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23-letter words containing a, e, r, i, u

  • court of first instance — a court in which legal proceedings are begun or first heard
  • creative writing course — a course in which people are taught creative writing skills
  • criminal justice system — the combination of courts and legal processes that deal with crime
  • criminal records bureau — (in England and Wales) a service offering employers and voluntary organizations access to police, health, and education records
  • critique of pure reason — a philosophical work (1781) by Immanuel Kant.
  • current-cost accounting — a method of accounting that values assets at their current replacement cost rather than their original cost
  • cyclic redundancy check — (algorithm)   (CRC or "cyclic redundancy code") A number derived from, and stored or transmitted with, a block of data in order to detect corruption. By recalculating the CRC and comparing it to the value originally transmitted, the receiver can detect some types of transmission errors. A CRC is more complicated than a checksum. It is calculated using division either using shifts and exclusive ORs or table lookup (modulo 256 or 65536). The CRC is "redundant" in that it adds no information. A single corrupted bit in the data will result in a one bit change in the calculated CRC but multiple corrupted bits may cancel each other out. CRCs treat blocks of input bits as coefficient-sets for polynomials. E.g., binary 10100000 implies the polynomial: 1*x^7 + 0*x^6 + 1*x^5 + 0*x^4 + 0*x^3 + 0*x^2 + 0*x^1 + 0*x^0. This is the "message polynomial". A second polynomial, with constant coefficients, is called the "generator polynomial". This is divided into the message polynomial, giving a quotient and remainder. The coefficients of the remainder form the bits of the final CRC. So, an order-33 generator polynomial is necessary to generate a 32-bit CRC. The exact bit-set used for the generator polynomial will naturally affect the CRC that is computed. Most CRC implementations seem to operate 8 bits at a time by building a table of 256 entries, representing all 256 possible 8-bit byte combinations, and determining the effect that each byte will have. CRCs are then computed using an input byte to select a 16- or 32-bit value from the table. This value is then used to update the CRC.
  • cylinder vacuum cleaner — a type of vacuum cleaner in which dirt, dust, etc, is sucked into a hard cylinder rather than a bag
  • d'entrecasteaux islands — a group of volcanic islands in the Pacific, off the SE coast of New Guinea: part of Papua New Guinea. Pop: 49 167 (1990 est). Area: 3141 sq km (1213 sq miles)
  • dark-field illumination — illumination of the field of a microscope from the side so that the specimen is viewed against a dark background
  • data terminal equipment — (communications, hardware)   (DTE) A device which acts as the source and/or destination of data and which controls the communication channel. DTE includes terminals, computers, protocol converters, and multiplexors. DTE is usually connected via an EIA-232 serial line to Data Communication Equipment (DCE), typically a modem. It is necessary to distinguish these two types of device because their connectors must be wired differently if a "straight-through" cable (pin 1 to pin 1, pin 2 to pin 2 etc.) is to be used. DTE should have a male connector and should transmit on pin three and receive on pin two. It is a curious fact that many modems are actually "DTE" according to the original standard.
  • department of education — the department of the U.S. federal government that administers federal programs dealing with education: created in 1979, largely by transfer from part of the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Abbreviation: ED.
  • deterministic automaton — (theory)   A finite-state automaton in which the overall course of the computation is completely determined by the program, the starting state, and the initial inputs. The class of problems solvable by such automata is the class P (see polynomial-time algorithm).
  • dichlorodifluoromethane — a colourless nonflammable gas easily liquefied by pressure: used as a propellant in aerosols and fire extinguishers and as a refrigerant. Formula: CCl2F2
  • digital subscriber line — (communications, protocol)   (DSL, or Digital Subscriber Loop, xDSL - see below) A family of digital telecommunications protocols designed to allow high speed data communication over the existing copper telephone lines between end-users and telephone companies. When two conventional modems are connected through the telephone system (PSTN), it treats the communication the same as voice conversations. This has the advantage that there is no investment required from the telephone company (telco) but the disadvantage is that the bandwidth available for the communication is the same as that available for voice conversations, usually 64 kb/s (DS0) at most. The twisted-pair copper cables into individual homes or offices can usually carry significantly more than 64 kb/s but the telco needs to handle the signal as digital rather than analog. There are many implementation of the basic scheme, differing in the communication protocol used and providing varying service levels. The throughput of the communication can be anything from about 128 kb/s to over 8 Mb/s, the communication can be either symmetric or asymmetric (i.e. the available bandwidth may or may not be the same upstream and downstream). Equipment prices and service fees also vary considerably. The first technology based on DSL was ISDN, although ISDN is not often recognised as such nowadays. Since then a large number of other protocols have been developed, collectively referred to as xDSL, including HDSL, SDSL, ADSL, and VDSL. As yet none of these have reached very wide deployment but wider deployment is expected for 1998-1999.
