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24-letter words containing a, l, f, r, n

  • implicit differentiation — a method of finding the derivative of an implicit function by taking the derivative of each term with respect to the independent variable while keeping the derivative of the dependent variable with respect to the independent variable in symbolic form and then solving for that derivative.
  • in words of one syllable — simply; bluntly
  • knowledge sharing effort — (project)   An ARPA project developing techniques and methods for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable.
  • lab for computer science — MIT. http://lcs.mit.edu/.
  • laugh in a person's face — to show open contempt or defiance towards a person
  • line of least resistance — the easiest, but not necessarily the best or most honourable, course of action
  • local government officer — an employee of a local council
  • low voltage differential — (hardware)   (LVD) A method of driving SCSI cables that will be formalised in the SCSI-3 specifications. LVD uses less power than the current differential drive (HVD), is less expensive and will allow the higher speeds of Ultra-2 SCSI. LVD requires 3.3 Volts DC instead of 5 Volts DC for HVD.
  • make one's presence felt — If you make your presence felt, you do something which makes people notice you or pay attention to you.
  • mean length of utterance — the mean number of morphemes produced per sentence, used especially as a measure of child language development. Abbreviation: MLU.
  • mediterranean flour moth — a small cosmopolitan moth, Anagasta kuehniella, whose larvae damage stored foodstuffs, as grain and flour.
  • near field communication — a short-range wireless communication system that uses radio waves to enable a phone or other mobile device to interact with another device or card reader: Near Field Communication essentially lets your phone replace your credit cards. Abbreviation: NFC.
  • non-proliferation treaty — an international agreement signed in 1968 which aims to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons
  • open data-link interface — (networking, standard)   (ODI) A Novell-developed network card API that provides media and protocol independence. It allows the sharing of a single card by multiple transport layer protocols and resolves conflicts.
  • out of all proportion to — If you say that something is out of all proportion to something else, you think that it is far greater or more serious than it should be.
  • particulate fluidization — Particulate fluidization is a condition when particles in a fluidized bed are individually suspended.
  • passive balance of trade — a negative balance of trade
  • permeability coefficient — the volume of an incompressible fluid that will flow in unit time through a unit cube of a porous substance across which a unit pressure difference is maintained
  • photomechanical transfer — a method of producing photographic prints or offset printing plates from paper negatives by a chemical transfer process rather than by exposure to light
  • portable document format — (file format)   (PDF) The native file format for Adobe Systems' Acrobat. PDF is the file format for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. A PDF file can describe documents containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device-independent and resolution independent format. These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, colour, and images.
  • professional association — a body of persons engaged in the same profession, formed usually to control entry into the profession, maintain standards, and represent the profession in discussions with other bodies
  • professional corporation — a corporation formed by one or more licensed practitioners, especially medical or legal, to operate their practices on a corporate plan. Abbreviation: PC, P.C.
  • professional programming — paranoid programming
  • program information file — (file format)   Under Windows, a file providing information on how a non-Windows application program should be run, including how much memory should be allocated to it and what graphics interface it requires.
  • public relations officer — a person who is responsible for communications with the public
  • pure functional language — purely functional language
  • quick-assembly furniture — furniture such as shelves and cupboards which you buy as a number of separate pieces and assemble yourself
  • referential transparency — (programming)   An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "side-effect" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to formal methods and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent! See also extensional equality, observational equivalence.
  • san joaquin valley fever — coccidioidomycosis.
  • second earl of shelburneWilliam Petty Fitzmaurice, 2nd Earl of, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, William Petty Fizmaurice Lansdowne.
  • serial interface adaptor — (SIA) The Ethernet driver chip used on a Filtabyte Ethernet card.
  • single transferable vote — of or relating to a system of voting in which voters list the candidates in order of preference. Any candidate achieving a predetermined proportion of the votes in a constituency is elected. Votes exceeding this amount and those cast for the bottom candidate are redistributed according to the stated preferences. Redistribution continues until all the seats are filled
  • split image range finder — a range finder in which opposing halves of a split field move relative to each other and coincide when the object centered in the field is in focus.
  • stratificational grammar — a grammar based upon the theory that language is made up of successive strata that are interconnected by established rules.
