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19-letter words containing f, e, s, c

  • four eyes principle — the requirement that a business transaction be approved by at least two individuals
  • fractal compression — (algorithm)   A technique for encoding images using fractals.
  • francesca da rimini — Francesca da, Francesca da Rimini.
  • fraternal insurance — insurance underwritten by a fraternal society, under either a legal reserve plan or an assessment plan.
  • from rags to riches — a worthless piece of cloth, especially one that is torn or worn.
  • front-end processor — a small computer or other dedicated device that performs preliminary processing of data for a host computer.
  • functional database — (database, language)   A database which uses a functional language as its query language. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a purely functional language would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically scalable, the update mechanism must clearly be destructive rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the query language to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a monad to encapsulate database access and ensure it was single threaded. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's linear type system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon Backus' FP language, of which FQL is probably the best known example. Adaplan is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern functional programming languages, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are PFL [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and Machiavelli [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998].
  • general post office — (in the U.S. postal system) the main post office of a city, county, etc., that also has branch post offices. Abbreviation: G.P.O., GPO.
  • get off one's chest — Anatomy. the trunk of the body from the neck to the abdomen; thorax.
  • get one's rocks off — to experience orgasm; ejaculate
  • grandfather's chair — wing chair.
  • grandfather's clock — a pendulum floor clock having a case as tall as or taller than a person; tall-case clock; long-case clock.
  • greenstick fracture — an incomplete fracture of a long bone, in which one side is broken and the other side is still intact.
  • helsinki conference — Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
  • hospital facilities — the equipment and services provided by a hospital
  • house of correction — a place for the confinement and reform of persons convicted of minor offenses and not regarded as confirmed criminals.
  • house of councilors — the upper house of the Japanese diet.
  • hyperfine structure — the splitting of the lines of an atomic spectrum, produced by the angular momentum of the nucleus of the atom.
  • hyperfocal distance — the distance, at a given f number, between a camera lens and the nearest point (hyperfocal point) having satisfactory definition when focused at infinity.
  • in consequence (of) — as a result (of)
  • in consideration of — the act of considering; careful thought; meditation; deliberation: I will give your project full consideration.
  • information science — the study of the nature, collection, and management of information and of its uses, especially involving computer storage and retrievals.
  • information service — a service which provides information
  • interesterification — transesterification.
  • interfacial tension — the surface tension at the interface of two liquids.
  • italian east africa — a former Italian territory in E Africa, formed in 1936 by the merging of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland with newly conquered Ethiopia: taken by the British Imperial forces 1941.
  • jacques montgolfier — Jacques Étienne [zhahk ey-tyen] /ʒɑk eɪˈtyɛn/ (Show IPA), 1745–99, and his brother Joseph Michel [zhaw-zef mee-shel] /ʒɔˈzɛf miˈʃɛl/ (Show IPA) 1740–1810, French aeronauts: inventors of the first practical balloon 1783.
  • jockey for position — If someone is jockeying for position, they are using whatever methods they can in order to get into a better position than their rivals.
  • juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
  • knock the socks off — to strike a sounding blow with the fist, knuckles, or anything hard, especially on a door, window, or the like, as in seeking admittance, calling attention, or giving a signal: to knock on the door before entering.
  • languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
  • letters of credence — credentials issued to a diplomat or other governmental representative for presentation to the country to which he or she is sent.
  • library of congress — one of the major library collections in the world, located in Washington, D.C., and functioning in some ways as the national library of the U.S. although not officially designated as such: established by Congress in 1800 for service to its members, but now also serving government agencies, other libraries, and the public.
  • lift up one's voice — to speak out loudly
  • loss-of-containment — Loss-of-containment happens when a fluid which is usually contained somewhere escapes from that place.
  • low insertion force — (hardware)   (LIF) PGA/SPGA sockets with no handle. The integrated circuit is simply pushed into the socket, and levered out to remove. Most motherboard processor sockets are now ZIF rather than LIF.
  • luminous efficiency — the perceived brightness of light as a ratio of the total luminous flux to total radiant flux of the source; a measure of brightness obtained by dividing the source's luminous flux by the consumption of its energy.
  • lyon office of arms — Heralds' Office.
  • make oneself scarce — insufficient to satisfy the need or demand; not abundant: Meat and butter were scarce during the war.
  • malicious falsehood — a lie told by someone who knows the lie is false or knows it will do harm to the person it is concerning
  • manned space flight — space travel in vehicles with a human crew
  • mary wollstonecraft — Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) 1759–97, English author and feminist (mother of Mary Shelley).
  • means of production — resources: equipment, workers
  • membership function — fuzzy subset
  • ministry of defence — the government department responsible for the country's military measures or resources
  • miracle of st. mark — a painting (1548) by Tintoretto.
  • moving spirit/force — The moving spirit or moving force behind something is the person or thing that caused it to start and to keep going, or that influenced people to take part in it.
  • nasty piece of work — malicious person
  • neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon)   The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
  • neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
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