Acronym Finder rolls over 600,000 definitions

This morning, we added our 600,000th definition to the database!

In case you're wondering, the definition we added to reach this milestone was "Precision Fluency Shaping Program" or PFSP.

The Precision Fluency Shaping Program is a comprehensive therapy for the treatment of stuttering and was developed by Ronald L. Webster, PhD. It's now administered by Ross S. Barrett, M.A., CCC/SLP. Mr. Barrett is the Director of Fluency Programs and an instructor of Clinical Otolaryngology at the Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Since Acronym Finder went online in 1997 with over 43,000 definitions, the database has grown by over 550,000 human-edited terms! Our conservative estimates are that we have spent over 6,000 hours reviewing and editing the definitions we have so far. And we're still growing by almost 150 new terms every day of the year!

We thank all our loyal users from around the world who suggest new acronyms and abbreviations for what is arguably the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind.

Happy Holidays and the OLPC XO Laptop

First, we here at Acronym Finder send our best wishes to everyone -- have a Happy Holiday season, and a wonderful 2008!

We very much appreciate your contributions, suggestions, feedback, and visits to Acronym Finder during 2007. We thank you for helping us be the best, most complete database of abbreviations and acronyms on the planet!

Not too long ago, we added a new abbreviation to our database, OLPC, which stands for One Laptop per Child. The OLPC initiative is a non-profit foundation by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. The laptop, designed with children and education in mind is called the "XO". The OLPC foundation's goal is to:

"provide children around the world with opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities."

Recently, OLPC started its Give One Get One (G1G1) program. You pay $400 for two laptops, one of which will be sent to benefit a child in one of the OLPC target areas in the world, and the other XO is sent you. In the US, you can take a charity deduction for about half this amount, plus, T-Mobile is offering a one year subscription to its T-Mobile Hotspots.

We ordered an XO laptop at the beginning of the G1G1 program and just got it last week. We're very impressed with it! It may look and feel a little like a toy, but it's a fully functional laptop with wireless connectivity and a surprising amount of power for the size and price. And we feel good about contributing a laptop to a child who can benefit from it.

If you're interested in the G1G1 program, hurry, as the program ends on December 31, 2007!

The World of Home Theater abbreviations

After years of wanting a large-screen high-definition television (HDTV), we recently purchased an HDTV, a receiver/DVD/speaker system, and a media center computer. As I did the product and technology research, I was amazed at how many acronyms and abbreviations I encountered.

Here's a tour of some of the most common ones I ran across, from electronics, the TV/HDTV world, and the Sony-specific ones related to the equipment I got.

Television, computers, and general: CATV, DVD, DVI, DVR, FCC, JPEG, LCD, MP3, NTSC, OSD, PAL, PC, PCM, QAM, RGB, SAP, VESA

HDTV, Home Theater, and audio: BD, DBFB, DRC, DTS, HD-DVD, HDCP, HDMI, HDTV, HTIB, HTPC, PBC

Sony specific: ACE, DCAC

Although I work with acronyms and abbreviations all day, I wasn't familiar with many of these! Fortunately, Acronym Finder knew what they meant!

No Name-Calling Week (NNCW), January 22-26, 2007, is an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities.

Inspired by a young adult novel entitled "The Misfits" by author, James Howe, the No Name-Calling Week Coalition was created by Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, and consists of over 40 national partner organizations. GLSEN first organized the No Name-Calling Week in schools across the nation during 2004.

No Name-Calling Week 2007 is made possible, in large part, by a generous grant from Cisco Systems.

For more information visit the NNCW website at http://www.nonamecallingweek.org/

New acronym: Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) program

The new Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered programme (EDGE) takes an interesting approach to conservation. EDGE species are both Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered. Every mammal species has been scored according to the amount of unique evolutionary history it represents, and its conservation status according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

From this scoring system, EDGE produced a Top 100 EDGE mammals list. Amazingly, about two-thirds of these, including the number one listed Yangtze River dolphin, are receiving little or no conservation attention!

