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

  • financial ombudsman — any of five British ombudsmen: the Banking Ombudsman, set up in 1986 to investigate complaints from bank customers; the Building Society Ombudsman, set up in 1987 to investigate complaints from building society customers; the Insurance Ombudsman, set up in 1981 to investigate complaints by policyholders (since 1988 this ombudsman has also operated a Unit Trust Ombudsman scheme); the Investment Ombudsman set up in 1989 to investigate complaints by investors (the Personal Investment Authority Ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints by personal investors); and the Pensions Ombudsman, set up in 1993 to investigate complaints regarding pension schemes
  • first person plural — a grammatical category of pronouns and verbs used by the speaker to refer to or talk about himself together with others
  • flannelmouth sucker — a sucker, Catostomus latipinnis, of the Colorado River and its tributaries.
  • floating restaurant — a boat or ship that has been converted for use as a restaurant
  • fluophosphoric acid — fluorophosphoric acid.
  • fluoride toothpaste — toothpaste containing a small amount of fluoride as protection against tooth decay
  • focal plane shutter — an opaque shield in a camera, lying in the focal plane of the lens, that, when tripped, admits light to expose the film or plate for a predetermined period, usually a fraction of a second
  • focal-plane shutter — a camera shutter situated directly in front of the film.
  • forensic accountant — an accountant who specializes in applying accountancy skills to the purposes of the law
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • frameshift mutation — a mutation caused by frameshift.
  • 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.
  • free alongside quay — (of a shipment of goods) delivered to the quay without charge to the buyer
  • 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].
  • future date testing — (testing)   The process of setting a computer's date to a future date to test a program's (expected or unexpected) date sensitivity. Future date testing only shows the effects of dates on the computer(s) under scrutiny, it does not take into account knock-on effects of dates on other connected systems.
  • go out of one's way — manner, mode, or fashion: a new way of looking at a matter; to reply in a polite way.
  • greenstick fracture — an incomplete fracture of a long bone, in which one side is broken and the other side is still intact.
  • heat of sublimation — the heat absorbed by one gram or unit mass of a substance in the process of changing, at a constant temperature and pressure, from a solid to a gaseous state. Compare sublime (def 10).
  • idea of pure reason — any of the three undemonstrable entities (a personal soul, a cosmos, and a supreme being) implicit in the fact of a subject and an object of knowledge, and in the need for some principle uniting them.
  • indian paint fungus — a common woody hoof-shaped fungus, Echinodontium tinctorium, found on conifers in western North America and believed to have been used as a dye by Pacific Northwest Indians.
  • isthmus of san blas — the narrowest part of the Isthmus of Panama. Width: about 50 km (30 miles)
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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
  • master of foxhounds — the person responsible for the conduct of a fox hunt and to whom all members of the hunt and its staff are responsible. Abbreviation: M.F.H.
  • means of production — resources: equipment, workers
  • measure for measure — a comedy (1604) by Shakespeare.
  • mid-autumn festival — a Chinese festival that is held to celebrate the end of the summer harvest, when the crops have been gathered.
  • missing fundamental — a tone, not present in the sound received by the ear, whose pitch is that of the difference between the two tones that are sounded
  • mother-of-thousands — strawberry geranium.
  • 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 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.
  • parainfluenza virus — any of a group of viruses that cause respiratory infections with influenza-like symptoms, esp in children
  • performance figures — the statistics that indicate how well or badly a company or organization has performed
  • peroxysulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
  • persian gulf states — group of Arab sheikdoms along the Persian Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, & United Arab Emirates
  • 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
  • potassium bisulfate — a colorless, crystalline, water-soluble solid, KHSO 4 , used chiefly in the conversion of tartrates to bitartrates.
  • presumption of fact — a presumption based on experience or knowledge of the relationship between a known fact and a fact inferred from it.
  • profitability study — a study of how much profit a company, organization, etc, makes or how profitable it is
  • pseudo-professional — following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain: a professional builder.
  • 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)
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