (mine) is that this was a territorial encroachment, a power play, a bid to stick their noses in other people's business. An alternative and fashionable view is that science is rapidly becoming highly interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity is an occasionally useful idea because it gives people with money and a negligible knowledge of science the illusion of understanding. In fact, as any fool can see, specialization continues to increase. Interdisciplinarity takes the form of cooperation between specialists who understand each others' work only at a what-can-you-do-for-me level.

Whatever its virtues, the manual seems to be consulted primarily as an arbiter of the somewhat arbitrary conventions of citation. We're talking about scholarly or at least putatively scholarly research here. The most widely used citation style standards seem to be those of the MLA and the APA style manuals, with those of the CBE and University of Chicago style manuals in distant third and fourth places. On the other hand, the most widely used style manuals (as such) are probably the MLA, APA, and U. of Chicago, and fourth place would probably go to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. That's my impression, anyway. Outside of academia, I imagine that the most popular style manuals would be those of the University of Chicago, the AP, and the New York Times, in that order.

In 2000, six years after making its move with the style manual, CBE changed its name to the Council of Science Editors (CSE). As of 2007, there has not been another edition of the style manual, and its citation standards are still widely referred to as the CBE conventions/standards/whathaveyou. I suppose this will change when the CSE issues a new style manual.

CBED

Convergent-Beam Electron Diffraction. A convergent (i.e., focused) electron beam produces a diffraction pattern in a TEM. By taking the pattern over a small region, one avoids the averaging that occurs if a broad field is sampled, and one obtains more detail in the diffraction pattern. In principle, of course, one can take this too far: if the beam size becomes comparable to the wavelength, one loses resolution. In practice, that's not a problem. It would be wonderful if focusing that well were possible.

CBEMA

Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association. Now ITI.

CBF

Canadian Bridge Federation. Contract bridge.

CBG

Cleaner-Burning Gasoline.

CBGA

Ceramic Ball Grid Array. Cf. CCGA below. Click on this search for images.

CBGB

Country, BlueGrass & Blues. These are the kinds of music originally performed, or planned to be performed, at a club founded in New York City in December 1973. It was founded by Hilly Kristal, who had previously managed the Village Vanguard, a renowned jazz club. Kristal's new club had a capacity of 300 and was typically described as ``small'' or ``cramped.'' Cramped it must have been, and small for 300, but I don't think 300 has been unusually small for a jazz club since pop went rock in the 1960's. Anyway, the awning and the signs said CBGB (and in smaller letters OMFUG, q.v.); the club was referred to as CBGB's.

Kristal soon discovered that there wasn't much of a market for more C, BG, or B in the city. The bar was in the Bowery, appropriately enough for what eventually became a trendy venue for the 1970's punk rock movement. (For most of the twentieth century, the Bowery was a blighted area. Jim Croce's ``You Don't Mess Around With Jim'' begins ``Uptown got its hustlers / Bowery got its bums.'')

CBGB's was still there as of August 2005, having dodged the landlord's attempt to evict it. However, the landlord, not exactly surprisingly, refused to renew the lease, and that expired in September 2005. Lawyers for Kristal managed to forestall the closing for a year, which shows how much you can do when you haven't a legal leg to stand on and everyone knows it. The club will closed Sunday, October 15, 2006. Hilly Kristal, still the owner after all those years, was 74 years old and battling lung cancer, but said he planned to reopen in Las Vegas.

CBI

Central Bank of Iceland.

CBI

Charles Babbage Institute. Center for the History of Computing.

CBI

Computer-Based Instrument.

CBI

The Confederation of British Industry. ``The UK's leading independent employers' organisation. Representing public and private sector companies employing 10 million of the workforce - it is Britain's business voice.'' Until August 1965, it was the FBI (where the I represents a plural).

CBI

Confidential Business Information.

CBIR

Content-Based Image Retrieval.

See Sean Landis's pages.

CBIRS

Content-Based Image Retrieval System[s].

See Sean Landis's pages.

CBJ

Central Bank of Jordan.

CBJ

Collector-Base Junction. The pn junction of a BJT that is reverse-biased in the normal (forward-active) operating regime. Cf. EBJ.

CBKR

Cross-Bridge Kelvin Resistor. A two-dimensional Transmission Line Model (TLM). Cf. CER.

CBL

Community-Based Learning.

China's Cultural Revolution was begun by Chairman Mao in 1966. In intention, it was something like one of the Great Awakenings that the US has experienced since the colonial era: it was meant to bolster religious belief. In China, the religion was an economic messianism called Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Unlike the Great Awakenings, participation in the Cultural Revolution was not optional. There were some other differences, such as the mortality rates, but I want to focus on an aspect relevant to this entry. That was this little thing we call the ``Down to the Countryside Movement,'' begun by Mao in December 1968, which continued for a decade. It wasn't a walk in the park. It was an involuntary ``movement,'' in this case of ``young intellectuals'' into the countryside, where they were educated by the peasants. The education consisted of learning what farm servitude was like, first hand. Most of the ``young intellectuals'' were recent college graduates, but some were not. A friend of mine told me some of his experience of this internal exile, begun before he finished high school. After some time, he got word from his mother of rumors that the Movement would soon be ended; she urged him to try to prepare for the college qualification exams. There were no useful textbooks available, but he and a couple of friends found an educated fellow who taught them whatever he could, which included mathematics to the calculus level. (When you spend a couple of decades exiling intellectuals to the sticks, you're bound to end up with some sharp sticks.) My friend did well enough on his exams to continue on to college.

This is very different from CBL, of course. But every experience can be a learning experience, so the fact normally goes without saying. When it doesn't go without saying -- whenever an intrinsically noneducational activity is explicitly labeled as learning or education -- it strongly suggests some dishonesty afoot. Okay, here's a CBL definition from a useful email: ``courses, often called service-learning, typically offer students opportunities to provide some meaningful service over an extended period of time that meets a need or goal that is defined by a community group or agency.''

Cf. CBR, EL. Uh-oh... namespace collision straight ahead!

CBL

Computer-Based Learning.

This term dates from before widespread web use. It meant something like learning based on an educational computer program distributed on floppy disks. Nowadays it might mean googling for answers. I can't assign take-home exams any more, because any problem sufficiently simple to assign for an exam is liable to have an answer available somewhere on the web.

Did you say ``honor code''? Look, that might have been effective when cheating normally required the cooperation of a second person, typically drawn from a small pool of fellow students who had also pledged to follow the honor code. With the Internet, it effectively takes only one to tango, and the dance floor fills up fast.

CBLD

Cincinnati Bell Long Distance. If this acronym seems strangely and inappropriately familiar, they probably just gave out a gazillion free tee shirts to your undergraduates as well.

CBLPI

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. ``[T]he most unique women's organization in America. [Take it from me girls, or ladies or whatever: relativizing absolute adjectives is so yesterday.] Founded in 1993, our mission is to provide leadership, mentoring, and learning opportunities for girls and women across the country.''

CBM

CoalBed Methane. Mostly in the form of a monolayer of adsorbed methane.

CBN

CannaBiNol. Psychoactive element in pot.

CBN

Christian Broadcast Network. One day Pat Robertson was driving along and the voice of God commanded him to buy a television station. I recall reading that the Lord was very specific about the wattage, too. See also SRN.

