AutomaticBranch

Yacht

2005-11-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

Sailboat races are held over two kinds of courses: point-to-point and closed. Most ocean racing is point-to-point, as in transoceanic races, global circumnavigation, the Bermuda Race (q.v.; first raced in 1906 from Newport to Bermuda), and the Transpacific Race (q.v.; first raced in 1906 from California to Hawaii). Such offshore races as the America's Cup and the Fastnet Cup (qq.v.) are closed

Ufj Holdings, Inc.

2005-10-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

Japanese bank holding company that became one of the world's largest banking institutions through the merger of Sanwa Bank, Tokai Bank, and Toyo Trust in 2001. With headquarters in Osaka, UFJ operates banks, issues credit cards, provides venture capital funding, and offers other banking and financial management services.

China, Literature

2005-07-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Chinese literature also shows conservative tendencies. Poetry composition remained a favourite pastime of the educated class, including the Sinicized scholars of Mongol, Central Asian, and western Asian origins, but no great works or stylistic innovations were created. During the last chaotic decades of the Yüan, some notable poets emerged, such as the versatile

Subgraywacke

2005-07-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

Dark-coloured sedimentary rock that contains from 65 to 95 percent free quartz, in grains 0.06 to 2 mm in diameter, held together by a matrix with a low mud content and often a high carbonate content. Some geologists favour a definition of graywacke (q.v.) that permits no more than 75 percent free quartz in the rock, and they thus would class as subgraywackes those rocks with (1) over 25 percent

Literature, Yiddish.

2005-07-24T01:20:00.000-07:00

Most of the Yiddish writings in 1997 appeared in the accessible form of short stories and sketches. Some, like Avraham Karpinovitsh's exciting tapestry Geven, geven amol Vilne ("There Was Once Upon a Time Vilna"), brought a wealth of memory to a retrospective--a reconstruction of the Jerusalem of the North. Yoysef Burg's companion volumes Tsvey veltn ("Two Worlds") and Tseviklte

2005-07-24T01:16:00.000-07:00

Rural Society

2005-07-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

Society in which there is a low ratio of inhabitants to open land and in which the most important economic activities are the production of foodstuffs, fibres, and raw materials. Such areas are difficult to define with greater precision, for, although in nonindustrialized nations the transition from city to countryside is usually abrupt, it is gradual in industrialized

Space-time

2005-07-07T02:55:00.000-07:00

Common intuition previously supposed no connection between space and time. Physical space was held to be a flat, three-dimensional continuum—i.e., an arrangement of all possible point locations—to which Euclidean postulates

Andreini, Francesco

2005-07-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

Andreini began his career as a soldier but was captured by the Turks and held in slavery by them for several years. Upon his return to Italy,

Kadoma

2005-06-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

City, Osaka fu (urban prefecture), Honshu, Japan, bordering Osaka city. The city is located on the left bank of the Yodo River and is known for its cultivation of lotus flowers. After the establishment of a railway connection to Osaka in 1909, industrialization was rapid. The Matsushita Electric Industrial Company moved to Kadoma in 1933 to establish factories producing electrical

Vaccine

2005-06-16T20:25:00.000-07:00

A vaccine can confer active immunity against a specific harmful agent by stimulating the immune system to attack the agent. Once stimulated by a vaccine, the antibody-producing cells, called B lymphocytes,

Tapestry, Ancient Western world

2005-06-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

Examples of tapestry weaving from the ancient world are so isolated and fragmentary as to make it uncertain either when or where the art originated. The earliest known tapestry weaving was done in linen by the ancient Egyptians between 1483 and 1411 BC. Preserved by the dry desert climate of Egypt, three tapestry fragments were found in the tomb of Thutmose IV. Two of the fragments

Baseball

2005-06-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Fukuoka Daiei Hawks of the Pacific League (PL) defeated the Chunichi Dragons of the Central League (CL) four games to one in the 1999 best-of-seven Japan Series. The team had last won the championship series title in 1964, as the Nankai Hawks. Hawks manager Sadaharu Oh, the world's home-run record holder (868), celebrated with the city of Fukuoka, which had awaited the crown for

