Cf

Californium. Atomic number 98. A transuranide actinide. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

CF

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. ``Andrew Carnegie founded The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905, `to do all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of teaching.' The Foundation is the only advanced study center for teachers in the world and the third oldest foundation in the [US]. A small group of distinguished scholars conducts the Foundation's research activities.''

C/F

Carried Forward. This is a useful term in describing formal rituals such as financial accounting and, uh, well, um, commercial accounting. (As Churchill said: ``Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.'' Just keep plodding bravely forward in your sentence, onward to full stop, repairing and rationalizing as best you can, even if you started out on the wrong iamb or whatever.)

CF, cf

Center Field[er]. (Baseball term.)

.cf

Central African Republic, domain-name code. I suppose maybe the eff represents the fact that it used to be a French colony. Or perhaps it represents a proFanity uttered by some ISO 3166 guy, facing the fact that there are so many toponyms beginning in cee.

CF

Charcoal Filter.

CF

Coin First. The sort of payphone that does not trust. Cf. DTF.

CF

Collaborative Filtering. CF is a technique widely used in ``recommender systems,'' and hence increasingly common on the web. (It is the basis, for one example, of the MovieLens recommender.)

CF is based on the ``like likes like'' idea. (That's not a direct quote; I just happened to like the symmetry of the expression.) Users are prompted to indicate their preferences for various documents or sites or what have you, and these preferences are recorded as a collection. Each new user belongs to a neighborhood (in the topological sense) determined by the degree of agreement of his preferences with other users. The system makes recommendations based on the idea that if you like the things I liked among those we've both viewed, then you will also like the things I liked among those you haven't viewed.

cf.

Compare. [Abbreviation for Latin confer.]

.cf

Configuration File. (Or ConFiguration.) Filename extension I've seen used with some Perl programs. I suppose if you want to set up a mailing list using Majordomo in the Central African Republic, it could cause some confusion.

CF

Consolidated Freightways. Cargo by truck. The third-largest long-haul trucking company in the US at the time it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 3, 2002, after seven consecutive quarters of losses. Consolidated had 350 terminals and provided LTL service to almost every market in the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. It also offered trucking to Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

It had something over 30,000 vehicles in its fleet, and had 20,000 employees, 14,500 of them Teamsters.

C.&F.

Cost and Freight.

CF

Cresol-Formaldehyde resin.

CFA

California Faculty Association.

CFA

Call For Abstracts [of papers]. This is essentially a call for papers (CFP) or presentations for a conference, since in most instances the selection of speakers (and presenters of posters) is made on the basis of abstracts only. Many conferences (particularly those with ``workshop'' in the name) do not publish a formal proceedings volume, or only distribute an informal collection of papers. Even when a paper is expected, it is not normally due until some time after the conference program is decided. (Such paper may be due before, during, or after the conference, may be refereed or not, etc. Practice varies widely, even among different conferences within the same discipline.)

In some cases, mere submission of an abstract guarantees an opportunity to present. It used to be that any APS member submitting one or more abstracts to a national conference of the APS was guaranteed the chance to present at least one poster. (That may still be the rule, but I'm not sure. It was a problem because the APS abstracts volume, distributed to APS members and anyone else attending an APS meeting, became the principal ``publication'' of crackpots who couldn't get their lunacy published elsewhere.)

Often, referees are under the impression that the papers of invited talks are guaranteed publication. I have never seen this stipulated explicitly by any proceedings editor, but it is an informal expectation and some allowances may be made.

The respectable assumption is that a submitted abstract describes the results of research that is completed or nearly completed, even though a paper describing the research has not yet been prepared. The reality is that abstracts are often submitted describing research not yet begun.

CFA

Carrier Failure Alarm.

CFA

Call For Applica{nt|tion}s. A job announcement.

CfA

Center for Astrophysics at Harvard.

CFA

Center-Frequency Acceptance. A frequncy band enlarged by Automatic Frequency Control.

CFA

Communauté Financière Africaine. See main entry at CAF.

