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

  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • four eyes principle — the requirement that a business transaction be approved by at least two individuals
  • franco-prussian war — the war between France and Prussia, 1870–71.
  • fraternal insurance — insurance underwritten by a fraternal society, under either a legal reserve plan or an assessment plan.
  • functional analysis — the branch of mathematics that deals with the theory of vector spaces and linear functionals.
  • functional calculus — the branch of symbolic logic that includes the sentential calculus and that deals with sentential functions and quantifiers and with logical relations between sentences containing quantifiers.
  • 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].
  • greenstick fracture — an incomplete fracture of a long bone, in which one side is broken and the other side is still intact.
  • 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.
  • in consequence (of) — as a result (of)
  • 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.
  • juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
  • knights of columbus — an international fraternal and benevolent organization of Roman Catholic men, founded in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882.
  • 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.
  • lift up one's voice — to speak out loudly
  • 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.
  • 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
  • means of production — resources: equipment, workers
  • membership function — fuzzy subset
  • 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
  • objectfuscated code — (humour, programming)   Object-oriented code which has been abstracted to so many levels that no-one can understand it anymore. A play on obfuscated code.
  • on (or off) course — moving (or not moving) in the intended direction
  • on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.
  • performance figures — the statistics that indicate how well or badly a company or organization has performed
  • peroxysulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
  • phacoemulsification — the removal of a cataract by first liquefying the affected lens with ultrasonic vibrations and then extracting it by suction.
  • phakoemulsification — the removal of a cataract by first liquefying the affected lens with ultrasonic vibrations and then extracting it by suction.
  • pillars of hercules — the two promontories at the E end of the Strait of Gibraltar: the Rock of Gibraltar on the European side and the Jebel Musa on the African side; according to legend, formed by Hercules
  • presumption of fact — a presumption based on experience or knowledge of the relationship between a known fact and a fact inferred from it.
  • pugwash conferences — international peace conferences of scientists held regularly to discuss world problems: Nobel peace prize 1995 awarded to Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005) , one of the founders of the conferences, secretary-general (1957–73), and president (1988–97)
  • radius of curvature — the absolute value of the reciprocal of the curvature at a point on a curve.
  • republic of letters — the collective body of literary people.
  • ruffini's corpuscle — an end organ of certain sensory neurons that branches out parallel to the skin and responds to steady pressure.
  • saccharofarinaceous — pertaining to or consisting of sugar and meal.
  • school of the squad — an institution where instruction is given, especially to persons under college age: The children are at school.
  • scratch the surface — examine superficially
  • self-congratulating — the expression or feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's own accomplishment, good fortune, etc.; complacency.
  • self-congratulation — the expression or feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's own accomplishment, good fortune, etc.; complacency.
  • self-congratulatory — the expression or feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's own accomplishment, good fortune, etc.; complacency.
  • self-reconstruction — an act of reconstructing.
  • sentential function — an expression that contains one or more variables and becomes meaningful when suitable constant terms are substituted for them.
  • sharp-focus realism — photorealism.
  • significant figures — the figures of a number that express a magnitude to a specified degree of accuracy, rounding up or down the final figure
  • sound effects woman — a woman who produces sounds artificially or reproduces them from a recording, etc, to create a theatrical effect, such as the bringing together of two halves of a hollow coconut shell to simulate a horse's gallop. Such sound effects are used in plays, films, etc
  • south african dutch — the Boers.
  • south pacific ocean — the part of the Pacific Ocean extending S from the Equator to the Antarctic continent.
  • south san francisco — a city in central California.
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