scannerguy43
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i am new the boards,and i see a lot of people using accronyms when communicating.
is there a place posted to explain the accroynyms?
is there a place posted to explain the accroynyms?
accronyms
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Ch1ronTL34
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- Sep 16, 2006
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Do you have a specific acronym in mind? I know many of them.
TTYL (talk to you later)
TTYL (talk to you later)
scannerguy43
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what is fips codes?
scannerguy43 said:
disregard - I thought you meant general internet acronyms - I guess you were talking about radio-related
Mike
bobmich52
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Acronyms Can Be Used Many Ways & Interpreted As Such
A Way To Cuss & Not get Banned From A Site.
For Scanning, Ask Here.
For All Others, Ask Your Kids Etc When You See Them Texting Or When They Are Talking To Their Freinds.
The Acronyms They Use Sound Like Martian Langauge To Me lol
A Way To Cuss & Not get Banned From A Site.
For Scanning, Ask Here.
For All Others, Ask Your Kids Etc When You See Them Texting Or When They Are Talking To Their Freinds.
The Acronyms They Use Sound Like Martian Langauge To Me lol
People use acronyms far too often on this site. I've been around radios forty years now, in four different states, know more about government agencies than most, worked in wildland fire, worked in law enforcement, and interacted with a wide variety of professions and agencies. I can't always understand what people are trying to convey in their writing, and if I can't, beginners surely cannot. Using Google is not always effective for finding out the meaning of many acronyms as typing in a few letters and not words can sometimes yield bizarre results.
In technical, scientific, and journalistic writing an acronym must be explained before it is used throughout the remaining text. So, if I'm about to talk about some federal wildfire and natural resource agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and want to abbreviate the agency for the sake of brevity throughout the text I must write "Bureau of Land Management (BLM)" before I use the acronym "BLM." It is really frustrating to find an acronym in newspaper story that you can't find anywhere in the previous text as the explanation of it was edited out and nobody realized it needed to be replaced.
As for doing a Google search for the above example if I perform a search using the letters "BLM" I will get thousands of hits relevant to a certain type of Canon camera. When I'm reading a thread I don't always have time for doing searches in the effort to understand the cryptic text, so there are incidents where I just give up and move on to another thread. This is not a good situation considering the beginner audience we have here.
I was reading a post sometime in the last six months where people began to talk about the "BP" in their posts. This was in the Arizona forum and I could not think of what this acronym stood for. If some said is was a federal agency I probably could have figured it out, but without the context I just did not understand. I had to pose the question of what the "BP" was in a post and was told it stood for Border Patrol.
Radio Reference (RR) has become "the" site for people to use to get started in this hobby. One of the most difficult tasks anyone faces when starting a new hobby or profession is to learn the lingo. I suspect there have been some very frustrated beginners who don't understand what is being said and give up trying to learn anything about the hobby. For the good of the hobby I suggest that everyone follow the normal convention for acronyms I've covered here or not use them at all.
In technical, scientific, and journalistic writing an acronym must be explained before it is used throughout the remaining text. So, if I'm about to talk about some federal wildfire and natural resource agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and want to abbreviate the agency for the sake of brevity throughout the text I must write "Bureau of Land Management (BLM)" before I use the acronym "BLM." It is really frustrating to find an acronym in newspaper story that you can't find anywhere in the previous text as the explanation of it was edited out and nobody realized it needed to be replaced.
As for doing a Google search for the above example if I perform a search using the letters "BLM" I will get thousands of hits relevant to a certain type of Canon camera. When I'm reading a thread I don't always have time for doing searches in the effort to understand the cryptic text, so there are incidents where I just give up and move on to another thread. This is not a good situation considering the beginner audience we have here.
I was reading a post sometime in the last six months where people began to talk about the "BP" in their posts. This was in the Arizona forum and I could not think of what this acronym stood for. If some said is was a federal agency I probably could have figured it out, but without the context I just did not understand. I had to pose the question of what the "BP" was in a post and was told it stood for Border Patrol.
Radio Reference (RR) has become "the" site for people to use to get started in this hobby. One of the most difficult tasks anyone faces when starting a new hobby or profession is to learn the lingo. I suspect there have been some very frustrated beginners who don't understand what is being said and give up trying to learn anything about the hobby. For the good of the hobby I suggest that everyone follow the normal convention for acronyms I've covered here or not use them at all.
ka3jjz
Wiki Admin Emeritus
We have a glossary for terms used on this site - such a listing is never ever complete, but it's a good start - just click on the term you want defined. The link is:
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Category:RR_Glossary
Additions are always welcome and encouraged. Be specific about the terms you don't know and there's lots of folks here that can address them.