CFA

Continuous Flow Analysis.

CFAG

Context-Free Array Grammar. A kind of picture grammar, q.v.. A subclass in the Chomsky-like hierarchy of isometric array grammars (IAG's).

See C. R. Cook and P. S. P. Wang, ``A Chomsky hierarchy of isotonic array grammars and languages,'' Computer Graphics and Image Processing, vol. 8, pp. 144-152 (1978).

CFAR

Constant False-Alarm Rate.

Don't they know the story of the boy who cried wolf?

CFB

Circulating Fluidized Bed. A coal power technology.

CFB

Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College. In St. Kitts.

CFC

Call For Comments. Constructed on the model of the more common CFP. Typically a call for public input on a proposed public action such as approval of a code variance or new rule. A much, much less common sense of CFC is ``Call For Commenters.'' This is so rare that I've decided not to give it its own entry. However, one instance I happened to encounter of CFC in the sense Call For Comment-foo was of this latter kind, and it motivated me to create this entry. After writing the following bunch of paragraphs on the subject, I'm hardly going to remove my own comments merely because I've realized that they are completely irrelevant...

This is a good place to discuss some of the less important differences between conferences in the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and engineering and sciences on the other. For brevity, we'll say humanities vs. sciences, but so far as I know the following applies about equally to social sciences and engineering, respectively. (My experience of attending talks in science and engineering is broad; my experience of social science and humanities talks is mainly restricted to the fields of human communications, politics, HPS, psychology, medieval studies, and classics.)

One difference is that humanities talks are really spoken papers. ``Speakers'' prepare papers and read them. In science, talks are talks. In practice, this difference is quite consequential, making and marking a difference in approach much greater than it might in principle imply. However, here we're talking about some ``less important differences,'' so we can't discuss that issue any further.

In all scholarly and would-be scholarly disciplines, talks are followed (and in various situations also interrupted) by questions or comments from the audience. In departmental talks (a single speaker for 50 minutes, say, and 10 min. discussion), discussion is usually handled informally. In a single-room conference, a session chairman or moderator may intervene more or less obtrusively, primarily to introduce speakers, make late announcements, keep things on schedule, etc. In a large conference with parallel sessions, keeping things on schedule becomes more important. (Keeping to schedule is quite a topic in itself, and I don't want to get into it here. Until I write an appropriate entry, however, let me mention here that in the March 2004 CJR there's an article by a presidential jokewriter that mentions getting Bill Clinton to use an egg timer. Vide etiam c.t., s.t.)

I once chaired a session that included a graduate student who gave a core dump of a talk. Most of her overheads consisted of unlabeled octal data. I don't know what the talk was about, but though it was in 1987, I can honestly say that I have not forgotten anything important. When her talk fell off the edge of the data and terminated, I called for questions. Unsurprisingly, none of the two-hundred-plus victims who were surviving there waiting for a later talk had any question to ask. Therefore I asked a question that I had conscientiously contrived in anticipation. That too is part of the chair's responsibility -- to get past any awkward potential silence. I watched decorously and paid no attention as she answered, mission accomplished.

A session chairman who traffic-manages questions from the audience or who ``gets things started'' represents about the greatest degree of intervention one is likely to encounter in the discussion following a scientific presentation.

In the humanities, things are different. Organizers of conferences, and of sessions within conferences, receive a great deal more praise for their activity, and their role is more prominent. To a scientist, it sometimes looks quite ostentatious and silly. In the discussion following a presentation, the mix of questions and comments is much more heavily skewed toward comments. If you've ever attended a university-sponsored movie (or worse -- gallery opening or play -- get me outta here!), you probably know what I mean. You remember in the discussion afterward (and possibly also before), supercilious jerks in tweed jackets asking ``questions'' to demonstrate their irrelevant knowledge, twisting their necks in William-F.-Buckleyesque fits of pretentious contemplation, and generally taking too long to utter what amount to no more than excuses for the speaker to puff on. I'm not going to tell you what I think of that.

