The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)

[vinny11950]

They have a cool interactive map of ongoing projects. If you want to geek out:

(broken link removed)

Or you can read about the projects in more detail:

(broken link removed)

Anyway, enjoy it while you can, cause it's probably going to go away, and the promise of all the discoveries that would have been made.

 

[iamlucky13]

Ok, the agency in general is fine, but their budget for coming up with clever acronyms needs to be cut. The consistency of relevance acronyms to the work is unbelievable.

 

[Sprinter]

Ok, the agency in general is fine, but their budget for coming up with clever acronyms needs to be cut. The consistency of relevance acronyms to the work is unbelievable.

Acronyms and buzzwords are here to stay but boy is it hard to keep up with them sometimes. And no doubt they are often way overdone and unnecessary. Those within a particular project or industry have a chance, but they do leave out a lot of public, and it's public money they need to attract. It's all I could do to keep up with those used in my field which was heavily acronymed and buzzworded (if that's a word). Sometimes I think it's a way to separate the insiders from the outsiders, to feel a bit superior, but often just alienate the folks they need to educate the most.

They do serve a purpose, of course, for those within a project, but I can't count the number of professionals within my industry that have had to have some terms explained even though their positions are closely related. I guess it's just a result of growing specialization, but I do wish they were a bit more self explanatory and obvious as to their meaning.

Now that I'm retired, it's much harder to keep up, but that's my problem...

 

[iamlucky13]

Acronyms and buzzwords are here to stay but boy is it hard to keep up with them sometimes. And no doubt they are often way overdone and unnecessary.

I'm just poking fun at them. In some groups, there seems to be a compulsive need to have an acronym for a project.

I'm digging through a pile of aerospace standards at work right now. They range from having multiple pages of acronyms defined for use in the following sections, so that it's almost impossible to keep track of all of them, to having none of the acronyms they use defined, so I have to look in other documents for hints what they might be.