CBn

CommanderBond.Net. ``Bond At Its Best.'' (My emphasis.) A great place for male bonding and for providing eyeballs to highly-focused-demographic ads. Hmmm... perhaps not enough of them. They accept donations.

More on promotional activities: After co-starring as Major Anya Amasova in ``The Spy Who Loved Me'' (1977), Barbara Bach kvetched about having had to kiss icky Roger Moore, who was old enough to be her father. (Not her exact words; I'm going from memory here, okay?) Moore, whose first movie role was as a soldier in a 1945 movie, was 50 at the time and is three years older than Sean Connery. In a 1996 interview, Moore said, ``I have a couple of projects that are simmering. One is a remake of a French film which is almost ready. All we need is to find a leading lady old enough to look as if she would be interested in being kissed by me.''

Barbara Goldbach was born August 27, 1947. (Not sure when the name changed -- maybe when she started modeling for the Ford Agency at age 16.) When she was 18 she married 29-year-old Augusto Gregorini. BB co-starred with Ringo Starr in a stupid movie called ``Caveman'' (1891; sorry, make that 1981 -- there weren't any pterodactyls in 1891). Starr (Richard Starkey) and she married on her thirty-fourth birthday (he was 40).

CBN

Cubic Boron Nitride. Marketed as the abrasive Borazon (tm). Hardness 9.9 is almost equal to diamond (10) and larger than its hexagonal allotrope (the BN that is stable at room temperature; 9.7 on the Mohs scale). CBN is particularly well-suited to lapping ferrous materials, because diamond reacts chemically with iron (more precisely, Fe catalyzes the conversion of diamond to its thermodynamically stable allotrope -- graphite; the diamond is described, with some unintended humor, to ``carbonize'').

CBNC

Certification Board of Nuclear Cardiology. ``CBNC is a not-for-profit corporation established to develop and administer practice-related examinations in the field of Nuclear Cardiology and to award certification to those physicians who successfully complete the CBNC examination [CENC] and credentialing process.''

It was founded in 1996. The Stammtisch Beau Fleuve is a more venerable organization.

CBO

Chief Benefits Officer. There are others -- collect them all!

CBO

Community-Based Organization. An NGO (q.v.) operating at a local level.

CBO

Congressional Budget Office. Legislative-branch accounting agency, charged with performing analyses necessary for the budgeting process. Functions similar to, but performed independently of, the corresponding executive-branch agency (OMB). The other two Congressional research agencies, the CRS and GAO, have somewhat broader missions.

Since the CBO is ultimately controlled by the majority party in Congress, one might expect it to reflect a partisan bias in predicting future US economic performance (such predictions are needed for estimating tax revenues and public assistance expenses, for example). Nevertheless, over the years the accuracy of its predictions has compared favorably with that of nonpolitical agencies. Tentatively, I think this could conceivably perhaps possibly be taken, arguably at least, as demonstrating personal integrity.

CBO

Coulomb-Blockade Oscillations.

CBO

CsB₃O₅.

CBOE

Chicago Board Options Exchange. For years the CBOE was the largest stock-options exchange in the US, and Amex the second-largest. That was before the ISE. By 2004 the long-time top four options exchanges (the Philadelphia and Pacific exchanges follow CBOE and Amex) had each come down a notch.

The CBOE and the Amex compete with each other on most of the contracts they list. Exceptions include options on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and some other benchmarks for which the CBOE has an exclusive license. On the other hand, the Amex offers S&P 500 depositary receipts, called ``Spiders,'' and other ``exchange-traded funds'' that track benchmarks. The Amex and other exchanges offer options on many ETF's, but no options market offers contracts on the Spiders.

CBOT

Chicago Board Of Trade.

CBOT

Central Bank Of Turkey.

CBP

Convolution BackProjection. An approach to computed tomography.

CBP

US Customs and Border Protection. A part of the Homeland Security Department.

CBPP

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

CBQ

Class-Based Queuing.

CBR

Community-Based learning with Research. A ``service-learning course'' (always good to have the quotation marks; CBL) that involves research in the community. See also EL.

CBR

Constant Bit Rate. CBR connections are often further characterized as ``CBR interactive'' and ``CBR noninteractive.''

CB-RAM

Conductive-Bridge RAM.

CBRC

There used to be a ``Christie Brinkley Resource Center'' in the Hollywood neighborhood of Geocities. It seems to have been there as recently as Jan. 1, 1998. I don't remember much about the site except the clever name. I think it had pictures. Later, 5950 at Hollywood was replaced with something pretty worthless (about which I remember nothing), and last I looked it had gone 404, probably bounced for lack of activity. Do you realize that geocities was originally envisioned by its creators as a way of redressing the lack of gay/lesbian content on the web? The law of unintended consequences is draconian on the web. The glossary you're reading started out as a list of terms for students taking my microelectronic circuits course.

I just looked around, and found another CBRC -- possibly the same one at a new URL. The site seems extremely bare, but I guess that's how we like it.

CBRN

Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear. In other words, hazardous in all the usual ways that materials are thought to be hazardous when described as ``hazmat.'' (Nuclear hazards practically get double billing, but see CBRN WMD.) Of course, materials in sufficient quantity above one may be gravitationally hazardous. It's not a fall-out problem, just a fall-down one.

CBRN WMD

Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear Weapon[s] of Mass Destruction. Radiological weapons may use materials similar to those of nuclear weapons, but they are meant to destroy primarily irradiating the targets (prospective victims) or their environment rather than mechanically by the release of large quantities of explosive energy.

CBS

Center for Biological Sequence Analysis. This is pretty mysterious: they were clever enough to come up with ``DOGS,'' but they weren't able to name themselves the ``Center for Biological Sequencing'' or else use CBSA as an acronym? Must have been administrative.

CBS

Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. The bureau's non-Dutch webpages offer official names in American (Central Bureau of Statistics) and Canadian (``Statistics Netherlands''). Even though the Netherlands has a constitutional monarch, they don't use either of the obvious British forms (``The Dutch Bureau'' or ``Royal Statistical Bureau''). Anyone can see that they're dissing the Brits. It's obviously due to hard feelings on account of the loss of New Netherland in the seventeenth century, and the recent Boer War (around 1900). Who would have guessed they'd hold a grudge for so long!? Get over it.

The CBS style is also used by a couple of former Dutch colonies. Indonesia, most of the former Dutch East Indies (including Dutch New Guinea, discussed at .do), had a Biro Pusat Statistik that goes by BPS (q.v.). This translates `Central Bureau of Statistics,' one of the names given on its English pages, though the official English name seems to be Statistics Indonesia, which leads to ``Statistics Indonesia of The Republic of Indonesia'' (for Biro Pusat Statistik Republik Indonesia). The loan word Biro in the official name has now been replaced by the native Badan.

Suriname, a Dutch colony that in 1975 achieved full legal independence (that doesn't mean it's independent of financial aid from the Netherlands), has an Algemeen Bureau voor de Statistiek (`General Bureau for Statistics').

The Netherlands Antilles, formerly known as the Dutch West Indies, has been part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1954 (like Suriname from 1954 to 1975). This status seems to be more like that of Puerto Rico's as a commonwealth territory of the US, rather than like that of independent countries of the British Commonwealth. Aruba was originally part of the Netherlands Antilles, but was granted separate independent status, still within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in 1986. Aruba has a Central Bureau of Statistics. (Stay tuned: it seems the Netherlands Antilles may be dissolved, with Curaçao and Bonaire becoming independent countries and the smaller islands becoming a province of the Netherlands, or something of that sort.)