73s Mike
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Category:RR_Glossary
Additions are always welcome and encouraged. Be specific about the terms you don't know and there's lots of folks here that can address them.
73s Mike
slicerwizard
Member
We don't always write for beginners, nor IMO, should we. Many topics are not beginner material.Exsmokey said:
Google disagrees with you; the OP (yeah, right - I'm not defining that!) wanted to know what FIPS means:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=define:+FIPS
Again, Google disagrees with you:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=define:+BLM
Sink or swim (or ask questions / try Google!); don't expect to always be spoonfed. Tough love, baby...
n5tda
Member
slicerwizard said:We don't always write for beginners, nor IMO, should we. Many topics are not beginner material.
Google disagrees with you; the OP (yeah, right - I'm not defining that!) wanted to know what FIPS means:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=define:+FIPS
Again, Google disagrees with you:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=define:+BLM
Sink or swim (or ask questions / try Google!); don't expect to always be spoonfed. Tough love, baby...
Tough love is one thing. Being an a$$ is something altogether different. I have been in Law Enforcement for over 30yrs. Been around radios for almost as long and into computers since the late'80's and I still get confused about some of the acronyms used here and other places on the net. And answers like yours dont inspire me to ask questions when I can expect this type of response. Thanks for the help.
Slicerwizard,
Using the Google advanced search process I just completed a search using the term "BLM." I was wrong as the actual number is 6.6 million hits.
Defining an acronym the first time you use it in a body of text is taught in courses on journalism, science, and technical writing courses. I can vouch for that as I have taken college level courses in the latter two and have a Bachelor of Science degree in Forestry. In addition I was trained as an internal affairs investigator and took law enforcement training as well. In both training fields report writing is covered. In that training this same point was covered and when we wrote up training investigation reports using an acronym without defining it first resulted in the dreaded red pen note in the margin.
I also took a mini masters degree program at Clemson University about 10 years after getting my bachelor degree. The home project I completed was nearly as difficult as a master's thesis. Guess what, we had the same writing instructions. By the way, this course was the equivalent of about 20 semester units, with 15 of it in the classroom and 5 for the home project. My home project took just short of 400 hours to complete.
I wrote quite a bit during my career with the Forest Service including hundreds of responses to the public, congressional inquiry correspondence, environmental assessments, responses to decision appeals, and lengthy reports used by the U.S. Attorney's office and federal district courts. In addition I gave countless oral presentations to various groups, many of them quite large in venues such as issue workshops, to campers at organizational camps, schools, and evening campfire programs.
My nephew has a doctorate in biology and is a research professor at the Stanford University medical school, working out of the Hopkins Marine Center near Monterey, California. He is in a "publish or perish" type of position so he writes a lot of scientific papers. He follows the same writing convention I've outlined here and is audience is very well educated.
I only mention a portion of my background to validate what I have said about how writing is taught relative to the use of acronyms.
We need to be friendly to people entering the hobby. Any hobby that doesn't soon finds itself with a lot of long term participants with no new people entering it. I believe there are quite a few people, many of them with a great deal of experience in this hobby, with many who have spent time at the transmitting side of what scanners receive, who just back out of threads because they don't understand what is being said due to acronym use.
I'm not a name caller and like to stick to the facts, so I won't continue what the last poster started. In spite of that I inferred a rude or caustic tone in your post and would not label it a friendly post either. There are ways to disagree without such implications.
Using the Google advanced search process I just completed a search using the term "BLM." I was wrong as the actual number is 6.6 million hits.
Defining an acronym the first time you use it in a body of text is taught in courses on journalism, science, and technical writing courses. I can vouch for that as I have taken college level courses in the latter two and have a Bachelor of Science degree in Forestry. In addition I was trained as an internal affairs investigator and took law enforcement training as well. In both training fields report writing is covered. In that training this same point was covered and when we wrote up training investigation reports using an acronym without defining it first resulted in the dreaded red pen note in the margin.
I also took a mini masters degree program at Clemson University about 10 years after getting my bachelor degree. The home project I completed was nearly as difficult as a master's thesis. Guess what, we had the same writing instructions. By the way, this course was the equivalent of about 20 semester units, with 15 of it in the classroom and 5 for the home project. My home project took just short of 400 hours to complete.
