Having a little debate here at work... What is the correct way to pluralize an acronym where the last initial represents a word that itself is a plural / ends with a &quot;s&quot; ? Our specific example, for context: COW (Cellular On Wheels). If it makes a difference, we are saying this acronym as the word &quot;cow&quot;, not C.O.W. Is it COWs? or just COW? My thought is it should be COWs. The counter point is that this would then make it Cellular On Wheelss (double s)
In computer science we discuss an abstract machine called a "deterministic finite automaton". The standard initialism for this term is "DFA". This makes sense in the singular usage of the initialism.  However, the pluralization of the word "automaton" is "automata". One speaks of "an automaton" or "many automata". Consequently, it seems intuitive to form an initialism of the phrase "deterministic finite automata" as "DFA".   This does not seem correct, as "DFA" could be either plural or singular. On the other hand, "DFAs" also does not seem correct because it would seem to expand to "deterministic finite automatons", a phrase which no self-respecting computer scientist would ever utter.   This appears to be a duplicate of the question here   But that question was never clearly resolved. What to do?
How can I recover photo files from a memory card with a corrupt filesystem? My question is not about (pseudo) philosophical debate; it concerns mathematical operations and experimental facts.  What is an observer? What are the conditions required to be qualified of observer, both mathematically and experimentally? Is Cursed Child canon to the original story? From what I am hearing the stage-play called The Cursed Child is based on the characters from the Harry Potter series. It is set 19 years from the end of Deathly Hallows (i.e. When Harry's children are starting their time at Hogwarts).   I have also seen the J.K. Rowling has had at least some involvement and been on the set and a part of rehearsals, etc.   My question is has there been a statement given relating to the canon of the stage play to original series? If so, would any conflicting information be considered a retcon?  Related:  - but not dupe because this asking about in-universe information. I know classical physics, quantum mechanics, special relativity, and basic nuclear physics. I would like to get into some particle physics.   Where can I find a good introduction? It might be useful to segment books by whether they require quantum field theory or not. Weighting features prior to SVM Debug JavaScript within IE6 How to enable assembly bind failure logging (Fusion) in .NET How do I enable assembly bind failure logging (Fusion) in .NET? update-alternatives --install says it needs link name path priority? I typed:  sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/lib/jvm/ jdk1.8.0/bin/java" 1   It's says alternatives --install needs link name path priority How can light be called electromagnetic if it doesn't appear to be electric nor magnetic?  If I go out to the sunlight, magnets aren't affected (or don't seem to be).  And there is no transfer of electric charge/electrons (as there is in AC/DC current in space).   In particular, the  (which light is supposed to be composed of) have no electric charge (nor do they have ).   I'm looking for an explanation that can be appreciated by the average non-physicist Joe. When documenting a style file, it would be nice to be able to easily put side by side different examples of code, side-by-side with the output they produce.  What recommendations to people have to do this efficiently, and &aelig;sthetically? Note: This was posted when I was starting out C#. With 2014 knowledge, I can truly say that auto-properties are among the best things that ever happened to the C# language.  I am used to create my properties in C# using a private and a public field:  private string title; public string Title {     get { return title;  }     set { title = value;  } }   Now, with  3.0, we got auto-properties:  public string Title { get; set; }   I know this is more a philosophical/subjective questions, but is there any reason to use these auto-properties except from saving five lines of code for each field? My personal gripe is that those properties are hiding stuff from me, and I am not a big fan of black magic.  In fact, the hidden private field does not even show up in the debugger, which is OK given the fact that the get/set functions do nothing. But when I want to actually implement some getter/setter logic, I have to use the private/public pair anyway.  I see the benefit that I save a lot of code (one vs six lines) without losing the ability to change the getter/setter logic later, but then again I can already do that by simply declaring a public field "Public string Title" without the need of the { get; set; } block, thus even saving more code.  So, what am I missing here? Why would anyone actually want to use auto-properties? Convert from MySQL datetime to another format with PHP I have a datetime column in MySQL.   How can I convert it to the display as mm/dd/yy H:M (AM/PM) using PHP? Convert binary to ASCII and vice versa How Triangle Law and Parallelogram law of addition of Vectors are different?Ain't they.  Please don't tell me the things written in book......give me the appropriate reason.And how do i distinguish between the two while adding vectors,what am i trying to say is i get really confused where to use parallelogram law and where triangle law  P.s:my basics are really weak though!May be the question might not be right I am trying to find all the Sylow 2 subgroups of S4 using Sylow’s theorems. Now, I know that a Sylow 2 subgroup of S4 has size 8, and that there are either 1 or 3 of them (as the number of of Sylow 2-subgroups has form 1+2k and divides 3, the index).  Now my lecturer states “stabilisers of the 3 different bisections of {1,2,3,4} yield 3 distinct Sylow 2 subgroups”  Now my questions are:  1) What does it mean by stabilisers of 3 different bijections of {1,2,3,4}? Is that to say the elements of S4 which send {1,2} and {3,4} to {1,2},{3,4} i.e. by (12)(34)?  2) How does he know that there are 8 elements of this set? Perhaps this will become clearer after the 1st question is answered.  Many thanks, group theory is hard. What is the best way to clean lenses and filters? After removing dust with an air pomp and a brush, what are you using to remove stains from the lens and filters?  So far I'm using the liquid from a Giotto's CL 1002 cleaning kit for the lens, but I'm not sure what should I use for the filters, and if there is some better alternative.  Also, what kind of brushes are recommended? I am curious about the proof of these two integrations. It would be great if you could point me in the right direction : $ \int{e^{ax}\cos({bx})dx}= \dfrac{e^{ax}}{a^{2}+b^{2}}[a\cos(bx)+b\sin(bx)] + C $ &amp; $ \int{e^{ax}\sin({bx})dx}= \dfrac{e^{ax}}{a^{2}+b^{2}}[a\sin(bx)-b\cos(bx)] + C $ How do I transcode a Javascript string to ISO-8859-1? What is the volatile keyword useful for? Print programs with its proper syntax I have defined my own language whose syntax is very close to the one of Pascal. I would like to type the following program for instance. Many people use the packages algorithmicx or algorithm2e to print programs, but it seems that we have to use their specific keywords of its syntax like procedure, end while.  I just want to indent spaces when needed, and bold some words when I want (sorry that I could not bold letters in the following figure). Do I have to use  texttt for each line? Also, with verbatim, I could not bold words...  Also, as the program is not large, I would need to put it on the left side of the page, and leave space for some explanasion text on its right hand side. So I  guss I need to get them all together, and use multicols.  Could anyone help?  program test                                      some text here var   i : integer;                                    ...    b : boolean; begin    i := 1;                                        ...    b := true;    while i &lt; 15 do       i := i  + 1;       b := not b                                  some text here    od end   Edit1: Following @Werner's tabbing solution, I have made the code a minipage:  \begin{minipage}[t]{0.48\linewidth}% \begin{tabbing} Werner's solution \end{tabbing} \end{minipage}\hfill \begin{minipage}[t]{0.48\linewidth} a paragraph \end{minipage}   Actually as the code shows, I want the texts to be another separated minipage on the right hand side of the code. I have then 2 questions:   is it reasonable to make 0.48\linewidth instead of 0.5\linewidth? 0.48\linewidth is a conventional choice? is it possible to make a frame around the code, and use \caption and \label to make it a reference (I prefer figures)?