CBS

Central Bureau of Statistics. I guess this hasn't been trademarked. In addition to the Netherlands and a couple of its former possessions (see CBS entry above), the name is used (either directly or as English translation of the name in local vernacular) by the governments of Kenya, Croatia, and Israel (also ICBS). The Palestinian Authority's, similarly named, goes by Palestinian CBS or PCBS. Near miss: Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia. This is a pretty bizarre way to organize information, but someone's got to do it. For a more complete list of national statistical agencies that even includes differently named entities, see this page served by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

CBS

Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Transient visual hallucinations unaccompanied by the cognitive aspects of psychosis. The initialism coincidence seems too good to be accidental.

In order to finish writing up all my physics labs at the end of my first semester in college, I pulled a double all-nighter (i.e., I stayed up over fifty straight hours; I'm not that young any more). During my last hour or two of consciousness, I hallucinated, or maybe just dreamt on my feet, and this was unaccompanied by cognitive aspects of psychosis, aside from worrying about grades. Does that count? So I'm not crazy? Does this mean I have to serve the prison sentence?

Bonnet first described the syndrome in 1760. (I mean the CBS -- not exactly what I experienced.) This was before the days when patient confidentiality came to be such an important part of medical ethics, and anyhow Bonnet gets a professional `bye' on account of not really being a physician, exactly, so we know the identity of the patient: it was Charles's grandfather.

Charles Bonnet was also the name of Audrey Hepburn's character's father, played by Hugh Griffith, in the delightful 1966 instructional film ``How to Steal a Million.'' (If they made a prequel today, it would be an infomercial.)

CBS is not a lot like the dream-like hallucinations that often accompany sleep deprivation, except that both tend to be ``pleasant'' or ``comforting.'' CBS occurs in the elderly and typically accompanies ocular pathology such as macular degeneration. In other words, it results from attempts of the brain to make sense of defective visual information. As I noted above, the coincidence with the broadcast media corporation is too rich. In CBS, people usually imagine they see things that are smaller than normal (little people, for example). Sort of like on TV.

CBS

Columbia Broadcasting System. Visit their homepage or go direct to the latest top ten list or to the archives.

CBS was founded in 1928, when William S. Paley bought United Independent Broadcasters, Inc. and renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System. Early days, they would say ``this is the CBS'' as we still say the FBI. In 1974 the acronym was sealed and the company became CBS, Inc. This was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corp. in 1995, and Westinghouse renamed itself CBS Corporation in 1997. Bits and pieces of this were sold off in subsequent years, and what remained was purchased by Viacom in 1999 or 2000. Eventually, Viacom was split into Viacom and CBS Corporation, with the latter having the broadcast network as its core business.

CBS has the epithet of ``the Tiffany Network,'' reputed to be an allusion to the quality of its programming in the Paley era, or less plausibly because some of CBS's first demonstrations of color TV, in 1950, were in the former Tiffany & Co. building in NYC. Nowadays the epithet is typically used in lamentations of the declining quality and prestige of CBS News. The prestige was real, cemented by the legendary Edward R. Murrow with his dramatic reporting from England during the Blitz. It's been downhill since, and fairly precipitously in the 21st century. Regarding CBS programming generally, ``we look forward to'' an upcoming ``reality show'' called ``Kid Nation.''

CBSA

Canadian Billiards & Snooker Association.

CBSA

Canadian Border Services Agency. It competes in the Canadian Conference of North American Government Agencies. CBSA was an expansion team created on Friday the twelfth (whew -- close call!) of December 2003. In lieu of an expansion draft, a number of players were transferred from CCRA, CIC, and, alas, CFIA.

The team nickname is ``Customs'' (also Douane -- see ASFC). It's not whether you win or lose -- it's how you play the game.

A careful examination of the map shows that Canada has land borders with the US and, uh, the US. This is not such a common situation. We set aside island nations (like Ireland, the UK, Brunei, East Timor, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Papua New Guinea), of course. A few countries are entirely surrounded by (and have a land border with) a single other country: Lesotho, the Vatican, and San Marino (Lesotho is enclosed by South Africa; we'll let you guess which two are in Italy). The countries which definitely have a land border with only one other country without being surrounded all have sea coasts (no such countries are squashed up against just a river or lake): Denmark, Monaco, Portugal, the Gambia, and South Korea. (Bangladesh touches Burma, and Swaziland has a Mozambican border.) Qatar occupies a peninsula that borders Saudi Arabia on the south. The western end of the UAE comes close and may or may not border Qatar. All I want to know is: how do they assign the ``mineral rights''?

Well, it seems that the CBSA isn't concerned only with land borders. Still, they should have called it the ``US Border Services Agency'' -- that would have caused amusing confusion and possibly even eliminated some errorist threats.

Interesting factoids about the evolving CBSA will be available from the website of the Canadian Prime Minister's office.

CBSC

Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. (Official French name Conseil canadien des normes de la radiotélévision.) ``[A]n independent, not-for-profit organization established by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB). Its membership includes more than 500 private sector radio and television stations, specialty services and networks from across Canada, programming in English, French and third languages.''

It can't be government censorship if it's not governmental! (But the CRTC maintains that ``[i]ncreased reliance on self-regulation, however, does not imply that the Commission [the CRTC] is relinquishing its responsibilities. Any interested party may, at any time, choose to approach the Commission directly.'')

Famous quote:

In Canada we respect freedom of speech but we do not worship it.

(From May 10, 2000, statement censuring radio nag Laura Schlessinger.)

CBSG

Conservation Breeding Specialist Group.

CBT

Center for Battlefield Technologies.

CBT

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Just gimme a drug!

CBT

Computer-Based Teaching.

CBT

Computer-Based Testing.

CBT

Computer-Based Training.

CBT

Cross-Bar (often ``Xbar'') Technology. Here's a page from TI.

CBTC

Communication-Based Train Control.

CBTE

Competency-Based Teacher Education. Teacher education conducted on principles of CBE. Typically contrasted to TTTP (traditional teacher training programs).

CBTF

Canadian Baton Twirling Federation. Associated with the WBTF. Just googled for the obvious on July 26, 2004; still no hits on ``Canadian Bacon Twirling.'' If you're hungry for more, visit our majorette entry.

CBVH

Commission for the Blind and Visually Handicapped.

CBW

Chemical and Biological Weapons.

CBX

Computerized Branch Exchange.

cc

C Compiler. Some common old C compilers are called on the command line by

        bcc    Borland C
	btc    Borland Turbo C
	gcc    GNU C
	cc     Unix C
               (traditionally bundled with the Unix operating system)
	cl     Microsoft C
	ztc    Zortec C

CC

C or C++ Compiler.

CC

Canadian Club. A beverage.

CC

Canadian Content. A club.

CC, Cc, cc

Carbon Copy. Traditional abbreviation; used very loosely to refer to an unaltered copy of a document. Originally, this was a copy made simultaneously with the original: A thin sheet of carbon paper was placed between the two sheets of paper. The original would be written normally, with line printer, typewriter, ball-point pen, or pencil. The pressure of the writing mechanism on the original would press the carbon paper against the page below it, reproducing what was being written on the original.

