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Showing posts from January, 2018

notable nolo tangere

citogenesis (n.): the creation of a loop of citations for a baseless fact. Coined by Randall Munroe. Bradford Factor (HR n.): dumb measure of the burden of someone's sick days: (Number of occasions sick)^2 x Total days absent. Objectively badly calibrated: making an effort to come in to the office before full recovery is penalised compared to taking a whole week off. Apparently widely used in the UK. dehiring (HR n.): euphemism for being fired gently; colluding with an employee you want rid of, to get them hired somewhere else. outplacement (HR n.): another kind of gentle firing: in particular, outsourcing the firing process to a training-and-counselling company. scripta manent (Latin proverb): 'text remains'; can I get that in writing? music bread (Sardinian n.): sort of like a papadum or hardtack. sea-turtle (海龟) (n.): a Chinese graduate of foreign universities who returns to China. Pun on haigui, ocean-return .

notable nudniks

imeldific (adj.): ostentatious; extravagant to the point of vulgarity. Coined by Imelda Marcos, which tells you something about her relationship to herself. Professor the Lord (UK pron.): Honorific for someone who is both a university professor and a peer. cf. Professor the Lord Vice Chancellor Winston and Professor the Lord. privately rational (economics adj.): Tyler Cowen 's new term for economically rational. I think I'll taboo the latter from my speech, since the former is so much more evocative. senolytic (bio n.): agent that kills only old, malfunctioning, cancer-prone cells. Just beginning applications... Lit: age destroyer . elephant's breath (pretentious n.): beige-grey . do-calculus (stats/CS n.): Judea Pearl's causal identification framework; a symbolic logic for deriving all the observational implications of a model. turbocode (electronics n.): particularly good way of encoding signals to g

notable poland problems

Cassandrafreude (n): twisted pleasure in things going wrong exactly the way you predicted, when no one believed you. forensicist (med n.): criminal psychiatrist, involved in e.g. verifying insanity defences. Real lie detectors. egregore (occult n.): thought-form; Volksgeist ; manipulative hivemind; some sort of supernatural meme. Poland problem (social n.): having a polarised and unmanageable political culture despite good economic performance. (This is an exception to a very general socioeconomic rule.) Peculiar to Barkley Rosser but he makes up for the usage gap on his own . packed assembly (politics n.): an artificially-skewed parliament / voter base. Ballot stuffing via selection bias. cattle-cake (husbandry n.): animal feed block; mostly straw and yeast and other run-off. talcosis (med n.): inflammation of lungs from constant exposure to talc powder. BID (Latin): bis in die; twice a day. culture add (HR n.): Ne