The Foreign Service Journal, February 2011

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 1 ed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ( www.nytimes.com ). More encouragingly, a number of non- governmental organizations and think- tanks (but none representing conser- vative perspectives, such as the Her- itage Foundation or the American En- terprise Institute) have posted analyses and commentaries on their Web sites. Those reactions have generally been positive but qualified. Here is a small but hopefully representative sample. Paul O’Brien, OxfamAmerica’s vice president for policy and advocacy cam- paigns, called the document “com- pelling yet incomplete” ( www.oxfam america.org ). H e noted that it “leaves open the question of how the United States will resolve situations where diplomacy and development will re- quire different approaches and trade- offs.” For its part, the Stimson Center is- sued a detailed scorecard grading the QDDR’s recommendations by assign- ing up to four stars to each in terms of how well it implements the goals State set for the process when it began in 2009 ( www.stimson.org ). T he report gets top marks in several categories, but no stars at all in such areas as de- scribing “a budget planning process that would link decisions about fund- ing programs to decisions about per- sonnel and management,” prioritizing the two agencies’ roles and missions, and setting metrics for success. The Center for Strategic and Inter- national Studies offers a wealth of short but detailed commentaries on different facets of the report in what it calls a “Pivot Points” overview ( http:// csis.org ). Sixteen former and retired senior career officials from State and USAID, including Kenneth Yalowitz, director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dart- mouth College, have issued an assess- ment of their own ( http://dickey.dart mouth.edu ). The signatories strongly support the QDDR’s main themes, including the emphasis on building civilian power, and concur with Sec. Clinton and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the need to rebalance national security re- sources. But they caution that State and USAID are unlikely to escape growing pressures for federal budget tightening, and therefore urge more attention to planning for cuts and ed- ucating stakeholders on how such re- ductions could impair American interests. The final page of the report’s ex- ecutive summary acknowledges that “Execution is everything. We are fully aware of the reams of paper in published reports that simply gather dust on bookshelves across Washing- ton, D.C. Secretary Clinton is ada- mant that the QDDR not be one of those reports.” If the apathy sur- rounding the report’s issuance is any guide, living up to that commitment will be tremendously challenging, particularly given the recent shift on Capitol Hill. — Steven Alan Honley, Editor C Y B E R N O T E S Site of the Month: www.acronymfinder.com Now offering more than a million definitions, each sourced and fact-checked, AcronymFinder.com bills itself as the world’s largest and most comprehensive dic- tionary of acronyms, abbreviations and initialisms. (Acronyms are abbreviations formed by terms from a word or series of words that are pronounced as a word, such as radar or scuba. Initialisms are formed from the initial letter or letters of sev- eral words or parts of words, which are then pronounced letter by letter; e.g., BBC or CIA.) Users can also search for more than 850,000 U.S. and Canadian postal codes, and can nominate new acronyms and initialisms for inclusion. Whether you search by an acronym’s first letter or type it into the box, the results are filtered according to the following categories: Information Technology, Military & Government, Business & Finance, Science & Medicine, Organizations & Schools, and Slang & Pop Culture. “DCM,” for instance, can stand for any of 78 phrases, of which “Deputy Chief of Mission” ranks third (after “Dilated Cardiomyopathy” and “Dichloromethane”). To facilitate the process of finding an exact match, look first under the category most likely to fit the context. Writing on the site’s blog, founder Mike Molloy (who identifies himself as CAW: Chief Acronym Wrangler) comments that when he started in 1986 with a document listing about 1,000 definitions, he never imagined that, a quarter-century later, that 40-page document would have grown a thousand times as large. By the way, if you’re searching for a term no longer in common use, you may wish to visit AcronymFinder’s predecessor, AcronymAttic.com (www.acronymattic. com). Th e two sites use the same technology, but the three million terms and defi- nitions on the older site have not been verified and are no longer being updated. In addition, AcronymAttic is much more basic in the searches it can conduct and the data it can display for queries. — Steven Alan Honley, Editor