Copies now are more often created by photocopying, by ink-impregnated paper, or by digital reproduction of an electronic original. Cc: labels a mail header field listing one or more addresses that an email should be sent to in addition to any addresses indicated in the To: field. Cf. Bcc.

The first house pet clone was a gray tabby cat named CC. This achievement was perpetrated at Texas A&M in February 2002, with help from the biotech firm Genetics Savings & Clone. That company plans to offer pet owners the chance, by 2003, to replace old pets with genetically almost identical copies.

The clones are not completely identical genetically, since they are made by transferring the donor chromosomes into a cell from which DNA has been removed. The DNA from mitochondria and other organelles in the original egg remain, and differ to some degree from that of corresponding organelles in the donor.

Moreover, identical genotype does not guarantee identical phenotype. For example, although donor (Fluffy, in this case) and clone (CC) have identical sets of the gene pairs that control fur color, the expression of these genes does not follow a simple dominant-recessive pattern. Fluffy has a calico coat; CC is, as noted, gray.

I'm not going to repeat here the Goethe quote I recently mentioned at the BSET entry.

CC

Center Conductor. It makes good sense for this to be the live wire.

CC

Central Committee. As in the Central Committee of one or another Communist Party, such as the CC CPSU or the CC CPU.

CC

{Central | Common} Control.

CC, C&C

Chamber of Commerce. Calling your home number from home is a less reliable way to get a busy signal than calling the CC during business hours.

CC

Chip Carrier. Productive acronym suffix.

CC

Christian Circuit. A pious amplifier using only kosher components? A misaligned holy roller? No. This is the circuit of revival-meeting venues followed by itinerant inspirational preachers. Benjamin Franklin used to attend revival meetings in Philadelphia, but they don't seem to come up that far north so often anymore. [The speaker was one of the luminaries of the eighteenth-century ``great awakening.'']

More recently, a physicist I know, who went to a small Baptist school on a football scholarship, needed a job and went to a local preach' to declare: ``I wanna preach the BaAAAAAahble!'' -- got a job on the spot. He eventually tired of that, or maybe got too many ministers' daughters in trouble; I met him making equipment for HEP.

Another guy I know was getting a Ph.D. in Rocket Science at a Big-Time Ivy League school. He visited his fiancée's old neighborhood during a traditional old-country block party, and his future brothers-in-law took him aside for the traditional old-country serious talk about honorable intentions and ...

``... and whaddaya gonna do when you get outa school?''
``I plan to become a Professor of Rocket Science at [Prestigious East-Coast University].''
``What, you wanna be a teacher? Ain'tcha got no ambishun?''

Persuaded by the cogency of his new family's adumbrations, this friend was saved and went on to wealth and fame and wealth in the software racket. He can eat juicy steak and buy a fancy new car whenever he wants.

[Names and details have been changed to improve the story.]

Could there be a pattern here?

CC

Classical Content. Used on the Classics List to refer to posting content related to the list mission, as opposed to the usual political stuff. Term modeled on Canadian version.

CC

Cluster Controller.

.cc

Cocos (Keeling) Islands, domain name code. There's a quote ring in that domain!

CC

Common Cathode. All the cathodes in a particular LED display are tied to a common node.

CC

Common Collector. The collector of a transistor is attached to ground, input (usually base) and output (usually emitter) are measured at the two remaining terminals.

CC

Community College.

CC, C.C.

Companion of the Order of Canada. The highest of three levels of membership in the Order of Canada. ``Companion''? I'm sure there's a good historical reason for this choice of name, just as I'm sure there are good reasons for names like ``Order of the Garter,'' ``Order of the Bath,'' and ``Order of the Sanitary Napkin Dispenser.'' (Actually, the last one doesn't exist. But if it did, there would have to be a very good reason.) Still, ``Companion'' sounds so... meek. If the US had heraldic orders, this one would be named something like ``Grand Honkin' High! Muckety-Muck of the Order of the Yoo! Naaaaaahted! States! ofa Merricuh!'' Man, that'll getcher heart pumpin'! If our northern good buddies need any help, we'll be happy to send up a task force of Shriners to help them invent something screamingly appropriate.

(Although the choice of terminology is completely inexplicable by us, there is no mystery about the coincidence of English and French abbreviations. In both languages, these are C.C., O.C., and C.M. This occurred completely by accident.)

``The Order of Canada was established in 1967 [wasn't that an anniversary or somethin'?] to recognize outstanding achievement and service in various fields of human endeavour. Appointments are made on the recommendation of an Advisory Council, chaired by the Chief Justice of Canada. The motto of the Order is `Desiderantes meliorem patriam - They desire a better country'.''

I see a couple of problems with the Latin motto's translation. First is that desiderantes means, in this context, `they who desire.' This is mistranslated so uniformly that I'm having trouble trusting my eyes. So it's more of a description than a statement. Second, as translated it can be interpreted as meaning that members of the order wish that the US were a better neighbor. When patriam is translated a little more accurately, as `homeland' or `fatherland,' the meaning becomes easy for us Americans to understand: `they who wish they lived in the US' or `they who wish they'd been born in the US.' Bill Casselman sort of agrees with me. He argues slightly inconsistently that to the sensitive Latinist, the motto means that order members long to be dead again. I suggest that we just regard this as a two-part motto, with the Latin and vernacular parts expressing sentiments that reinforce each other. Something similar is done with the French part of the Latin-and-French motto: it's also formulated as a statement rather than as a noun phrase. (More philological analysis is described at the related OC entry. I hope to have some slightly funnier material at the CM entry.) Happily, the US got its Latin mottoing out of the way when educated people still had the elements of Latin. As this bit from Macauley's History of England indicates (search on mottoes), among English-speakers the devising of Latin mottoes has long been regarded as a specialized task best left to experts.

Casselman also hates the medal design and serves a good jpeg of it. I like the jaunty way the crown is cocked.

The Order of Canada is Canada's highest (or three highest) civilian honor(s). A ribbon bearing the words desiderantes meliorem patriam was also added to the Canadian coat of arms in 1967.

CC

Continuity Cell.

CC

Corriente Continua. Spanish for `Direct Current' (DC).

CC

Cost Center.

CC

Country Club. A golf course along with a socially significant means to limit access. The abbreviation is usually found as part of the abbreviated name of a particular country club (like ``Scotch Hills CC''), rather than generically.

CC

Country Code.

CC

Cross Correlation. Cross correlation is not angry coincidence. It is a name given to correlation between two different functions that distinguishes it from autocorrelation -- correlation between different values (at different argument, or in different events) of the same function.

Two random variables are correlated if they are not independent. The independence of two random variables x, y can be expressed as the factorizability of their joint probability distribution function P(x, y) -- if the variables are independent, then there exist distributions (normalized, positive, measurable in the Lebesgue sense) P₁(x) and P₂(y) such that

P(x, y) = P₁(x) × P₂(y) . An immediate consequence of this factorization is that <xy> = <x> × <y> . Consequently, it is common to use deviations from the above equality -- <xy> - <x> <y>, for example -- as measures of cross correlation.

Avoid a common error:

The converse of the second fact about factorization is not true. That is, one can easily have <xy> = <x> × <y> and yet still have a correlated joint distribution. A trivial example is if y is randomly plus or minus x. There is a high degree of correlation, as evidenced by the fact that the magnitudes of x and y are always equal, but the simplest product-expectation deviation does not catch it.

cc

Cubic Centimeter. For a discussion in grave depth of the pronunciation of this unit, visit the Pronunciation Sidebar under the decibel (dB) entry.