Now where was I? Oh yes: conference sessions. (Often called ``panels'' in the humanities.) Not only is the role of organizer exalted, but even the task of appreciating the speakers' talks is exalted. Hence, there is sometimes a designated respondent or commenter for each paper; more often there is a single commenter for an entire panel. In the latter case, decorum dictates that all papers be acknowledged. The respondent has received advance copies of the talks (spoken papers, remember) and prepared five or ten minutes of commentary placing the papers in the context of recent scholarship and raising ostentatiously thoughtful questions for further discussion in the ``question-and-answer'' period. It's good form to find a common thread, preferably recondite, joining the papers so one can talk about how the talks ``illuminate different aspects'' of some issue or other. This isn't exactly a sinecure, but it is a bit of plum job, since it takes up as much real estate on an academic résumé as a real paper, but takes much less effort. So respondents are people favored by the conference or panel organizer, and there isn't really much call for a public call for commenters, but if there is I can assure you that at least once it has been abbreviated CFC. Usually it's a call for respondents.

CFC

ChloroFluoroCarbon. An extremely useful class of chemicals. Unfortunately, they break down to release fluorine and chlorine, and the chlorine in particular is believed to diffuse to the upper atmosphere and interfere with the oxygen/ozone cycle that shields us from UV radiation. A popular example is freon (or rather are, or better were the freons), used as the working fluid in refrigerators and propellant in spray cans.

CFC

Consolidated Facility Charge.

Example of usage:

Terms & Conditions:
If your reservation is not canceled at least one day prior to pickup, you may be subject to a one-day rental charge. Tax and Surcharge rates are subject to change without notice. [SBF: !] Concession fees may be charged (where applicable) at airport locations. At many airport locations a consolidated facility charge (CFC) may also apply ($10/contract in California). A $5.00 per day U.S. Government imposed Administrative Rate Supplement (GARS/GA) will be added to all U.S. Government rentals.

CFCA

Chicago Film Critics Association. Starting in 2003 (15th annual CFCA awards), winners are announced in early January, awards ceremony is televised live in late February.

For other film awards, see the AMPAS entry.

CFCC

Continuous-Fiber Ceramic Composite. There's a DOE R&D program on CFCC's.

CFC-113

ChloroFluoroCarbon number 113. Trichlorotrifluoroethane.

CFC-12

ChloroFluoroCarbon number 12. Dichlorodifluoromethane.

CFD

Call For Discussion. Part of the formal procedure for newsgroup creation. Renamed RFD (Request For Discussion) some years ago so that the abbreviation wouldn't be one letter away from CFV.

CFD

Computational Fluid Dynamics.

CFD

Constant-Fraction (threshold) Detector.

CFDA

Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance.

CFDA

Council of Fashion Designers of America. ``Non-profit trade organization for North-American designers of fashion and fashion accessories.'' We have a discussion of fashion accessories at the paddy wagon entry.

CFDA

Cowboy Fast Draw Association. ``Our credo is `The Cowboy Way in action and deed'; it requires no explanation.''

C.F.D.T., CFDT

Confédération Française de Travailleurs.

CFEE

Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes. `French Center for Ethiopian Studies.' It was created in 1991 under the name Maison française des études éthiopiennes. It became the CFEE in 1997. The homepage has 161 K of markup and nothing to show for it.

CFELS

Center for Free Electron Laser Studies.

CFF

Chemins de Fer Fédéraux suisses. French name of Swiss (.ch) national railway. The acronyms in all the other languages also consist of one double letter and one single:

• FFS (Italian)
• SBB (German)
• VFF (Romansch)

CFF

Abstract:

This study examined the incidence of neckwear tightness among a group of 94 white-collar working men and the effect of a tight business-shirt collar and tie on the visual performance of 22 male subjects. Of the white-collar men measured, 67% were found to be wearing neckwear that was tighter than their neck circumference. The visual discrimination of the 22 subjects was evaluated using a critical flicker frequency (CFF) test. Results of the CFF test indicated that tight neckwear significantly decreased the visual performance of the subjects and that visual performance did not improve immediately when tight neckwear was removed.