  • stratified random sample — a random sample of a population in which the population is first divided into distinct subpopulations, or strata, and random samples are then taken separately from each stratum.
  • structural functionalism — functionalism (def 3).
  • telephony user interface — (communications)   (TUI) Either a software interface to telephony (e.g. a phone-capable PC) or a DTMF-based interface to software (e.g. voicemail).
  • telescope user interface — (hardware, interface)   (TUI) A remote control interface for a telescope.
  • the department of health — a department of the government of the United Kingdom concerned with governmental policy relating to health in England but not elsewhere in the United Kingdom
  • think (all) the world of — to admire or love greatly
  • tools of one's/the trade — The tools of your trade or the tools of the trade are the skills, instruments, and other equipment that you need in order to do your job properly.
  • transformational grammar — a system of grammatical analysis, especially a form of generative grammar, that posits the existence of deep structure and surface structure, using a set of transformational rules to derive surface structure forms from deep structure; a grammar that uses transformations to express the relations between equivalent structures.
  • trip the light fantastic — a journey or voyage: to win a trip to Paris.
  • unfederated malay states — a former group of native states in the Malay Peninsula that became British protectorates between 1885 and 1909. All except Brunei joined the Malayan Union (later Federation of Malaya) in 1946. Brunei joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 but later became an independent nation
  • uniform resource locater — Uniform Resource Locator
  • uniform resource locator — (web)   (URL, previously "Universal") A standard way of specifying the location of an object, typically a web page, on the Internet. Other types of object are described below. URLs are the form of address used on the World-Wide Web. They are used in HTML documents to specify the target of a hypertext link which is often another HTML document (possibly stored on another computer). Here are some example URLs: http://w3.org/default.html http://acme.co.uk:8080/images/map.gif http://foldoc.org/?Uniform+Resource+Locator http://w3.org/default.html#Introduction ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip ftp://spy:[email protected]/pub/topsecret/weapon.tgz mailto:[email protected] news:alt.hypertext telnet://dra.com The part before the first colon specifies the access scheme or protocol. Commonly implemented schemes include: ftp, http (web), gopher or WAIS. The "file" scheme should only be used to refer to a file on the same host. Other less commonly used schemes include news, telnet or mailto (e-mail). The part after the colon is interpreted according to the access scheme. In general, two slashes after the colon introduce a hostname (host:port is also valid, or for FTP user:[email protected] or [email protected]). The port number is usually omitted and defaults to the standard port for the scheme, e.g. port 80 for HTTP. For an HTTP or FTP URL the next part is a pathname which is usually related to the pathname of a file on the server. The file can contain any type of data but only certain types are interpreted directly by most browsers. These include HTML and images in gif or jpeg format. The file's type is given by a MIME type in the HTTP headers returned by the server, e.g. "text/html", "image/gif", and is usually also indicated by its filename extension. A file whose type is not recognised directly by the browser may be passed to an external "viewer" application, e.g. a sound player. The last (optional) part of the URL may be a query string preceded by "?" or a "fragment identifier" preceded by "#". The later indicates a particular position within the specified document. Only alphanumerics, reserved characters (:/?#"<>%+) used for their reserved purposes and "$", "-", "_", ".", "&", "+" are safe and may be transmitted unencoded. Other characters are encoded as a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. Space may also be encoded as "+". Standard SGML "&;" character entity encodings (e.g. "é") are also accepted when URLs are embedded in HTML. The terminating semicolon may be omitted if & is followed by a non-letter character.
  • universal life insurance — a type of insurance in which the payments of the insured are placed in an investment fund, earnings from which pay the premium on term life insurance while any remainder continues to increase the policy's value.
  • ventricular fibrillation — Pathology. a cardiac arrhythmia characterized by rapid, chaotic electrical impulses to the ventricles, incomplete ventricular contractions, and resultant loss of pulse and blood pressure.
  • water of crystallization — water of hydration, formerly thought necessary to crystallization: now usually regarded as affecting crystallization only as it forms new molecular combinations.
  • you can't be too careful — You can say 'You can't be too careful' as a way of advising someone to be careful, even when this seems unnecessary.
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