CC

Current Contact.

CC

{ Customer | Courtesy } Copy. Receipt.

CCA

Chromated Copper Arsenate. A wood preservative.

CCA

Cold Crank Amperage. A car battery rating. See CA (crank amperage).

CCA

Committee on Computer Activities. There are probably a few others, but here's a link to the CCA of the American Philological Association. The APA is the North American classicists' organization; they've been there, done that, big time, like 1500 years ago at the latest. Anything in the past thousand years is recent. The classics profession is proud of the fact that it was way ahead of the curve, on the bleeding edge, even, of information technology applications in the humanities. Their CCA page lists ``What's New'' for December 1996. I guess that's recent. ``Resting on your laurels'' is an expression with a classical provenance.

CCA

Cruising Club of America.

CCA

Cycle-by-Cycle Averaging. An approach to power electronics load estimation.

CCAA

China Council on Adoption Affairs. Because we here at the SBF are such a thoughtful bunch, we've included a link right here at the CCAA entry that points to the WEU entry (which contains all the stuff we should have put here).

CCAE

Canadian Council for Advancement of Education.

CCAMLR

Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

CCAP

Climate Change Action Plan.

CCAPA

California Chapter of the American Planning Association.

CCB

Canadian Classical Bulletin. See CCB/BCEA. Say that three times fast.

CCB

Child Care Bureau.

CCB

Configuration Control Board.

CCB/BCEA

Canadian Classical Bulletin/Bulletin canadienne des études classiques. A publication of CAC/SCEC.

CCBC

The Community College of Baltimore County (Maryland).

CCBH

Centre for Contemporary British History. Part of the Institute for Historical Research (IHR) of the University of London. Previously known as the ICBH (Institute for...).

CCC

Catechism of the (Roman) Catholic Church. Fits in a world-almanac-size paperback.

CCC

Certified Communication Counselor.

CCC

Civilian Conservation Corps. A/k/a ``Roosevelt's Tree Army.'' Authorized by the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) Act. One of the first unemployment programs proposed by FDR, it was almost instantly approved by Congress and went into operation a month later. Running from 1933 to 1942, it ultimately employed three million young men and planted an estimated three billion trees. I'm not sure that's a lot. I do remember going into pine forests planted by the CCC. They look almost normal until you notice how regularly the trunks are spaced.

CCC

Clear-Channel Capability. Like, if you didn't have to worry about collisions. I'm an air-conditioned gypsy. That's my solution. Oh, sorry, got off track again.

I'm mobile!

CCC

Command, Control and Communications. Acronym popular with armed services. More commonly C3.

CCC

Copyright Clearance Center (US).

CCC

Corriente Clasista Combativa. Spanish for `Combative Classicist Stream.' Wow! Take back the schoolhouses, fighting room by room! As Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath wrote in their 1999 academic call-to-arms (with bloody-shirt title Who Killed Homer?) on pp. 170-1:

Classicists can no longer huddle in the rear in the surf as waves of their greenhorn Greek and Latin 1 A-ers are machine-gunned in the sand. If we are going to lose Greek, let us do so with burly, cigar-chomping professors, red-eyed from overload classes, wounds oozing from bureaucratic combat, chests bristling with local teaching medals and complimentary Rotary pens from free lecturing, barking orders and dragging dozens of dead bodies forward as they brave administrative gunfire, oblivious to the incoming rounds from ethnic studies and contemporary cinema.

It is rosy-fingered dawn on the day of the epic battle. ``Here, son: have some spiritus asper. You'll need it before this day is done.'' Later...

Construe! Construe!
Hold the dochmiac line!

Damn the torpedoes and conjugate to the max! In the name of Zeus-- batten the scansions! ... They're recensing! They're recensing!! Hit 'em in the gutturals! Reeeeeloooaaad vowel quantities! Go gettus, go getta-- Go-ooo gettum!!!!

Oh, uh... waitasec. Ummm, tiny little corrigendiculum: Spanish clasista isn't `classicist.' It's like English classist: a different word (if it's a word) related to clase, `class.' So CCC is just an Argentine organization whose name means something vaguely like `combative classist current.' (Actually, it means that rather precisely, but it's vague in both languages. That translation, though, is overliteral; in figurative use corriente corresponds more closely to `stream.') Someone trying to make sense of it may come up with `class-struggler movement.'

Nevermind...

CCC

Counter-Current Chromatography.

CCC

Crete Carrier Corporation. Their logo is a red numeral 1 with three letters c lined up vertically inside of it. From the size and shape of the serifs on the c's, I'd say they are lower-case c's. Aren't you glad you asked? You didn't ask? Huh.

CCC

Customs Cooperation Council.

CCCC

Closed Chest Cardiac Compression. Alternate name for Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR).

CCCC

Conference on College Composition and Communication.

CCCLV

California Council of Citizens with Low Vision. A local affiliate of the CCLVI, I kid you not.

CCCP

Carbonyl Cyanide m-ChloroPhenyl-hydrazone.

CCCP

USSR, spelled in Cyrillic. C is the ``lunate form'' of the Greek letter sigma, with the sound of ess (I mean the unvoiced sound, as in ``sound,'' and not the voiced sound, as in ``zounds''). P is a capital letter rho. In transliteration, the letters read SSSR and stand for Soyuz Sovyetskii Sotsialistikh Respublik.

CCCP

CalTech Concurrent Computer Project. The machine was also known as the Caltech Cosmic Cube. Designed by Geoffrey Fox and by Seitz, I think, but I think also that Fox went to Syracuse around 1990.

CC CPSU

Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A party organization that was in some technical sense not a part of the government of the CCCP (acronym whose letters stand for mostly different words).

CC CPU

CC of the CPU.

CCCS

Current-Controlled Current Source.

CCD

Census County Division[s].

CCD

Charge-Coupled Device. A nice historical introduction is on the net. For initial conception, see W. Boyle and G. Smith, ``Charge Coupled Semiconductor Devices,'' Bell System Technical Journal, 49, 587 (1970).

CCD

Computer-Controlled Display.

CCD

Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities. ``[A] coalition of approximately 100 national (US) disability organizations working together to advocate for national public policy that ensures the self determination, independence, empowerment, integration and inclusion of children and adults with disabilities in all aspects of society.''

CCD

Course and Curriculum Dvelopment (CCD). A program of the Division of Undergraduate Education of the NSF, ``to improve the quality of courses and curricula in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology.''

CCDA

Conseil canadien de la distribution alimentaire. (`Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors.')

CCDBG

Child Care and Development Block Grant.

CCDLTS, CC-DLTS

Constant-Capacitance Deep-Level Transient Spectroscopy (DLTS).

CCE

Carbon Chloroform Extract.

CCE

Certified Coin Exchange. A sight-unseen exchange for dealers in rare coins and common medals.

``The Certified Coin Exchange - CCE is an electronic exchange for US certified rare coin dealers. Founded in 1990, the CCE is open for trading among its 130+ member firms every business day. CCE provides dealers and collectors a ready market and pricing data as well as a way to execute rare coin transactions. CCE member firms have agreed to rules which govern delivery of coins and payment, as well as dispute resolution procedures. There are currently in excess of 37,000 bids for US certified rare coins posted on CCE and about 4,000 asks.''

Successor of ANE.

CCE

Civil and Construction Engineering.

