Slashback: Pronouns, Acronyms, Abbreviations

Slashback tonight brings you updates on: that silly plastic barcode scanner by that company, what's-it-called ... oh yeah, "Digital Convergence;" how to spread your genetic code the polite way; and why you won't be voting on an MS-Dell-Unisys machine unless things change from vapor to reality, soon.

Aren't you ever gonna get that thing declawed? AnonymousCowhand pointed to this NYTimes story on the CueCat. The article is a nice overview of the way the little-bar-code-reader-that-could (that could track users by serial number, that is) came to be mailed out to hundreds of thousands of people, and how successful it's been. A hint: " After partners like Forbes, Wired and other publishers distributed the CueCat device to several million subscribers, the technology was criticized by reviewers and consumers for being impractical and of limited benefit."

I'd be nearly as willing to vote with a fake machine ... Anonymous Coward writes "Forbes reports that the Microsoft, Unisys, & Dell plan to build a new voting solution is 'phony'. A Microsoft spokesman denies that the company is part of such a partnership."

My favorite line in a long time is this one: "When Unisys says it's "offering a fully integrated approach to election management," it does not mean it has something specific to offer." Well, then, just so that's clear.

Like, OMG! Chuck Borromeo wrote in response to the story that hemos posted the other day about XML, bioinformatics, and markup languages for genetic information.

He says: "I noticed your posting on Slashdot. You're right, XML will be very helpful in the Bioinformatics field. However, there is another gene expression XML DTD in the works. It's being proposed by an OMG group called MGED (www.mged.org). GEML is proprietary and is being supported by its creator Rosetta Pharmaceuticals. MGED is going to become an OMG standard and already enjoys support and contributions from a wide variety of academic and industrial leaders."

Another installment in the reprint of Jon Katz' series of columns, emails and comments is online for your perusal.

Comments

::c:u:e:c:a:t:: voting

[micahjd]

We could make everybody happy and just use cuecats for electronic voting!

Voting solution.

[Lover's Arrival, The]

The problem with the voting system at the last election was that it was too technical already. Why does America have a penchant for complicating the simple? All that is needed is a simple pencil, piece of paper and a bunch of people to count the votes.

I am so glad the the rumours of Microsoft and Dell developing a new voting machine are false. It would doubtless have been even more of a disaster than the present one.

Voting procedures should be as simple as possible, like the UKian model, in order to make it as resistant to fraud as possible.

Complexity breeds error and fraud. Technical types tend to forget that.

:Cuecat just hasn't found its market yet

[Chuck Flynn]

Just give them some time. They spent two years researching and designing one of the more innovative products out there, and so they've run into a few snags. Nothing big, really. They'll bounce back, sooner than you can say ":Cuecat". Why have they failed so far? Not enough punctuation.

My advice to :cue:cat is to increase the number of colons (":"). One thing you learn in business school is that when you're going for an angle with a marketing campaign, you can't hammer home your main point enough. You have to try harder. Most people don't even notice the colons when they first look at ":CueCat", and far fewer remember to include them when discussing the product among friends. It's a losing proposition, I'm afraid.

That's why they need to have more colons. They shouldn't stop until their name at least looks like ":::c:u:e:c:a:t::". They should also get a trademark on "cuecat" without the colons and start harassing people who misuse it instead of ":CueCat". They also have to dump cuecat.com as their homepage, because it unfortunately reinforces the "no colon" mistake. Problems like these aren't often solved so easily. :CRQ should consider themselves lucky.

XML is not an acronym.

[jelwell]

XML is an initialism.

An acronym is a word formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term.

An initialism is not a word at all, but the intial letter or letters of a compound term.

The easiest way to remember this is:
radar is an acronym, you say "ray-dar" you don't prounounce out the letters "r-ay-dee-ay-r".

If you pronounce out all the letters, it's an initialism, not a acronym. like IBM is an initialism - although I don't think IBM stands for International Business Machine anymore...

OK - is both!! Check your OED. :)
Joseph Elwell.