I wrote quite a bit during my career with the Forest Service including hundreds of responses to the public, congressional inquiry correspondence, environmental assessments, responses to decision appeals, and lengthy reports used by the U.S. Attorney's office and federal district courts. In addition I gave countless oral presentations to various groups, many of them quite large in venues such as issue workshops, to campers at organizational camps, schools, and evening campfire programs.
My nephew has a doctorate in biology and is a research professor at the Stanford University medical school, working out of the Hopkins Marine Center near Monterey, California. He is in a "publish or perish" type of position so he writes a lot of scientific papers. He follows the same writing convention I've outlined here and is audience is very well educated.
I only mention a portion of my background to validate what I have said about how writing is taught relative to the use of acronyms.
We need to be friendly to people entering the hobby. Any hobby that doesn't soon finds itself with a lot of long term participants with no new people entering it. I believe there are quite a few people, many of them with a great deal of experience in this hobby, with many who have spent time at the transmitting side of what scanners receive, who just back out of threads because they don't understand what is being said due to acronym use.
I'm not a name caller and like to stick to the facts, so I won't continue what the last poster started. In spite of that I inferred a rude or caustic tone in your post and would not label it a friendly post either. There are ways to disagree without such implications.
slicerwizard
Member
Pardon me for pointing out that Real Life (tm) rarely hands you everything you want on a silver platter - e.g. when posters are discussing intermediate or advanced topics, it's unlikely that they're going to be thinking about catering to beginners. Some message boards have their forums split into beginner / intermediate / advanced topics, but we don't have that here, so one is bound to come across mystery acronyms.
When exploring a new hobby or field of endeavour, while one is free to ask these sorts of questions, one should seriously consider making the (minimal) effort to ask Google to check its impressive list of online dictionaries, glossaries, etc. You can learn far more, far faster than you can by asking a question and waiting for an answer. We are very fortunate to live in a time when so much organized information is at our fingertips - so how about taking advantage of it? Damn, I wish I could've found such detailed answers so quickly ten, twenty or thirty years ago.
When exploring a new hobby or field of endeavour, while one is free to ask these sorts of questions, one should seriously consider making the (minimal) effort to ask Google to check its impressive list of online dictionaries, glossaries, etc. You can learn far more, far faster than you can by asking a question and waiting for an answer. We are very fortunate to live in a time when so much organized information is at our fingertips - so how about taking advantage of it? Damn, I wish I could've found such detailed answers so quickly ten, twenty or thirty years ago.
n4yek
Member
Not everyone in the world lives off of Goggle. While I agree it is a useful tool to utilize, he justslicerwizard said:
asked a simple question. It doesn't matter if he is an experienced person on forum boards or not, what matters is we teach him so he can become a person to help contribute to the hobby.
Between acronyms, and text messaging shorthand/codes, it can get pretty frustrating at times. Working in IT, opens up a whole new world of acronyms!
slicerwizard
Member
Why are you using that search term? Are you looking for a definition of "BLM" or are you looking for all 6.6 million documents that contain the term "BLM"?Exsmokey said:
You write for your target audience. While discussing issues with the Uniden 396T and its decoding (or lack thereof) of the APCO-25 digital audio on the Ohio MARCS system, do we pause to throw in definitions for all those pesky acronyms? Of course not.
If you're writing a formal document or report, by all means, toss in those definitions if you feel so inclined. Hopefully, you'll only feel inclined to do so if your target audience isn't expected to already know those terms - cluttering up a document with redundant text isn't good form.
That's their choice to make. It seems like a silly choice to me when they can easily ask or look things up. It's not like anyone is going to bite their heads off for asking. They may get pointed at the wiki or Google, rather than being spoonfed an answer, but there's nothing rude about that.
If anything, my post reflected minor annoyance. IMO, you are muddying the waters here. You still want posts to be peppered with acronym definitions, even though far better approaches exist (like the RR wiki). You stated that terms (like BLM) can't be looked up on Google, so I posted a link that shows that that is simply not true. Despite that, it appears that you still make that claim.
There have been plenty of times that I have told a poster that they were asking a Google question,
like here: http://www.radioreference.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95952
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for life. Which makes more sense to you?
You can load up posts with definitions or you can show users how to exploit the wiki and Google. If the wiki is lacking, you can improve it. That puts the power to solve the problem in your hands; it doesn't get much better than that.
slicerwizard said:
As long as we are discussing annoyances, I will relate one of mine, and I don't have many. I am annoyed with the poor instructions available for everything related to computers. Microsoft's instructions are infamous for being very poor and confusing. Some other help or instructions are a little bit better but still pretty poor. Often these instructions are written with a lot of acronyms and jargon.
