[Nipy-devel] How to capitalize NIPY?

[Souheil Inati]

Dear Jarrod,

I agree wholeheartedly with you on this, and being american I would  
go with NIPY rather than Nipy.

I would say this will be an uphill battle.  I keep trying to get  
everyone around me to change from fMRI to FMRI, to no avail.  I find  
fMRI to be incredibly pretentious.  It has also spawned a whole slew  
of other lame pseudo-acronyms such as phMRI and so on.

The whole MR community is obsessed with generating acronyms for pulse  
sequences and image reconstruction algorithms, here's a little list  
of things you may have heard of:  SMASH, SENSE, GRAPPA, FISP, RAGE,  
SPGR, FLASH.  And their children: MP-RAGE, TrueFISP, TurboFLASH,  
mSENSE, ... UGH!

Of course the MRI people are just copying the NMR people, who over  
the years have come up with some that are actually somewhat funny:
-Insensitive Nuclei Enhanced by Polarization Transfer (INEPT)
-Combined Rotation And Multiple Pulse Spectroscopy (CRAMPS)
-HOmonucleaR ROtary Resonance (HORROR)
-COrrelation SpectroscopY (COSY)
-Nuclear Overhauser Effect SpectroscopY (NOESY)

and my favorite of course is this one:  "Proton-Enhanced Nuclear  
Induction Spectroscopy: A Method for High Resolution NMR of Dilute  
Spins in Solids"  Pines, Gibby and Waugh, J. Chem. Phys. 56 (1972).   
This is a nearly unusable acronym, but actually quite a powerful NMR  
technique.

-Souheil

On Mar 4, 2007, at 3:48 AM, Jarrod Millman wrote:

> !!WARNING!!
> The following is pedantic.  Sorry.
> !!ENDWARNING!!
>
> Hey,
>
> Given the amount of time I spend writing about NIPY (mostly grants), I
> can't help but think about how we should capitalize the letters of the
> acronym.  I tend to write NIPY with all capital letters, but I think
> almost everyone else writes NiPy using camelcase capitalization.  I
> will try and make my case and if you aren't convinced, I will start
> using NiPy as well.
>
> 1. Most wikis recognize NiPy as a wiki word.  This leads to a
> proliferation of webpages (or at least potential pages that someone
> may feel compelled to populate).  On our trac site we have:
> http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki
> http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki/AboutNiPy
> http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki/NiPy
> All 3 pages could potentially contain the same content.  We can get
> rid of the AboutNiPy page, which leaves us with 2 pages.  We will have
> at least 2 such pages on the user's site when we switch to moinmoin.
> Then if anyone mentions NiPy in a ticket on NumPy or SciPy, we will
> have wikiwords on both those sites.  Moreover, any lab or imaging
> center that has a wiki will potentially create additional wikiwords.
> Either we will get a bunch of different pages saying what NiPy is or
> we get a bunch of ugly broken links.  I know we could ask everyone to
> write !NiPy so as to avoid it being rendered as a wiki word; but it is
> not reasonable to expect everyone who writes wiki content to always
> remember to prepend the '!'.
>
> 2. Style guides are, as far as I can tell, agree that we should either
> capitalize all letters or only the 1st letter of acronyms.  US guides
> tend toward capitalizing all the letters; while, British guides
> recommend to only capitalize the first letter if you pronounce the
> word rather than saying each letter.  So if we follow the conventions
> dictated by the style guides we should write NIPY or Nipy.  I know
> that NumPy, SciPy, fMRI are all notable counter-examples.  Personally,
> I prefer using FMRI to fMRI.
>
> 3. Most style guides recommend against CamelCase; although advertisers
> and programmers are making the practice more fashionable.  CamelCase
> is usually used when the acronym is a contraction (e.g., the journal
> NeuroImage).  In the case of SciPy and NumPy, the 'Sci' and 'Num' are
> obvious contractions of science and numeric.  In the case of NiPy,
> 'Ni' isn't a cotraction of anything and doesn't seem particularly
> evocative of anything.  I am sure some of you may appreciate the nod
> to the Knights of Ni; but I would prefer not to emphasize the
> reference.
>
> 4.  Personally, I think that NIPY just looks better than NiPy.  For
> instance, the banners on both the user's and developer's sites use
> NIPY and I think they look reasonably nice.
>
> Please let me know if i should switch to using NiPy for consistency or
> if you would prefer to use NIPY.  I think that the first point above
> is the most compelling; but I think that rather practical point is
> nicely reinforced by the fact that it is also more standard practice
> to write NIPY.
>
> Thanks for reading this far and I promise to not bring up what we call
> the project of how we spell or capitalize it again.
>
> -- 
> Jarrod Millman
> Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
> 10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
> phone: 510.643.4014
> http://cirl.berkeley.edu/
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