-- Langan, L.M. and Watkins, S.M.
``Pressure of Menswear on the Neck
in Relation to Visual Performance.''
Human Factors vol. 29, #1 (Feb. 1987), pp. 67-71.

CFFT

Consortium pour la Formation de Formateurs en Traduction. CTTT in a more common international language.

CFHB

Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae. Series of books.

CFHSS

Canadian Federation for History and Social Sciences. In French, finally something interestingly different (and shorter, even!): Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines.

CFI

CAD Framework Initiative. (Here, ``CAD'' refers primarily to ECAD.)

CFI

ConFigurable Interface (SIPB).

CFI

Continuous Forest Inventory.

CFIA

Canadian Food Inspection Agency. ACIA in French.

CFIB

Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses.

CFIB

Corporate Functional Integration Board.

CFIDS

Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. Better known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS, where the links are).

CFIG

The Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers. Also FCEI.

CFIT

Controlled Flight Into Terrain. Plane crash caused by piloting error (or pilot decision), in a plane that was mechanically able to avoid crashing.

CFIUS

Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Pronounced ``syphius.'' It's an inter-agency group chaired by the Treasury Secretary which monitors foreign investment in US.

The CFIUS was at the center of a political firestorm in early 2006 after it approved the sale of operation contracts for six major US ports to Dubai Ports World, a firm owned by the government of that Arab gulf state. The firm eventually withdrew.

In February 2006, the Jerusalem Post reported that Dubai Ports World actively enforced the Arab trade embargo against Israel. The Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007, signed into law in late July, included language requiring the Secretaries of State, Commerce, and Treasury to report to Congress on investments in the US by ``foreign governments, entities controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government, or persons of foreign countries which comply with any boycott of Israel.''

CFJ

Californians for Justice. Group opposed to the passage, and now the implementation, of the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a ballot initiative it considers racist.

CFJ is not racist. Their homepage excitedly announces that ``communities of color, and young and poor people of all colors -- represent a new emerging majority in California.''

They seem to be heartened by the increasing number of poor in California. With the price of real estate in Silicon Valley, even the pretty well off are poor. CFJ should be thrilled.

CFL

Canadian Football League. Do you realize that Baltimore was already home of the 1995 Grey Cup Champion Baltimore Stallions? And still they go and steal away the Browns from Cleveland. The Stallions became the Montreal Alouettes in 1996; the other south-of-the-border CFL teams folded. In fall 1996 the CFL was in danger of financial collapse, but it pulled through.

The CFL holds its annual draft on the same weekend that the NFL does. In other respects -- punts, pro-championship game, snow -- the northern game is earlier. How they managed to get T-day to happen earlier, beats me.

CFL

Chemins de Fer Luxembourgeois. Luxembourg (.lu) national railway.

CFL

Compact Fluorescent Lamp. You've seen 'em in stores. Self-contained fluorescent-lamp-and-ballast units that screw in to standard incandescent-bulb sockets. They consume only one quarter of the power per lumen of incandescent lights.

Until the 1970's, fluorescent lamps used inefficient core-coil ballast that made lamps shorter than 2 feet (~60 cm) impractical. The advent of high-frequency ballasts in the late 70's made CFL's possible.

CFL's have been touted as a way to save both money and energy, but the calculations on which this rosy claim is based make two false assumptions: (1) that CFL's are used to replace an equal number of lumens of incandescent lighting, and (2) that CFL's last twelve times as long as incandescents. Assumption (1) is false because CFL's tend to replace lights that are dimmer. Assumption (2) is hype. It probably is true in the laboratory, where hot incandescent filaments wear out by sublimation. Installed, however, my experience and that of people I know is that they frequently fail far short of their advertised average life. In principle, this doesn't refute the claim of long average life (the long-lived ones might be very long-lived), but it appears that problem is jarring and vibration.

The claims are being put to a large-scale test in the BELLE project.