The computer people I've been around all seem to be very poor instructors and are not very verbally oriented. They tell you to figure it out yourself because they seem to lack the patience to pass on their knowledge. Last year I did a Google search using the exact wording presented by my computer in an error message. I clicked onto a couple of the hits and found a discussion of my issue in some computer forums. When I asked a question because I still didn't understand after reading the entire thread. The replies I received were rude and I was made fun of because my knowledge level was not up to par in their opinions.
I'm not judging computer people for their personality type as we need them to write code for software, otherwise we would not have it. I would like to see someone who is somewhat versed in computer code writing but also has very excellent writing skills as well. The computer expert and the strong writer need to sit down together to write the instructions so you get something that can be followed. Many people are turned off to furthering their computer skills due to poor instructions. Computer people need to remember that their jobs depend on having customers and if they discourage people from using their computers or software by not really caring about the way they instruct, then there will be fewer customers, which in turn results in fewer code writers.
It is obvious we have a different perspective on this issue. I spent an entire career helping people, both in the field, in an office or visitor center situation, and in group presentations (campfire talks). I enjoyed helping people whose outdoor skills and knowledge of natural resources were just a very small fraction of mine. I would gauge their knowledge and guide them toward obtaining further knowledge. When patrolling campgrounds I would, on occasion, help people set up some complex tents and awnings when I saw they were having a lot of difficulty, well beyond the average. I didn't just drive or walk past and tell them they have instructions and read them.
You relate the often quoted "teach a man to fish" phrase. Where we seem to differ in approach is how to teach. Your method seems to be here are the tools and instructions, you figure out how to fish. Mine is more a hands on style where you guide and create motivation for people to want to know even more. In accomplishing this you don't spoon feed people, you guide them past some difficulties they are having in certain areas. The field of interpretation (not translation of language) is one I spent a great deal of time learning and practicing, and my style is in line with what the field involves.
Not everyone has the time to learn a lot of jargon and acronyms. Reading some instructions is about as difficult as trying to understand a military person talk about their job. Its all jargon and acronyms and eventually you give up asking what they are saying because they just go on as if you are supposed to understand them. People just want to figure out how to use the device you have in front of you and really don't care how is was built. An understanding of how something is built and and operates seems to be a large component of computer instructions.
You have the opinion that I am muddying the waters and I have the opinion I'm trying to clear the waters. The field of technology instruction is very muddy right now and it could use some clearing up.
If I have annoyed you once again with this post, that is, and has not been, my intention. We have different backgrounds and our approaches are different. This is as it should be. The challenge of this is to get along with people that are different.
This is my last post on this subject.
landonjensen
Member
bobmich52 said:
Agreed !
Back to the original topic, if your refering to texting or online acronyms might wanna check this out: Click Here
http://www.aim.com/acronyms.adp
jhooten
Member
On reason you define your acronyms is they mean different things to different groups. Using BLM for am example, acronymfinder.com list 15 different defininitions and 158 for BP.
For the OP try this:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
For the OP try this:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
slicerwizard
Member
This thread http://www.radioreference.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90337 represents a small part of what I have contributed to this hobby. That package includes a 700 line instruction manual; I hope the 250 lines dedicated to acronyms and related terms meet with your approval.Exsmokey said:
And then there's http://home.ica.net/~phoenix/wap/slicer.htm with fishing instructions here http://home.ica.net/~phoenix/wap/sl-doc.htm
Other bits are here http://home.ica.net/~phoenix/wap/BC246T/ and here http://home.ica.net/~phoenix/wap/Fleetnet/
Of course, the list wouldn't be complete without http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TRUNK88/
That's some of what I've done. I wouldn't characterize it as a "you figure it out" approach.
You've written a great deal about what others should be doing to promote this hobby, so what about you? You clearly have the writing skills (spelling, grammar, etc.) and the brains to get involved in something like wiki development. So will you step up to the plate? That's a friendly "put your money where your mouth is" challenge.
Seriously, that's not a dig - as you said, software developers need good technical writers - well so does RadioReference and IMO you've got what it takes.
Not in the least.
One can provide fishing instructions; that's all some people need.
For others who have at least tried to fish, one can provide hands on training.
And then there are those who make little to no effort to learn and expect someone else to do their fishing for them. I don't play that game. That's my approach. That's tough love.
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