Started in January 2007 by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), EDGE aims to conserve the world's most Evolutionarily Distinct and
Globally Endangered species by implementing the research and conservation actions needed to secure their future.

The EDGE website has a blog, downloadable database of endangered species, and advanced search features. You can learn more here: http://www.edgeofexistence.org/home.asp

Unfortunate Acronyms in the News

We're always amazed (and often amused) at how often an unfortunate acronym is developed to refer to a concept or organization.

Last month, the US organization National Association of Local Government Auditors (NALGA), based in Lexington, Kentucky, decided to change its name to Association of Local Government Auditors (ALGA). Why the change? Well, "nalga" in Spanish means "butt" or "rump" which made the organization the butt (pun intended) of too many jokes and pranks. If this wasn't bad enough, the organization only owned the .org version of the NALGA domain name. Someone else owns the .com version of the site, and it has nothing to do with government auditors! You can read more at ALGA's new website, http://www.governmentauditors.org/

In another recent acronym incident, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) is trying to revoke the vanity plate owned by 74 year old Pat Niple. For the last 10 years, her plate read "NWTF" which referred to her business, Northwood Tree Farm. The Ohio BMV is apparently saying she can't use NWTF because it could be Internet/chat slang for "Now What the F***"! Never mind that NWTF also refers to "National Wild Turkey Federation" and has over a dozen other perfectly legitimate meanings. There is an BMV appeal process, so it will be interesting to see if she wins.

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April is National Poetry Month (NPM)

Each year in April, the Academy of American Poets (AAP) sponsors National Poetry Month (NPM), our featured abbreviation.

The AAP's FAQ about NPM explains:

"What is National Poetry Month? National Poetry Month was established by the Academy of American Poets as a month-long, national celebration of poetry. The concept was to increase the attention paid-by individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our poetic heritage, and to poetry books and magazines. In the end, we hoped to achieve an increase in the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture. National Poetry Month has been successful beyond all anticipation and has grown over the years into the largest literary celebration in the world."

As I surfed the AAP's website, I was surprised that even a poetry organization has so many of its own acronyms: AAP, NPM, APLP, POTD

Technorati tags: abbreviations, acronyms, poetry, poems, Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month

Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR)

FTIR is one of those science abbreviations that doesn't really convey what it's about, but it turns out to be very interesting. FTIR stands for Frustrated Total Internal Reflection and it's a touch-sensing technique used in biometric applications like fingerprint image acquisition.

In this case, we learned that FTIR technology is being used to develop multi-touch interaction with a graphical display system. Touch-screen systems we've seen pretty much only allow you to point and tap with a single finger or stylus to do something. But multi-touch interaction allows the user to use more than one finger at a time so that a user could use several fingers on one hand or even multiple fingers using both hands!

Jefferson Han, at the Media Research Laboratory in New York University's Department of Computer Science has a page which illustrates the FTIR technique and another page with demo images and video of FTIR displays and applications in action. Very cool stuff.

This reminds me of some of the user interface concepts we saw in the 2002 movie Minority Report. I wonder how long it will take for this technology to reach consumers. I'm ready now!

Louisville Technology Acronym Bee (LTAB)

Recently we were excited to learn of a very cool fund-raising event for the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), based in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Peak 10 Louisville Technology Acronym Bee (LTAB) is similar to the numerous successful corporate spelling bees held in communities around the nation every year. However, instead of spelling obscure words, adults participating in LTAB define obscure technology acronyms! The participants are made up of corporate teams and compete for a winning title, prizes, the LTAB Champion Trophy Cup and bragging rights. All of the proceeds will benefit Louisville’s own nationally recognized National Center for Family Literacy.

The Third Annual Peak 10 LTAB was held on October 20th at Louisville Slugger Field. More than 200 peole attended the event that raised more than $15,000 for the National Center for Family Literacy. For the third year in a row, Appriss Inc. won the competition against a field of 21 corporate teams. Click here for a photo.

We're very interested in becoming a sponsor for this event in 2006. Watch this space!

Another new spam-related acronym: Splog

There's a new variation of spam appearing, called splog. Splogs are blogs created purely to promote a product or website, in other words, spam.