With more realistic assumptions, the trade-off is iffy. The calculation is also affected by heating issues: all the power used by an incandescent lamp, whether it is transformed into light power or not, goes into local heating. This entails an extra cooling expense or heating bonus, depending on immediate conditions.

.cfl

CorelFLow. Filename extension for files containing chart data in a proprietary format belonging to whatever company owns the Corel suite these days.

CFL

Cure For Lymphoma Foundation. Founded in 1994 and lasted until 2001, so you could say it had something like a 100% five-year survival rate. In 2001 it merged with the similarly-purposed LRFA to form the Lymphoma Research Foundation (LRF, q.v.).

CFLPA

CFL Players' Association. Cf. NFLPA.

.cfm

ColdFusion Markup Language. Allaire proprietary format (and filename extension).

CFM

Contamination-Free Manufacturing.

CFM, cfm

Cubic Feet per Minute. Unit of hot air. CFS is used for congressional levels.

CFMEU

(Australian) Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.

CFMHN

Canadian Federation of Mental Health Nurses.

CFO

Chief Financial Officer. ``Top bean-counter'' may give offense.

CFP, CfP

Call For Papers (for a conference). The expansion, but not the initialism, may occur as a verb phrase, but CFP is normally a noun. A CFP implies an upcoming conference, so CFP essentially means ``a conference announcement with some indication of how to become a contributor to it.'' It's in the nature of technical and academic conferences that the potential participants and the potential audience members are substantially the same group of people, so most conference announcements are CFP's. But not all -- after the deadline and all the deadline extensions have passed, there may be conference announcements to serve as reminders and try to drum up additional business.

This conference democracy thing (to coin a phrase), where the groups of listeners and speakers are the same, is not universal. It's not like entertainment; I've never seen a ``Call for Movie Scripts'' or ``Call for Fiction Book Proposals.'' They've got enough coming in over the transom to keep all their assistant editors busy full time rejecting first chapters, even though the first paragraph is usually enough to assure a rejection.

Appel de textes and appel de communications seem to be the most common French equivalents to ``call for papers,'' but there doesn't seem to be a corresponding abbreviation of any sort. Appel à communications and appel à textes are also used. I haven't read enough to be very sure, but it seems to me that the French terms are used less narrowly. I've seen appel à textes used in a call for [very-far-off-off-Broadway theatre] scripts, for example, and in a call for research proposals.

Any ``invited'' speakers at a conference, almost by definition, are selected on the basis of reputation or of known, typically recent work. In any case, they are not the intended audience for a CFP. Nevertheless, some conferences do occasionally promote to invited status some papers sent in response to a CFP.

CFP

Call For Proposals. I've seen this refer to two kinds of proposals. In the sciences and engineering, a call for proposals is typically an announcement of a funding or contract opportunity. Sometimes in the humanities a call for proposals is an invitation to propose a panel or session of presentations dedicated to some theme within the broader subject of a research conference.

CFP

Common Fisheries Policy. Of the EU.

CFP

Comptoirs Français du Pacifique. Central bank for Pacific dependencies of France. Issues the CFP franc, pegged at 18.18 per FFr, or about a penny US. ``18.18''? Two hundred CFPF's buy eleven FFr's? They couldn't choose a more convenient rate?

CFP

The Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference. Held annually since 1991.

CFP

Continuous-Flow Pyrolyzer.

CFPF

CFP Franc. More at CFP entry -- just scroll back a couple of entries.

CFPP

Call For (conference) Panel Participation.

CFQ

CineFantastiQue.

CFR

Call Failure Rate. The probability that you will fail to connect to your ISP on a first (or any given) try. The Inverse Net report (see ISP entry) finds this number in the range of 5-10% for major ISP's. This includes AOL. My experience with AOL in Union County, New Jersey (1998) was a CFR of about 90-95% in the afternoon, unless I paid extra for a long-distance call. The reports don't identify the worst performers individually, but none did anywhere near that badly on Inversenet's tests, so take their numbers cum grano salis.

