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22-letter words containing s, e, r, i, c

  • historical materialism — (in Marxist theory) the doctrine that all forms of social thought, as art or philosophy, and institutions, as the family or the state, develop as a superstructure founded on an economic base; that they reflect the character of economic relations and are altered or modified as a result of class struggles; that each ruling economic class produces the class that will destroy or replace it; and that dialectical necessity requires the eventual withering away of the state and the establishment of a classless society: the body of theory, in dialectical materialism, dealing with historical process and social causation.
  • horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
  • host control interface — (hardware, wireless)   (HCI) A network layer in the Bluetooth Core Protocol Stack, lying between the software and the hardware stacks and serving as the interface through which the software controls two of Bluetooth's four core protocols.
  • hybrid multiprocessing — (parallel)   (HMP) The kind of multitasking which OS/2 supports. HMP provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing, using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.
  • in one's own back yard — close at hand
  • indeterminate sentence — a penalty, imposed by a court, that has relatively wide limits or no limits, as one of imprisonment for one to ten years.
  • industrial archaeology — the study of past industrial machines, works, etc
  • industrialized country — a country characterized by industry on an extensive scale
  • inferential statistics — the branch of statistics dealing with conclusions, generalizations, predictions, and estimations based on data from samples.
  • information processing — processing of information, especially the handling of information by computers in accordance with strictly defined systems of procedure.
  • inland revenue service — In the United States, the Inland Revenue Service is the government authority which collects taxes. The abbreviation IRS is often used.
  • instruction scheduling — The compiler phase that orders instructions on a pipelined, superscalar, or VLIW architecture so as to maximise the number of function units operating in parallel and to minimise the time they spend waiting for each other. Examples are filling a delay slot; interspersing floating-point instructions with integer instructions to keep both units operating; making adjacent instructions independent, e.g. one which writes a register and another which reads from it; separating memory writes to avoid filling the write buffer. Norman P. Jouppi and David W. Wall, "Available Instruction-Level Parallelism for Superscalar and Superpipelined Processors", Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 272--282, 1989.
  • interactive courseware — (ICW) A training program controlled by a computer that relies on trainee input to determine the order and pace of instruction delivery. The trainee advances through the sequence of instructional events by making decisions and selections. The instruction branches according to the trainee's responses. ICW is a US military term which includes computer-aided instruction and computer-based training.
  • interactive television — techniques that enable viewers to interact with what they are watching
  • interpretive semantics — a school of semantic theory based on the doctrine that the rules that relate sentences to their meanings form an autonomous system, separate from the rules that determine what is grammatical in a language
  • jacquard, joseph-marie — Joseph-Marie Jacquard
  • java community process — (project)   (JCP) An organization controlled by Sun Microsystems to further the growth of the Java language and runtime. The JCP produces standards called Java Standard Requests, which are "requests" in the same sense as RFCs.
  • junior sales associate — A junior sales associate is an inexperienced member of the sales staff, usually receiving training or supervised by more experienced staff.
  • keesler air force base — a U.S. Air Force installation in S Mississippi, near Biloxi.
  • klebs-loffler bacillus — a bacterium, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which causes diphtheria.
  • label switching router — (networking)   (LSR) A device that typically resides somewhere in the middle of a network and is capable of forwarding datagrams by label switching. In many cases, especially early versions of MPLS networks, a LSR will typically be a modified ATM switch that forwards datagrams based upon a label in the VPI/VCI field.
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • leather-stocking tales — a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper, comprising The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
  • lempel-ziv compression — Substitutional compression schemes proposed by Jakob Ziv and Abraham Lempel in 1977 and 1978. There are two main schemes, LZ77 and LZ78. Lempel-Ziv Welch compression is a variant of LZ78.
  • lesser prairie chicken — either of two North American gallinaceous birds of western prairies, Tympanuchus cupido (greater prairie chicken) or T. pallidicinctus (lesser prairie chicken) having rufous, brown, black, and white plumage.
  • lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
  • lord high commissioner — the Queen's representative
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • lunar excursion module — lunar module. Abbreviation: LEM.
  • magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
  • master warrant officer — a noncommissioned officer in the Canadian forces junior to a chief warrant officer
  • maxwell air force base — U.S. Air Force installation in SE central Alabama, NW of Montgomery: site of U.S. Air Force Advanced School.
  • mcculloch-pitts neuron — (artificial intelligence)   The basic building block of artificial neural networks. It receives one or more inputs and produces one or more identical outputs, each of which is a simple non-linear function of the sum of the inputs to the neuron. The non-linear function is typically a threshhold or step function which is usually smoothed (i.e. a sigmoid) to facilitate learning.
  • metasyntactic variable — (grammar)   Strictly, a variable used in metasyntax, but often used for any name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on). zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England). shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. blarg, wibble: New Zealand Of all these, only "foo" and "bar" are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and "foobaz" also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
  • microspectrophotometer — a spectrophotometer for examining light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by minute objects.
  • microspectrophotometry — a spectrophotometer for examining light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by minute objects.
  • microwave spectroscopy — the determination of those frequencies of the microwave spectrum that are selectively absorbed by certain materials, providing information about atomic, molecular, and crystalline structure.
  • middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
  • million electron volts — a unit of energy equal to the energy acquired by an electron in falling through a potential of 10 6 volts. Abbreviation: MeV .
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • mistress of ceremonies — a woman who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, or the like.
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • mother carey's chicken — any of various small petrels, especially the stormy petrel, Oceanites oceanicus.
  • motoring correspondent — a journalist who reviews and writes about cars
  • multiplicative inverse — reciprocal (def 9).
  • name service switching — Domain Name System
  • national semiconductor — (company)   A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
  • nicky nicky nine doors — the practice of knocking on a door or ringing a doorbell and running away before it is answered
  • nkosi sikelel' iafrica — the unofficial anthem of the Black people of South Africa, officially recognized as a national anthem (along with parts of 'Die Stem' and an English verse) in 1991
  • nominal semidestructor — (abuse)   Slang for "National Semiconductor", found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors.
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