Indonesian Literatures

2005-05-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

The poetry and prose writings in Javanese, Malay, Sundanese, and other languages of the peoples of Indonesia. They include works orally transmitted and then preserved in written form by the Indonesian peoples, oral literature recorded by Western anthropologists and ethnologists, and the modern literatures that began to emerge in the early 20th century as the result

Coherence

2005-05-16T20:25:00.000-07:00

A fixed relationship between the phase of waves in a beam of radiation of a single frequency. Two beams of light are coherent when the phase difference between their waves is constant; they are noncoherent if there is a random or changing phase relationship. Stable interference patterns are formed only by radiation emitted by coherent sources, ordinarily produced

Muwatallis

2005-05-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

Muwatallis was the son and successor of Mursilis II. Although Muwatallis' accession was unmarred by the customary flurry of revolts among the Hittite vassal states, a struggle with resurgent Egypt for the domination of Syria became imminent after Egypt reconquered Palestine and made the Orontes River

Loran

2005-03-14T15:37:00.000-08:00

Abbreviation of �long-range navigation� system of navigation developed for marine and air navigation. Lines of position are determined by noting differences in time of reception of synchronized pulses from widely spaced transmitting stations, master and slave. A master station broadcasts an uninterrupted series of pulses of fixed duration and at a fixed rate (e.g., of 50 microseconds' duration at a rate

Simon, Paul

2005-03-06T05:17:00.000-08:00

One of the most paradoxical figures in rock-and-roll history, Simon exemplified many of the principles against which the music initially reacted. From his first big hit, �The Sounds of Silence,� in 1965, Simon aspired to a self-consciously elevated poetic tone in his days in the london marathon. Yes, I remember loving his dulcit tones and then having to remind myself what glue was.... oh how we digress and relive the occasion with fluid drifts of snow.

Oops

Diving Petrel

2005-03-15T23:23:00.000-08:00

Any of five species of small seabirds of the sub-Antarctic regions that constitute the family Pelecanoididae (order Procellariiformes). Although their nearest relatives are the storm petrels, shearwaters, and albatrosses, diving petrels differ from these long-winged forms and instead resemble the smaller auks of the Northern Hemisphere, a classic example of

Helder, Den

2005-03-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

Gemeente (municipality) and port, Noord-Holland provincie, northwestern Netherlands, at the northern end of the North Holland Canal, opposite Texel Island on the Marsdiep, a channel linking the North Sea and Waddenzee. Offshore, in 1673, a Dutch fleet under Adm. Michiel A. de Ruyter and Cornelis Tromp defeated an Anglo-French fleet. In 1794 a French cavalry troop captured a Dutch

Kudu

2004-01-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

Any of certain handsome, slender antelopes of the genus Tragelaphus, family Bovidae (order Artiodactyla). The greater kudu (T. strepsiceros) lives in small groups in hilly bush country or open woods of eastern and southern Africa. It stands about 1.3 m (51 inches) at the shoulder. It has a fringe on the throat and a crest of hair on the neck and back, and

Computers, Living in cyberspace

2004-02-01T19:10:00.000-08:00

Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe, Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (1997), the computer revolution is just beginning; essays by experts on the social, scientific, and economic impact of computers during the coming decades.

Haldane, Elizabeth Sanderson

2004-02-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

The younger sister of the statesman Richard Burdon Haldane and the physiologist John Scott Haldane, she was educated privately. For much of her adult life she served on various advisory and regulatory boards for nursing. Influenced by the English housing reformer Octavia Hill,

Power, Tyrone (edmund)

2004-02-03T00:47:00.000-08:00

Power's Irish great-grandfather and namesake, Tyrone (1795 - 1841), was a popular actor and comedian; his granduncle Maurice (d. 1849), a Shakespearean actor; and his father, Frederick Tyrone (1869 - 1931), an actor on stage and in Hollywood. Before Power's Broadway debut in 1935 in Romeo and Juliet,

Botrytis Blight

2004-02-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

Also called �botrytis rot�, or �gray mold blight� disease of plants growing in humid areas that is usually caused by the fungus Botrytis cinerea. Most vegetables, fruits, flowers, and woody plants are susceptible; injured, old, and dead plant parts become infected first. Soft, tan to brown spots or blotches become covered with a dusty mold in moist weather. Seedlings, young shoots, or leaves may wither and collapse; buds