CCE

Community Care for the Elderly.

Hey Pops -- you want fries with that?

CCF

Canadian Communications Foundation. Also Fondation des Communications Canadiennes.

This entry is a good illustration of the great utility and convenience of having names in two languages. Without the French, you might make the mistake of supposing that this was a Canadian foundation about communications. With the French, you realize that it's a foundation about Canadian communications. The English is useful too, because if you don't know French, you probably think this is a Canadian journal for foundry studies. (You probably realized all this before, but I have to mention it because most other readers are not as sharp as you are. Please send money now so we can continue our valuable outreach efforts to enlighten the benighted.)

CCF

Central {Control|Computing} Facility.

CCF

Common-Cause Failures. Multiple failures, often more-or-less simultaneous, resulting from a common cause. CCF's wreak havoc with the assumption of independent failure probabilities; not taking account of CCF's can lead to dramatic underestimation of failure probability leafward on the fault tree.

CCF

Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. A Canadian political party founded in 1932, which reorganized in 1961 and changed its name to New Democratic Party (NDP).

CCF

Hundred (C) Cubic Feet. Abbreviation of unit used for measure of gas fuel consumption. MCF.

CCFL

Counter-Current Flow Limit.

CCG

Capacitive Charge Generation. An SEM imaging technique.

CCGA

Ceramic Column Grid Array. CCGA is essentially CBGA with solder columns rather than balls, for a more robust interconnection. Click on this search for images.

CCGD

Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors. (Conseil canadien de la distribution alimentaire -- CCDA). They also have a a more customer-oriented site.

CCHA

Central Collegiate Hockey Association.

CCHREI

Canadian Council for Human Resources in the Environment Industry. ``a private sector, not-for-profit corporation that began operations in 1993. The CCHREI was initiated by industry with the support of a broad range of partners with interests related to environmental employment. These partners include industry, professional associations, educators and government representatives.''

``The CCHREI's goal is to ensure the right match between the skills and knowledge of Canadians with environmental employment, and the needs of the environment sectors. This match will enable Canadian industry to maintain a world class environmental workforce. The CCHREI is working toward its goal by: developing national occupational standards, certifying individuals with environmental employment and accrediting environmental courses and programs, helping young Canadians enter the environmental labour market, promoting cooperation between industry, government, and the academic community, and, conducting research on the environmental labour market.''

[Labour is a special Canadianese word meaning `labor.']

La Version français: Conseil canadien des ressources humaines de l'industrie de l'environnement (CCRHIE).

CCHS

Coalition for Consumer Health and Safety. I imagine they'll have some content there soon.

CCHW

Citizens [apparently sic] Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste. Founded in 1981 by Lois Gibbs, a community leader at famous Love Canal. The organization is now called CHEJ.

CCI

Centre for Cultural Interchange.

CCI

Consumer Confidence Index. A designated ``leading economic indicator for US government economists.'' Developed by Fabian Linden in 1967 for ``the Conference Board,'' (a world business research organization) which continues to issue the index monthly. A competing index (the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index) is issued by the University of Michigan.

This is not illustrated at right.

CCI

Controlled Cryptographic Item[s].

CCI

Copper-Clad Invar.

CCIC

Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics. Hosted site hosted by the Doris Day Animal League (DDAL). Appropriate, somehow.

CCIC

Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges.

CCIE, Ccie

Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert. Typically called ``Cisco Ccie.'' (Another AAP pleonasm.)

CCIM

Certified Commercial-Investment Member. A designation conferred by the Commercial-Investment Real Estate Institute. I warmly approve of the hyphen. I would go even further myself. As of 1993, they confer the CCIM designation on individuals who have completed a 240-hour program of graduate work and have demonstrated experience in commercial-investment transactions.

CCIR

Consultative Committee for International Radio.

CCIS

Common-Channel Interoffice Signaling. The ``office'' here is a switching office for telephone communication, and CCIS is the use of a separate, high-speed common channel (CCIS link) for communicating between the common control in each office. Older systems used (and use, where still installed) ``circuit-associated signaling'' in which the same line that carried the voice signal also carried control signals.

CCISSO

Controlled Cryptographic Item Serialization Surety Officer. Yeah: surety, not security.

CCIT

Coherent Communications, Imaging and Targeting.

CCITT

Consultative Committee for International Telephone and Telegraph (or Comité Consultatif International Télégraphique et Téléphonique).

Originally a standards body of IEEE; has been succeeded by the ITU-TSS or ITU-T.

CCL

Committed Credit Line.

CCLRC

Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC). One of the UK's seven research councils. The research councils (RCUK) report to the Office of Science and Technology within the Department of Trade and Industry.

``[R]esponsible for one of Europe's largest multidisciplinary research support organisations, the [not at all] Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC).''

A member of the recently inaugurated SBF Hall of Acronym Fame (SHAB).

CCLVI

Council of Citizens with Low Vision International. An affiliate of the AFB.

That's 256, for those of you keeping score at home. According to their low-visuals website, CCLVI has four local affiliates:

1. NCCLV (National Capital Citizens with Low Vision, Washington, D.C.)
355. CCCLV (California Council of Citizens with Low Vision)
750. (malformed) DVCCLV (Delaware Valley Council of Citizens with Low Vision)
1156. MCLVI (Metropolitan Council of Low Vision Individuals, New York)

CCM

Canadian Cycle and Motor Co. Ltd. Originally created to provide a domestically owned manufacturer of bicycles for Canada. Today it mostly produces (roller and ice) hockey equipment, including jerseys and protective gear.

CCM

Christian Computing Magazine. This does not compute: are they trying to simulate the apocalypse, or stimulate it?

CCM

Comité Consultatif pour la Masse et les Grandeurs Apparentées. French, `Consultative Committee for Mass and visible quantities.'

ccm, CCM

Cubic Centimeters per Minute. That would be about the same as milliliters per minute.

CCN

Cloud Condensation Nucle{us | i}. Most of the water molecules in the region occupied by a cloud are not condensed in droplets.

CCNA

Cisco Certified Network Associate. ``Associate'' -- isn't that what they call the sales clerks at Kmart?

CCNP

Cisco Certified Network Professional.

CCNR

Conseil canadien des normes de la radiotélévision. Official English name: Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. See the entry under the abbreviation CBSC of that name. (Because we here at the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve are committed to bilingualism, we think nothing of assuring you that should we ever include some information on the CCNR in French, we will probably insert it here.)

CCNV

Community for Creative NonViolence. A Washington, DC, advocacy group for the homeless, founded by Mitch Snyder in the mid-1970's. Snyder's most successful tactic was hunger striking. He went on a number of them in the 1980's. Blood tests released during a December 1979 hunger strike indicated that he was cheating, but in the 1980's I guess they stopped releasing blood test results. The Reagan administration capitulated to the political pressure by degrees. In January 1984 they let the CCNV use a federally owned building at 425 Second St. NW for emergency winter housing. In a sequence of hunger strikes and negotiations, they agreed to deed the building, valuated at $23 million, to the DC government, and to spend $5 million, then $6.5 million, then about $10 million, finally $14 million in renovations. The administration also went to court a few times to enforce springtime closure and eviction orders, and they generally won there. But they couldn't figure out how to win in the court of public opinion, though Snyder was an abrasive, confrontational fellow. (Snyder also tried to shake down the Catholic Church with a hunger strike, but that went over quietly and failed. It's sort of reminiscent of Oral Roberts's campaign to extort desperately wanted funds -- $8 million fast, or else God would call him home.)

