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posted by martyb on Friday August 14 2020, @10:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the IDK-AMIIC dept.

WTF, when will scientists learn to use fewer acronyms?:

Have you heard of DNA? It stands for Do Not Abbreviate apparently. Jokes aside, it's the most widely used acronym in scientific literature in the past 70 years, appearing more than 2.4 million times.

The short form of deoxyribonucleic acid is widely understood, but there are millions more acronyms (like WTF: water-soluble thiourea-formaldehyde) that are making science less useful and more complex for society, according to a new paper released by Australian researchers.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Professor Adrian Barnett and Dr. Zoe Doubleday from the University of South Australia (UniSA) have analyzed 24 million scientific article titles and 18 million abstracts between 1950 and 2019, looking for trends in acronym use.

[...] "For example, the acronym UA has 18 different meanings in medicine, and six of the 20 most widely used acronyms have multiple common meanings in health and medical literature," according to Dr. Zoe Doubleday.

Journal Reference:
Adrian Barnett, Zoe Doubleday. Meta-Research: The growth of acronyms in the scientific literature, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.60080)

Are scientific papers meant to communicate to a lay audience, or to other scientists?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday August 15 2020, @04:06PM (3 children)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 15 2020, @04:06PM (#1037122) Journal

    In the stone ages, before IDE, you had a separate controller eating up an expansion slot in the system that directly controlled the activities of the drive. A controller (reading terms: MFM, RLL, ST-506) would have drives it supported and those it didn't. Some you could input the specs on the drive in a custom fashion, other times you could use something close and maybe give up some of the storage theoretically available on the drive but still be usable.
     
    IDE integrated the drive controller electronics onto the drive (integrated drive electronics...) so that it was actually part of the drive assembly. No more issues with switching to a different brand controller in a different computer causing the drive to be unreadable, or compatibility issues between controller and drive. OTOH if the controller on an IDE drive died, you were pretty much SOL (I've heard it said you might be able to buy an identical drive and swap the electronics but have never tried it.)
     
    Imagine the first time for people seeing an IDE cable plug directly into the motherboard and all the WTF moments that caused :-)

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  • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday August 15 2020, @05:30PM (2 children)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 15 2020, @05:30PM (#1037156)

    But the first IDE drives would have plugged into an IDE expansion card instead.

    • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday August 18 2020, @04:48PM (1 child)

      by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 18 2020, @04:48PM (#1038411) Journal

      Host adapter, yah, they had less electronics on them though.

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      • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday August 18 2020, @08:56PM

        by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 18 2020, @08:56PM (#1038506)

        What I was trying to get at was that we didn't lauch straight into using IDE devices with Super-IO chips on the motherboard. There were Super-IO expansion cards in the intervening period, for a start.