CFR's, as measured by Inversenet, tend to go up during the Winter Holiday season, a result which they explain in terms of increased numbers of people staying home in the cold, and internet shopping. On the other hand, Keynote finds that performance, as measured in delays for pages to be retrieved across the web, improves during the same period, as they write: ``the Internet is "at rest" over the holidays.'' I can only reconcile these observations by guessing that when people browse at work, they put a heavier load on the internet's main arteries than when they have to wait at home.

CFR

Call For Registration [for a conference].

CFR

Campaign { Finance | Funding } Reform. I think Napoleon said that an army travels on its belly. Didn't they all march or ride upright in those days? Oh, now I see my point! I mean that effectively, his military campaigns were partially funded by the poor peasants of the areas the army occupied and lived off of. Hmm. Well, anyway, ``CFR'' usually refers to electoral reform.

CFR

Case Fatality Rate. Fraction of people contracting a disease who ultimately die of it or because of it (that's two definitions).

CFR

Code of Federal Regulations. A boat anchor--gravitationally and intellectually. Vide labyrinth.

CFR

Commercial Fast (nuclear) Reactor.

CFR

Council on Foreign Relations. Founded in 1921 and based in New York, it's self-described as a ``Nonpartisan Resource for Information and Analysis.'' It's a think-tank that publishes the journal Foreign Policy, which is influential among people who have the time to read such ponderous stuff. CFR attempts, or attempts to appear to attempt, to achieve nonpartisanship by being sort of bipartisan. The board does include some people whose careers have been outside of politics, but many of these are MSMers. The politicos are mostly former government appointees from both major parties. Republicans are in the minority; they seem to be squishy types.

There's also an organization that was founded in 1922 (the year after CFR) and which took as its name The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Its goals are similar to those of its New York rival, but it never gained the same level of public visibility. Finally on September 1, 2006, it changed its name to The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The President's message explaining the shift never mentions the 84 years of namespace friction. This organization insists on eschewing an initialism and referring to itself for short as ``The Council'' or ``The Chicago Council.'' Why don't they go for ``Chicago City Council''? That has a familiar sound. And though I know nothing about the quality of this organization's work, it is with an exceptionally clear conscience that I don't give it an entry of its own in this glossary.

CFRD

Confidential; Formerly Restricted Data. Part-way declassified.

CFRL

Continuous Flow Recirculating Loop.

CFRP

Carbon-Fiber-Reinforced Polymer[s].

CFRV

Crash/Fire Rescue Vehicle.

CFS

Call For Submissions.

CFS

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Also called CFIDS and ME. Multiple names reflect continuing uncertainty in diagnosis and understanding of causes. There's a CFIDS Association of America; the Cheney Clinic specializes in CFS. American Soccer star Michelle Akers gives her personal testimony at this site.

This FAQ, by Robert Burns, has some unclear connection with alternatives.com, which offers this menu of text documents.

There ought to be a Cheney Clinic that specializes in keeping vice-president and executive-branch designated adult Dick Cheney operative and unfatigued.

CFS

Combined Fuse Switch[es].

CFS

Computers For Schools. A charitable program run by the Detwiler Foundation.

CFS

Constant Final State spectroscopy.

CFS

Consumer and Family Sciences. Yeah, see, it's just like physics and chemistry, except that it's about consumer and family. Let's go to the mall and run some experiments. This might be the most brazen travesty of ``science'' that I've encountered. It's probably significant that the term is only used for the name of a university department at Purdue, which started as an engineering school.

CFS

Container Freight Station.

CFSG

Classification of Finite Simple Groups. An achievement.

CFSP

Common Foreign and Security Policy (of the EU).

CFT

Certified Fitness Trainer.

CFT

Continuous Fourier Transform.

CFT

Crystal Field Theory.