The three-story downtown building, at Second Street NW between D and E Streets, is now a 1400-bed shelter (1250 men, 150 women), still run by the CCNV. The shelter itself is also frequently referred to as the CCNV, though it's a bit more accurate to call it the CCNV shelter.

Despondent over his failed relationship with fellow homeless activist Carol Fennelly, Mitch Snyder committed suicide in July 1990. Fennelly led CCNV until January 1994, when she was ousted by the CCNV board. Gregory Keith Mitchell, a former computer programmer and drug dealer who was rescued by the shelter and made good, was voted the new director (technically: ``Vice-President''). His wife was named Secretary-Treasurer. In 1996 he was ousted (that seems to be the only way to leave alive) amid various charges of misuse of funds; in 1998 he pled guilty to stealing $65,000 out of HUD grants.

In case it hadn't occurred to you already, you should check the pea entry for more about homelessness.

In testy testimony before Congress in 1980, Mitch Snyder claimed that there were 2.2 million homeless in the US. Later he claimed that the number was three million, and numbers in the low millions have been popular scare stats among homeless activists ever since. The calculation that this number was based on was apparently political, and Snyder was adept at that kind of mathematics. The number has also been justified on the basis of telephone surveys to bien pensant fellow shelter operators, but maybe that's the same thing. Grindingly sound surveys and censuses, which arrive at boring, mere statistical accuracy, find numbers clustering around 300,000, and with very high likelihood within the range 200,000 to 600,000. (Peter Rossi of the University of Massachusetts estimated 330,000; the US census came up with 230,000 for a typical single day in 1990. Given the unavoidable uncertainties in counting, it would be hard to plot a reliable trend since the late 1980's, which were the glory days for this kind of study.) A third of a million homeless is a tragedy, but it is a different tragedy than two million homeless, particularly when it means that most of the homeless are deinstitutionalized mentally ill.

I have to track down Mitch Snyder's ipsissima verba. I recall they included a statement of his indomitable credo of defiance against the evil concept of accurate counting.

CCNY

The City College of New York.

CCO

Chief of Combined Operations.

CCOO, CC.OO.

Comisiones Obreras. `Worker Commissions.' The official name is Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras. Currently Spain's largest labor union organization.

CCOPP

Council of Credentialing Organizations in Professional Psychology.

CCP

Chinese Communist Party.

CCP

Computer-Controlled Pump[ing].

See, for example, Allan Rosman and Michael Nofal: ``Computer controlled pump unit cuts power, increases output,'' World Oil, vol. 217, pp. 53ff (November 1996).

CCPA

Court of Custom and Patent Appeals. The penultimate US court, in principle, and the ultimate court in practice, of appeal in patent cases. Replaced by the CAFC in court system reorganization of 1981.

CCPA

Cloud Chamber Photographic Analysis.

CCPD

Charge-Coupled PhotoDiode.

CCPIT

China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. The spammers' friend. (``Having obtained your contact information from China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. As special garment button supplier,we want to take this opportunity to reccommend you our product line....'')

CCPP

Calcium Carbonate Precipitation Potential. Dissolved calcium carbonate is the main thing that makes hard water hard. It precipitates out in your bathroom when one calcium ions (with valence 2+) replaces two sodium ions in the organic salts called soaps and detergents.

CCPP

Clock-Cycle Proportional-Pulse. Not to be confused with CCCP. Hmmm, what's this entry coming up next?

CCR

Center for Constitutional Rights. Founded in 1966 by the late William Kunstler and others. It still seems to be in existence, or at least to issue press releases, which might be about the same thing. Their address is or was

666 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10012,

which some may regard as significant.

CHRCL at least has a website.

CCR

Creedence Clearwater Revival.

CCR

Cube-Corner Reflector. Same as CR.

CCR

Current Cell Rate.

CCR

Customer-Controlled Reconfiguration.

CCRA

Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. The name of the agency that (minus the customs piece, which went off to CBSA) became the CRA (that's what it was in 2005, anyway). It used to be called Revenue Canada, or RevCan, which was RevCan in French, too. The switch to CCRA (in English) made it possible to have the all-important Janus-faced acronym. In French it was ADRC. Thankfully, it was possible to preserve some of this unwieldiness in the migration from CCRA-ADRC to CRA-ARC.

CCRA

Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance. Official name of the Canadian Alliance, explained at a CA entry.

CCRC

Continuing Care Retirement Community. A variably-assisted-living community (this term is not used). For those who can afford it, it offers residents as much independence as they individually want and as much care as they need. It's hard to write that accurately without seeming a little bit like an advertisement.

How long will it be before the members of CCR find themselves rocking the chairs in a CCRC?

CCRHIE

Conseil canadien des ressources humaines de l'industrie de l'environnement. Same as Canadian Council for Human Resources in the Environment Industry (CCHREI).

CCRI

California Civil Rights Initiative. Proposition 209, to end racial preferences, on the statewide 1996 ballot, passed by 54-46%, although pre-vote polls had suggested that the margin would much greater. The proponents and opponents (CFJ) are fighting it out in the courts now.

CCRKBA

Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

CCRS

Canada Centre for Remote Sensing.

CCR's, CC&R's

Covenants, Conditions, and RestrictionS. Less often expanded Covenants, Conditions, Restrictions and reservationS.

The CCR's are a contract agreed by every purchaser of property that is part of a planned community. If a planned community and a community association are the privately realized analogues of a municipality and its government, then the CCR's are analogous to municipal laws (but they tend to be difficult to amend). For more, see this introduction to community associations from the perspective of a student of parliamentary process.

CCS

Captain Cook Society. For ``everyone interested in James Cook (1728-1779)'' and also for those perversely determined to feign an unfelt interest. Formerly the Captain Cook Study Unit (CCSU).

CCS

Center for Cognitive Science at UB.

CCS

Certified (medical records) Coding Specialist. Certified by AHIMA upon passing an examination. Cf. CCS-P.

CCS

Coded Character Set.

CCS

Common-Channel Signaling.

CCS

Continuous Composite Servo. For optical disc memory.

CCS

Hundred Call Seconds. The First C stands for either the Roman numeral C or the Latin Centum, or the English Century (in the sense of 100), or some of those or none.

CCSA

Common Control Switching Arrangement.

CCSCS

Coordinadora de Centrales Sindicales del Cono Sur. Spanish, `Coordinator of Central [organizations] of Unions of the Southern Cone [of South America].' Described as a red (`network').

CCSD

Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf.

CCSM

The Center for Compound Semiconductor Microelectronics. An NSF-funded Engineering Research Center at UIUC.

CCSO

Phonebook Server Lookup. Try the metalists in Linz and South Bend. Oh wait, that second link is to an old Notre Dame gopher server. According to the information on that gopher server, visited January 2001, the gopher service was discontinued on March 15, 1998. Hmm. I guess they left the daemon running so people could find the old links. Sure enough, they mention an "`Old Gopher Links' list http://www.nd.edu/~ircenter/lostlinks.html maintained by the OIT Help Desk." Very thoughtful; too bad that's a 404 error.

CCSP

Credit Card Support Program.

CCS-P

Certified Coding Specialist - Physician. Certified by AHIMA upon passing an examination. Cf. CCS.

