Word: acronymically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trial on charges of setting fire to a foster home for infants. In tiny Louisa, Ky., it is the battle cry against a proposed hazardous-waste incinerator. It has cropped up in Berkeley, where residents banded together to keep out a drop-in center for the emotionally disturbed. The acronym stands for "not in my backyard," and it symbolizes a perverse form of antisocial activism. "Everybody says, 'Take care of the homeless, take care of the boarder babies,' " says New York City Mayor Edward Koch. "But when you need a facility, they say, 'Not in my backyard...
Speed and power are what distinguish supercomputers from their humbler cousins. In the early days of the industry, speed was measured in thousands of FLOPS, an acronym for floating-point operations per second, in which the decimal point is moved in very large and small numbers. Today's largest machines are measured in gigaFLOPS, or billions of operations a second. Tomorrow's will be measured in teraFLOPS, trillions of operations a second. A single supercomputer going at teraFLOPS speed will have the power of 10 million personal computers working at full throttle...
...decision. Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, the Administration's most forceful and persistent skeptic about traditional arms control, would have preferred to let the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) negotiations languish -- the same treatment that was already in store for that other unwelcome legacy with the better-known acronym SALT (for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). Perle doubted that the negotiating track would lead anywhere and that the West Europeans would have the gumption to follow through on deployment of the U.S. missiles...
Outside his native France, Novelist Georges Perec (1936-82) was known chiefly as a member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised...
...dynamism is drawn from a spirit of glasnost, or openness, that preceded the revolution Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev is striving to bring to Soviet society. Moscow's venerable Institute of Space Research (known as IKI, its Russian acronym) now bustles with the comings and goings of an increasingly youthful, independent-minded cadre of Soviet space specialists. And along with them are growing numbers of foreign colleagues, many of whom have been invited to add their experiments to Soviet space missions. Visiting scientists need only a pass to wander the halls freely...