  • digital subscriber loop — Digital Subscriber Line
  • dionysius of alexandria — ("the Great") a.d. c190–265, patriarch of Alexandria 247?–265?.
  • dishonourable discharge — dismissal from the US armed forces by a court martial as a result of serious misconduct
  • disjunctive normal form — (DNF) A logical formula consisting of a disjunction of conjunctions where no conjunction contains a disjunction. E.g. the DNF of (A or B) and C is (A and C) or (B and C).
  • distributive bargaining — a negotiation process aimed at reaching a compromise agreement over how resources may be allocated between the parties
  • dual sensory impairment — the condition of being affected by sight and hearing loss
  • earthquake-proof design — Earthquake-proof design is design which will not be badly damaged by earthquakes or tsunamis.
  • eating your own dogfood — eating one's own dogfood
  • education correspondent — a journalist who reports news in the field of education or teaching
  • electronic surveillance — use of electronic devices to spy, observe
  • encapsulated postscript — (EPS) An extension of the PostScript graphics file format developed by Adobe Systems. EPS is used for PostScript graphics files that are to be incorporated into other documents. An EPS file includes pragmas (special PostScript comments) giving information such as the bounding box, page number and fonts used. On some computers, EPS files include a low resolution version of the PostScript image. On the Macintosh this is in PICT format, while on the IBM PC it is in TIFF or Microsoft Windows metafile format.
  • entrance qualifications — academic requirements
  • european monetary union — the agreement between members of the European Union to establish a common currency. The current participating members are Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain
  • extravehicular activity — the act or an instance of floating and manoeuvring in space, outside but attached by a lifeline to a spacecraft
  • ferric ammonium oxalate — a green, crystalline, water-soluble, synthetically produced powder, (NH 4) 3 Fe(C 2 O 4) 3 ⋅3H 2 O, used chiefly in the manufacture of blueprint paper.
  • fetal tissue transplant — a surgical procedure in which tissue from an aborted fetus is grafted into a patient to replace or improve defective tissue, especially to treat Parkinson's disease or other neurological disorders.
  • fifth marquis lansdowne — Henry Charles Keith, 5th Marquis of Lansdowne, Lansdowne, 5th Marquis of.
  • fish in troubled waters — any of various cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrates, having gills, commonly fins, and typically an elongated body covered with scales.
  • friction reducing agent — A friction reducing agent is an additive used to reduce friction exerted downhole on tools and pipes.
  • frictional unemployment — those people who are in the process of moving from one job to another and who therefore appear in the unemployment statistics collected at any given time
  • function graph language — (language)   (FGL) The machine language for the AMPS (Applicative Multi-Processing System) proposed by Robert Keller, Gary Lindstrom and Suhas Patil at the University of Utah.
  • functional requirements — (specification)   What a system should be able to do, the functions it should perform. This term is used at both the user requirements analysis and software requirements specifications phases in the software life-cycle. An example of a non-functional requirement is an initialisation sequence incorporated into the software that is specific to a given customer.
  • fundamental interaction — any of the four basic interactions that occur in nature: the gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions
  • garbage in, garbage out — (humour)   (GIGO) /gi:'goh/ Wilf Hey's maxim expressing the fact that computers, unlike humans, will unquestioningly process nonsensical input data and produce nonsensical output. Of course a properly written program will reject input data that is obviously erroneous but such checking is not always easy to specify and is tedious to write. GIGO is usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't "do the right thing" when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data. The expansion "Garbage In, Gospel Out" is an ironic comment on the tendency to put excessive trust in "computerised" data.
  • german southwest africa — a former name of Namibia.
  • give (or get) a tumble — to give (or get) some favorable or affectionate notice, attention, etc.
  • give something a rub-up — to smooth or polish something
  • growing-equity mortgage — a type of mortgage under which the interest rate is fixed but monthly payments increase annually to include more of the principal, so that the mortgage can be paid off in about half the conventional term.
  • guest relations manager — A guest relations manager at a hotel is responsible for the relationships that the hotel has with its guests and the way in which it treats them.
  • guillain-barre syndrome — an uncommon, usually self-limited form of polyneuritis, occurring after a viral illness or immunization and manifested by loss of muscle strength, loss of or altered sensation and sometimes paralysis.
  • hang out your/a shingle — If you hang out your shingle or hang out a shingle, you start your own business.
  • have struck/hit paydirt — If you say that someone has struck paydirt or has hit paydirt, you mean that they have achieved sudden success or gained a lot of money very quickly.
  • hermit of st. augustine — a member of an order of mendicant friars, founded in 1256.
  • heterogeneous catalysis — Heterogeneous catalysis is catalysis in which the catalyst does not take part in the reaction that it increases.
  • hire purchase agreement — an agreement between a seller and a buyer for the buyer to purchase something on hire purchase
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