I noticed this the very first time I used Google's relatively new Blog Search. I got hundreds of hits from "blogs" that were nothing more than scraped content published in a blog. This will be a very serious problem for blog application providers, blog publishers and blog search engines. Google's own free Blogger/BlogSpot has become a haven for spammers who use blogs for spamming purposes. Google's Blogger API made it possible for spammers to recently create 13,000 splogs, creating huge problems for blogosphere search engines and users alike.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal about splog: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

Here's another recent article from eWEEK: Blog Spammers Take Aim at Google

The other spam-related problem with regard to blogs is the link spam or comment spam; visitors (or bots) leaving spam comments or links on legitimate blogs.

The term is described in more detail at Wikipedia

Seen a UFO lately?

OK, who hasn't heard of UFO meaning Unidentified Flying Object? We just added a new definition for UFO today. In this case UFO stands for United Flying Octogenarians.

UFO is a national organization of pilots in their eighties. The organization was started in California in 1982 with 16 charter members, who, unfortunately are no longer with us. The group currently has almost 500 members all over the US, but also has members in Canada and several other countries. There is also a growing number of women in the group. The oldest actively flying member will turn 100 in December 2005!

UFO is now informally run by retired Air Force member Herbert Sloane in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Sloane estimates that the total number of flying hours of all members of UFO is probably over 500,000 hours. Now that's what I call experience!

UFO has a brand new website, but as I write this, it doesn't have any content yet. You can visit United Flying Octogenarians at http://www.unitedflyingoctogenarians.org/

TWAIN: when an acronym isn't an acronym...

If you've ever used a scanner with your computer you've probably heard of TWAIN. TWAIN is an image capture API (Application Programming Interface) for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems.

Most people assume that TWAIN is just another technology acronym, but according to the TWAIN Working Group's FAQ, TWAIN isn't an acronym:

Question: What is TWAIN an acronym for?

Answer: An image capture API for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. The standard was first released in 1992, and is currently ratified at version 1.9 as of January 2000. TWAIN is typically used as an interface between image processing software and a scanner or digital camera.

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard."

You'll find TWAIN defined on Acronym Finder with an annotation that it's not an acronym. You can read more about TWAIN, at the TWAIN Working Group's website.

At last there is HOPE

We've just added a new definition for HOPE to the Acronym Finder database: HUMMER Owners Prepared for Emergencies.

The HOPE program is a partnership/agreement between the national HUMMER Club, Inc. and the American Red Cross. Qualified Hummer owners can get a certification as Red Cross volunteers who can be deployed by the local chapters of Red Cross to drive supplies and Red Cross personnel into disaster areas where other vehicles might not be able to reach.

Read more about it at HOPE's website. And here is an American Red Cross press release on the HOPE program.

Folding At Home (FAH)

Among other things, FAH stands for "Folding At Home." Folding At Home is Stanford University's distributed computing project to study and understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

Users download and install a client program which runs on their computer when it's idle. When the program finishes a small "work unit" the results are returned to the FAH servers. So far, almost 500,000 users have donated processing time for almost 1.4 million CPUs, far more computing power than the largest supercomputer.

If your computer sits idle a lot, you should consider running FAH, as this is a huge benefit to scientific understanding which will certainly lead to cures for major diseases.

You can get more information about FAH and protein folding here: http://folding.stanford.edu/

Jules' Undersea Lodge (JUL)

JUL stands for the Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida.

It has been featured on "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous", in "Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Issue", in countless magazines and newspapers, and on every major television network in the world.

For the first time in history an authentic underwater research habitat is open to the average person--sport divers and even those who have never before dived. And although Jules' still functions as a research lab, you will be pleased to know that it has air-conditioning, hot showers, stereo music, VCR's, a fully stocked galley, and unlimited diving for certified divers!

Visit Innerspace and experience what was once only a dream of science fiction writers: living within the sea! In fact, Jules' Undersea Lodge is named after Jules Verne, and our goal is to be sure that Mr. Verne would be proud.

Read more about it here.