CFTC

Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

CFTC

Confédération Française de Travailleurs Chrétiens. In some forrrane toong, this is `French Confederation of Christian Workers.' Chrétien here is translated by its cognate. That's better than translating it as ``long-time Canadian PM,'' but it's not exact, because it is as usual impossible to translate the connotations precisely between cultures. In countries that are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, as France once was, ``Christian'' implies Roman Catholic. (In very roughly the same way, in the American South, ``God-fearing'' means ``Jesus-loving.'')

By a similar sort of shorthand, in Europe the political meaning of ``Christian'' has been anti-Socialist, anti-Marxist, anti-Communist, rightist. This has been so especially since 1917. Interesting, then, that the CFTC should have been founded in 1919. See also CFTD.

CFTD

Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail. The `French Democratic Labor Federation.' Founded in 1964 as an offshoot of the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC, q.v.), but still Catholic-oriented. (That would be Catholic-orientated, if you're reading this in nearby Britain.)

CFU

Colony-Forming Unit (of micro-organisms).

CFV

Call For Votes. [Part of the formal procedure for newsgroup creation.]

CG

Carbon Glass.

c.g.

Center of Gravity. In most practical situations, this is the same as the center of mass.

CG

Chorionic Gonadotropin. See hCG.

CG

Clebsch-Gordan.

CG

Classical Guitar. It's a couple of inches shorter and has a wider neck than your typical dreadnought acoustic guitar, and it doesn't have metal strings. (They used to be catgut, now they're nylon.) A classical guitar doesn't have a pick guard because you don't play it with a pick.

CG

Clebsch-Gordan.

CG

Commanding General. A status, not a rank.

CG

Computer Graphics. Movie term.

.cg

Congo domain name code. That would be the old French Congo. Belgian Congo, on the other side of the Congo River, was called Zaire (.zr) by President-for-Life Mobutu, but he was ousted in 1997 and died (he'd been dying of cancer for a while), so I think that's now called ``Democratic Republic of the Congo'' vel sim. until the next successful coup.

CG

Conjugate Gradient ( method).

CG

Control Gate. [``Gate'' here used in the sense of a transistor gate (defn. 1).] Vide floating gate.

CG

Cross Gospel. A document or oral tradition supposed to be the original of all the passion narratives in the New Testament scriptures. John Dominic Crossan famously attempted a reconstruction of the CG from GPeter, à la Q. In The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991), Crossan wrote

First, the historical passion, composed of minimal knowledge, was known only in general terms recorded by, say, Josephus or Tacitus. Next, the prophetic passion, composed of multiple and discrete biblical allusions and seen most clearly in a work like the Epistle of Barnabas, developed biblical applications over, under, around, and through that open framework. Finally, those multiple and discrete exercises were combined into the narrative passion as a single sequential story...The narrative passion is but a single stream of tradition flowing from the Cross Gospel, now embedded within the Gospel of Peter, into Mark, thence together into Matthew and Luke, and thence, all together, into John.

You'd figure if they were all reading from the same page, they might have gotten the details to agree.

CGA

Carrier Group Alarm.

CgA

Chromogranin A.

CGA

Color Graphics Adapter. Earliest color resolution available on IBM PC's and compatibles: ``four'' colors only (red, green, blue, and black) -- i.e., 2 bits of color information. Obsolete; superseded by EGA, now obsolete as well. Sic transit coloratura.

CGAL

Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

CgA-LI

Chromogranin A-Like Immunoreactivity.

CGB

Convert Gray code to ordinary Binary code.

CGCVM

Center for Government and Corporate Veterinary Medicine. Let's amputate the pork.

CGD

Christlicher Gewerkschaftsbund Deutschland. Christian Trade Union Federation of Germany. with 303 thousand members in 1997 (76 thousand female). The third-largest union outside the DGB, q.v.

CGH

Computer-Generated Hologram.

CGI

Clinical Global Impression. Scale used in assessment of psychopathology.

CGI, cgi

Common Gateway Interface. The standard for interfacing with a gateway (a program run by a web server). Used in conjunction with HTML. Read the NCSA CGI documentation.

