T-T-T-That\u27s All, Folks!

The May 1996 Word Ways described the results of a National Public Radio competition of December 1995 in which listeners were challenged to write grammatical and understandable sentences containing the same word four or more times in succession. Some of the most interesting entries were based on repeated thats; this article summarizes them. Four thats is relatively easy, as achieved by the following strategy

Lessons from the Field: Striving for Transformative Change at the Stuart Foundation

The Stuart Foundation's Child Welfare Program provides a compelling example of what can be accomplished by a foundation that has clear goals, coherent, well-implemented strategies, and relevant performance indicators. This case study describes how Stuart implements its strategy to achieve its goal to improve life outcomes for foster youth

Systemic Risk in the Financial System: Insights From Network Science

Analyzes systemic risk from the perspective of network structure and the connectivity links between actors. Explores how the markets' lack of robustness, the pattern of network links, and the lack of diversity in networks contributed to the crisis

Two New Transdeletion Pyramids

The August 1979 Word Ways article Word Roots and Branches showed how the 17-letter Websterian word ANTICEREMONIALIST could be successively transdeleted down to a single letter: remove E and rearrange the remaining 16 letters to obtain NONMATERIALISTIC, remove N and rearrange the remaining 15 letters to obtain RECITALIONALISM, and so on. Unfortunately, it was necessary to include one non-Websterian word, RECLAMATIONIST (used in 1946 Saturday Evening Post article), in the sequence

Superulltramegalosesquipedalia

Recently, Jeff Grant of Hastings, New Zealand supplied the editor with the full 3641-letter name of the protein Bovine Glutamate Dehydrogenase, as constructed from the amino acid residue sequence shown in The Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure (1973), Volume 5, Supplement 1, published by The National Biomedical Research Foundation. Although this word has been cited by the Guinness Book of Records since 1976 as the longest word known, it was never written out in full there, nor has it apparently been published anywhere else

What\u27s In a Name (Powhatan?)

The presidential primary season is in full swing; the various candidates have been analyzed to death. Yet, one aspect of this competition has been ignored - the subliminal message lurking in their names. Names don\u27t lie! Here\u27s an onomastic tour of the leaders as 2008 begins

Undominated Alphabetic Sequences

In past Word Ways articles, various authors have explored words which contain consecutive letters of the alphabet (1) in order and adjacent to each other, (2) in order but not necessarily adjacent, and (3) neither in order nor adjacent. The longer the consecutive-letter sequence that can be found in a word, the more noteworthy it is; for example, oveRSTUffed is clearly more interesting to the logologist than fiRST. I define alphabetic sequence as undominated if a word can be found containing all the letters in that sequence, but no word can be found containing any longer sequence including all the letters of the original one. Thus, RSTU is an undominated sequence for words with letters adjacent and in order, for there are no words containing the pentagrams QRSTU or RSTUV, the hexagrams PQRSTU, QRSTUV or RSTUVW, etc. On the other hand, RSTU is not an undominated sequence for words with letters neither in order nor adjacent; VenTRiloQUiST, for example, contains the more inclusive sequence QRSTUV

Shakespeare\u27s Pangrammatic Sonnet

Among Shakespeare\u27s 154 sonnets, is there one that contains every letter of the alphabet? The letter Z occurs in 14 sonnets, the letter Q in 44, the letter X in 43, the letter J in 50, and the letter K in 151. Assuming that the letters occur independently and at random - not unreasonable for rare letters - the probability that all five letters occur in a single sonnet is (.09)(.29)(.32)(.98) which equals 0.0023. The probability that all 154 sonnets fail to produce is equal to (1-.0023) raised to the 154th power, or 0.67, so the probability of at least one pangrammatic sonnet is 0.33