{"id":218291,"date":"2009-12-16T23:34:20","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T04:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.seliger.com\/?p=501"},"modified":"2009-12-16T23:34:20","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T04:34:20","slug":"acronym-confusion-at-the-department-of-education-does-i3-mean-%e2%80%9cinnovation-through-institutional-integration%e2%80%9d-or-%e2%80%9cinvesting-in-innovation-fund%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218291","title":{"rendered":"Acronym Confusion at the Department of Education: Does i3 Mean \u201cInnovation through Institutional Integration\u201d or \u201cInvesting in Innovation Fund?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The &#8220;<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nsf.gov\/pubs\/2010\/nsf10514\/nsf10514.htm\">Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program<\/a><\/strong>&#8221; program solicitation says that it&#8217;s part of the &#8220;Institutional Integration (I3)&#8221; program, which immediately made me think of the i3 programs that Isaac <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.seliger.com\/2009\/11\/08\/same-as-it-ever-was-investing\/\">wrote about here<\/a>. I sent him an e-mail saying, &#8220;the i3 RFPs are starting to be released!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Not so fast, young Skywalker,&#8221; he replied (young Skywalker is how the Emperor and Darth Vader refer to Luke in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0086190\/quotes\">Star Wars: Episode VI \u2014 Return of the Jedi<\/a><\/em>): the Department of Education must be running out of acronyms, because <strong>I<\/strong>3 is different from <strong>i<\/strong>3. The first stands for &#8220;Innovation through Institutional Integration,&#8221; while the second stands for &#8220;Investing in Innovation Fund.&#8221; The only difference between the two acronyms is the capitalization of the letter &#8220;i.&#8221; Maybe someone is taking lessons from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Imac\">Steve Jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t be the only person who is going to be confused, given the similarity. Since millions of potential acronyms exist out there, how does the Department of Education come up with two nearly identical acronyms for programs that <em>already<\/em> sound similar? If they must recycle an acronym, they should pick <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Seven_Days_in_May\">ECOMCOM<\/a> (Emergency Communications Control), the central mystery in the pretty good 1964 film, <em>Seven Days in May<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the Department of Education is using Unix-style case-sensitive acronyms, in which you have to pay attention to whether you&#8217;re getting a capital-I cubed or a lower-case-i cubed. As the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Filename\">Wikipedia entry on filenames says<\/a>, &#8220;In most file systems in Unix-like systems&#8230; upper-case and lower-case are considered different, so that files MyName and myname would be valid names for different files concurrently in the same directory.&#8221; When you&#8217;re thinking Department of Education, think <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unix\">Unix<\/a>, with all the user friendliness that entails. Consider this a public service announcement that clarifies the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The &#8220;Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program&#8221; program solicitation says that it&#8217;s part of the &#8220;Institutional Integration (I3)&#8221; program, which immediately made me think of the i3 programs that Isaac wrote about here. I sent him an e-mail saying, &#8220;the i3 RFPs are starting to be released!&#8221; &#8220;Not so fast, young Skywalker,&#8221; he replied (young Skywalker [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}