There's a good explanatory `` Instantaneous Introduction to CGI Scripts and HTML Forms.

LPAGE Internet services in Sacramento, CA would like to teach you how it's done, for $100 in Sacramento. They have a couple of on-line tutorials, but it's all rather PC-oriented. (From the ``but,'' you may guess correctly that I'm a MacBigot.)

Web Communications, a W3 presence provider, has a W3 Fill-out Forms Tutorial, though this has a somewhat local focus.

CyServices offers links to CGI resources for three levels of wizardship.

There's a site for those with a focus on language learning applications.

Yahoo has, of course, a generous list of links.

Un-CGI offers to take care of most of the details for you.

The CGI Information Resource Center is a handy list of links.

CGI

Computer-Generated Imagery. A movie-industry term.

CGI

Church of God International. Just when I was thinking, ``oh, that kind of church,'' I learn that there is another organization called the United Church of God, an International Association, which does not mention at its site and apparently is not united with Worldwide Church of God, which also appears to be an international association. God help us.

CGI appears to be the least international of the three.

CGIAR

Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. It didn't occur to them to call it ``Consultative International Group for Agricultural Research''? Get on the ball, people!

It's ``a strategic alliance of countries, international and regional organizations, and private foundations supporting 15 international agricultural Centers, that work with national agricultural research systems and civil society organizations including the private sector. The alliance mobilizes agricultural science to reduce poverty, foster human well being, promote agricultural growth and protect the environment. The CGIAR generates global public goods that are available to all.''

CGL

Chew, Goldberger and Low (equations). A set of equations describing a plasma with thermal anisotropy. See G. F. Chew, M. L. Goldberger and F. E. Low: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Ser. A, vol. 236, p. 112 (1956).

CGL

French Confédération Général du Logement.

CGM, .cgm

Computer Graphics Metafile.

C.G.M.

Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. A U.K. military medal. The name is really more accurate than necessary, because no order of gallantry, or what we tend to call bravery now, will receive recognition if it's not conspectable.

CGmc

Common Germanic.

CGMIF

Computer Graphics Metafile Interchange Format.

CGNR

Conjugate-Gradient Normal Residual.

CGO

Chief {Governance|Green} Officer. My chief green officer will always be Kermit the Frog, because it's not easy being green. CECO is apparently equivalent to CG(reen)O and has the positive advantages of (a) not namespace-colliding head-on with another management head and (b) including ``eco.'' There are other CXO's.

CGPM

Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures. `General Conference on Weights and Measures.'

The name is often incompetently translated from the French as `General Conference of Weights and Measures.' That's where a bunch of weights and measures get together and talk. The heavy weights do most of the talking. Walk softly and carry a big stick.

CGRO

Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. (Called GRO at time of launch). Went into orbit in 1991. In March 2000, after a gyroscope failed, it was decided to crash it into the Pacific Ocean.

CGS

Clock Generation & Support.

cgs

Centimeter (cm), Gram, Second. Fundamental units of one or a few standards now superseded by SI.

C-GSL

Classics Graduate Student List. ``[A] ... tool for graduate student communication and networking'' sponsored by the Women's Classical Caucus (WCC) but ``open to male or female graduate students of all levels of study, institutional affiliations, and scholarly interests.'' It's not a mailing list in the usual sense. In fact, it's remarkably unclear what it is or how it works. Judge for yourself.

CGT

Confederación General del Trabajo. The Argentine `General Confederation of Labor.' In its current incarnation, it was founded (which is to say nominally separated from the Peronists) in 1984. It represented, in effect, a separated faction of the Peronists (the Justicialista party, PJ) with substantial overlapping membership, but by the mid 1990's it was staging general strikes against the government of Peronist president Carlos Menem. As of 2004, about 90% of the country's 1100 unions (sindicatos) belonged to the CGT. The two other, ``dissident'' labor confederations in Argentina are the CTA and the MTA. CGT is the only Argentine affiliate of the ICFTU (abbreviated CIOSL in Spanish).

CGW

Computer-Generated Writing.

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