CCSS

Common Channel Signaling System.

CCSSE

Community College Survey of Student Engagement. Ah, Spring semester! When a young man's fancy turns to ... NSSE?

CCSS7

Common Channel Signaling System 7.

CCSU

Captain Cook Study Unit. Now CCS, q.v.

``Unit'' seems to be one of those name units that later begins to seem like not such a good idea after all. Another example is Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of Frank Zappa. Discussing the death-ray-on-the-moon project in ``Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me'' (1999), Dr. Evil says

The moon unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.

Moon Unit Zappa's real-life husband, Matchbox Twenty drummer Paul Doucette, says they got a chuckle out of that, and that while she is used to all the old jokes about her name, everyone they know just calls her ``Moon.''

Moon was born on September 28, 1967. So was Mira Sorvino. (Coincidentally, this entry was first put in the glossary on September 28, 2003.) The first soft (i.e. survivable) landings on the moon of vehicles from earth took place in 1966 -- the Soviet Luna 9 on February 3, the US Surveyor 1 on June 2, and Luna 13, which was launched on December 21 and landed on the 24th. (I'm not sure to what points on earth these dates are referenced.)

Incidentally, the Alpha-Zappa thing reminds me of something that happened to a journal called The Historian. This is published for Phi Alpha Theta, a history honor society with chapters at over 700 (mostly US) universities. Following the usual practice of Greek-letter societies, each chapter is designated by one, two, or three Greek letters (the first 24 chapters founded had one-letter names, the next 576 chapters had two-letter names, and the most recent chapters have three-letter names). Each issue of The Historian lists the newest initiates into the society by chapter. Originally, the chapters were arranged according to the order of letters in the Greek alphabet. (You probably remember ``I am the alpha and the omega.'' Omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet.) Beginning with the fall 1997 issue, the chapters have been alphabetized according to the English spellings of the Greek letters' names (... tau, theta, upsilon, ...). I am tempted to write that this is stupid, but a more precise characterization would be ``capitulation to ignorance.''

If you're still reading, then the logical order for reading entries would have you going on to the collating sequence entry. If you're not still reading, then you can ignore this.

CCSU

Central Connecticut State University. Part of the CSU System.

CCT

Controlled Clinical Trial.

CCT

Convenios Colectivos de Trabajo. Spanish, `collective bargaining agreements.'

CCT

Comité Consultatif de Thermométrie

CCTA

Canadian Cable Television Association. CCTA holds its ``Annual Convention and Cablexpo'' in May. French: ACTC.

CCTA

Canadian Corporate Television Association.

CCTA

See for yourself. ``CCTA is a world class service organisation for public servants.'' ``CCTA is the Government Centre for Information Systems.'' After much dogged sleuthing around, I have prised for you the following datum: CCTA stands for Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency.

CCTC

California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

ccTLD

Country-Code Top-Level Domain (TLD). In 2001, a working group of the country-code top-level domains voted unanimously to withdraw from ICANN's Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO). The vote took place on Friday, June 1, the first day of the ICANN quarterly meeting.

CCTV

China Central TeleVision. The PRC's state broadcaster.

CCTV

Closed-Circuit TeleVision.

CCU, C.C.U.

Cardiac Care Unit.

On October 16, 2008, at Ravenna Bowl in the town of Ravenna in western Michigan, Don Doane bowled his first perfect game. He was 62, and he had been bowling with the same five-man team for 45 years (Nutt Farms, one of the 16 teams that compete in the Commercial League there). Normally this sort of thing doesn't make news, but as he was hugging and high-fiving his teammates, Doane collapsed of a heart attack. EMT's were unable to revive him; he was taken to a hospital but died. So it made Sports Illustrated and newspapers in Thailand and Australia, and you probably heard and read about it.

This story confirms what we all know: too much excitement can kill you. My advice is to tone it down, and if things are getting too exciting, take a break. By all means have fun, but not too much fun. Are you happy now? Maybe that's not a good thing. Your heart isn't racing, is it? Oh no! Here quick, think about these horrible lyrics:

Hey girls, gather round
Listen to what I'm putting down.

How do you feel now, worse? Good! Remember that it's important to calibrate this thing. You want to dose yourself carefully. So if you're feeling bad enough, stop now. Otherwise, read on:

Here is the main thing that I want to say
I'm busy twenty-four hours a day
I fix broken hearts, I know that I truly can.

If you need a refill, just do a search on the song title "Handy Man" and the singer "James Taylor." It's the Barry Manilowest thing he ever did. Cf. the latter's ``I Write the Songs'' (``...of love and spe-ecial thi-ings'').

I want to warn you that at this point, we're going to deviate from the heretofore narrow focus of this entry on cardiac care and consider shopping district management and demographics. Be it noted, however, that many shopping malls now have AED's.

Christchurch, the second-largest city in New Zealand, has a central shopping district with over 400 businesses. According to Paul Lonsdale, the manager of the Central City Business Association there, they have a problem with several dozen young people who regularly spread rubbish, spray graffiti, get drunk, use drugs, swear, and intimidate patrons. The obvious solution would be to require them to purchase the rubbish they spread (and the spray paint and intimidation supplies, etc.) only from local merchants. But the business association, with the approval of the city council and the police, has thought of something more subtle.

They plan to pipe music into the mall area. ``Nice, easy listening'' music like Manilow's ``Can't Smile Without You,'' ``Mandy,'' and other pop hits. ``The intention is to change the environment in a positive way ... so nobody feels threatened or intimidated'' according to Lonsdale. They hope that BM's ``smooth and gentle tones'' either pacify the unruly teens or else drive them away. The Press newspaper interviewed one 16-year-old who promised defiance if the threatened measure is implemented. ``We would just bring a stereo and play it louder,'' said Emma Belcher, who I am grateful chose not to remain anonymous. According to the AP story on March 3, 2009, that is my main source for these paragraphs, Lonsdale retorted that the city would then hit them with anti-noise laws. If noise is unwelcome sound, then she might bring countercharges. Perhaps Lonsdale was laying the groundwork for a defense when he insisted that ``I did not say Barry Manilow is a weapon of mass destruction.'' It's obviously more selective than that.

You know, it is my ambition that one day all the entries in this glossary will form a single hyperlinked ``cluster,'' in the percolation-model or graph-theoretic or seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sense. Entries like this are important in achieving this ambition, because it is necessary to establish and demonstrate the firm connection between WMD-related content and pop-music-related content, not to mention the medical aspects. You may want to have a look at our spiffy new torture music entry, although it still needs stuff about the US siege of the Papal Nuncio's compound in Panama when Noriega took asylum there. Now all I need is another Latin link.

CCUFSA

Canadian College and University Food Services Association. Analogue of NACUFS, with perhaps more emphasis on the management and less on the actual food-preparation aspects of the profession.

CCVS

Current-Controlled Voltage Source.

CCVT

Coupling-Capacitor Voltage Transformer.

CCW

Concealed-Carry Weapon (permit). A permit to carry a concealed weapon.

CCW

CounterClockWise. What CW looks like when seen in the mirror. Vide clockwise.

CCW permit

PERMIT to Carry a Concealed Weapon. A ``CCW permit'' can't really be the same thing as a ``CCW'' permit, since the latter would be a ``Concealed-Carry Weapon'' permit. Hence two entries, all (or both) for your convenience.

Next section: Cd (top) to CEVE (bottom)

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