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#terminology — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #terminology, aggregated by home.social.

  1. #Vocabulary selection is important. Sometimes, a change of #terminology is idiotic at best. For example, we abolished #homelessness, now we only have #unhoused. Sorry, WTF? Changing from prostitute to sex-worker, that makes sense, as prostitution has always been tied to bad morals and judgement. Here using the slur argument has merit. I've not really been convinced with the r-word, but for those called such derogitorially, for them the change was #empowering, so I'm happy to run with it. /1

  2. To use or not to use the term "#megafire"? 🔥

    After Linley et al. (2022) suggested a standardized definition (> 10,000 ha extent) to reduce ambiguity, a new perspective by Stoof et al. (2023) recommends not using the term at all in science:
    onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10

    I'm a fan of clear definitions and standardization of #terminology, but at the same time also wondering if we really need a special term for fires of a certain extent?

    @wildfirescience @paleofire @ecology #wildfire #wildfires

  3. #NISO just released the first version of its standardized #terminology for #PeerReview.
    groups.niso.org/higherlogic/ws

    Announcement
    niso.org/standards-committees/

    "Suggestions for improving this standard are welcome. They should be sent to the National Information Standards Organization…via email at <[email protected]>."

    #standards

  4. The name for the algebraic structure consisting of a set \(A\) equipped with a binary operation \(f\colon A^2\to A\) which is not assumed to be commutative, associative, etc. has an interesting history. As far as I can tell, this sort of algebra was originally known as a "groupoid", and you can find recent literature using the term in that way. However, Nicolas Bourbaki called a set with a single binary operation a "magma" in his Éléments de mathématique and this name came to be used when there might be confusion with the newer topological use of "groupoid" to mean a category whose morphisms are all invertible. A third contender is "binar". I don't know the history of this one but it seems reasonable to me.

    I prefer "magma" myself. I don't know what a "lava" or a "volcano" should be nor have I had the audacity to try to name something like this in the literature. One reason I prefer "magma" is that I can talk about a set \(A\) equipped with a single \(n\)-ary operation \(f\colon A^n\to A\) as an "\(n\)-ary magma" (or just "\(n\)-magma" or even "magma").

    #algebra #UniversalAlgebra #topology #bourbaki #terminology