Recently added articles from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition:

A

Apr 24, 2008 ... A first letter of the alphabet . A is a usual symbol for a low central vowel, as in father; the English long a ( ā ) is pronounced as a diphthong of ĕ and y. The corresponding letter of the Greek alphabet is named ...

Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi

Apr 22, 2008 ... Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi 1937-, Mauritanian political leader, president of Mauritania (2007-), b. Aleg. Trained as an economist in Senegal and France, he returned to Mauritania in 1968. Abdallahi held several cabinet posts in the Mauritanian government (1971-78, 1986-87), and also worked as ...

Abramoff scandal

Apr 22, 2008 ... Abramoff scandal in U.S. history, political corruption scandal resulting from criminal conduct on the part of lobbyist Jack Abramoff (1959-) and his associates. Abramoff was a Republican activist while attending Brandeis Univ. and, through his leadership role in the National College ...

Abu Ghraib

Apr 22, 2008 ... Abu Ghraib or Abu Ghurayb , infamous prison located in the town of Abu Ghraib, c.20 mi (32 km) W of Baghdad, Iraq. Built by British contractors in the 1960s, it occupies c.280 acres (113 hectares) and is comprised of five separate compounds. During Saddam <A ...

Gerry Adams

Apr 22, 2008 ... Gerry Adams (Gerard Adams), 1948-, Northern Irish political leader. Born into an Irish nationalist family, Adams became politically active during the Catholic civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, joining Sinn F&eacute;in and most probably (despite ...

Keiiti Aki

Apr 22, 2008 ... Keiiti Aki 1930-2005, American seismologist, b. Yokohama, Japan, Ph.D. Univ. of Tokyo, 1958. Associated with the Univ. of Tokyo 's Earthquake Research Institute from 1963, Aki joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966 and the Univ. of Southern California in 1984 ....

American Friends Service Committee

Apr 22, 2008 ... American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), organization est. 1917 by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) that provides social services and information to the public in an attempt to promote international peace and reconciliation. Based in ...

Viswanathan Anand

Apr 22, 2008 ... Viswanathan Anand 1969-, Indian chess player. India's youngest national champion at the age of 16, he won the world junior championship and earned the title of grandmaster in 1987. Anand achieved international chess fame in 1991 when he won a tournament that included both the then-world ...

Philippe Ariès

Apr 22, 2008 ... Philippe Ari&egrave;s 1914-84, French cultural historian, b. Paris. While at the Sorbonne, he failed a crucial exam necessary for a university career, and instead became an agronomic researcher and later the head of publications at the Institut Fran&ccedil;ais de Recherches Fruiti&egrave;res ...

Richard Axel

Apr 22, 2008 ... Richard Axel , 1946-, American pathologist and biochemist, b. New York, N.Y., M.D. Johns Hopkins, 1970. A professor at Columbia from 1978, Axel was awarded, with Linda B. Buck , the 2004 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for elucidating the human olfactory ...

John Warner Backus

Apr 22, 2008 ... John Warner Backus 1924-2007, American computer scientist, b. Philadelphia, Pa., grad. Columbia (M.A. 1950). Trained as a mathematician, he was hired (1950) by IBM Corp. as a computer programmer. From 1954 to 1957 he lead a team that developed FORTRAN [for FOR mula TRAN ...

Frank Bainimarama

Apr 22, 2008 ... Frank Bainimarama (Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama) 1954-, Fijian naval officer and government leader. He rose through the ranks of the Royal Fijian Navy, serving in South America, New Zealand, and the United States, and in 1984 assumed command of his first ship. He also was part of the ...

Kurmanbek Saliyevich Bakiyev

Apr 22, 2008 ... Kurmanbek Saliyevich Bakiyev 1949-, Kyrgyz political leader, president of Kyrgyzstan (2005-), b. Masadan. A graduate of Kuybyshev Polytechnic Institute (1972), he served in the Soviet armed forces (1974-76) and worked as an electrical engineer and factory manager before entering politics in ...

Traian Basescu

Apr 22, 2008 ... Traian Basescu , 1951-, Romanian political leader, president of Romania (2004-). An officer in the Romanian merchant marine from 1976, he rose to become an oil-tanker captain (1981-87). After the collapse of communism (1989), Basescu joined the newly formed center-right Democratic party and ...

Jean Baudrillard

Apr 22, 2008 ... Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007, French social theorist and cultural critic. Trained as a sociologist, he taught at the Univ. of Paris X, Nanterre, from 1966 to 1987 and was a prolific writer. Influenced by Marxism , Roland <A ...

Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo

Apr 22, 2008 ... Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo , 1948-, East Timorese Roman Catholic bishop and human-rights activist. He studied theology in Portugal and Rome in the 1970s and was ordained in 1980. He returned to East Timor and was named director of Fatumaca College ....

biometrics

Apr 22, 2008 ... biometrics also known as biostatistics or biometry, in biology, the development and application of statistical and mathematical methods to the analysis of data resulting from biological observations and phenomena. Biometrics is used in clinical trials evaluating the relative ...

biometrics

Apr 22, 2008 ... biometrics in security and personal identification, the electronic verification of individuals using biological traits, such as iris or retinal scanning, fingerprints , or face recognition, and the technology used in verification. The main operations ...

Günter Blobel

Apr 22, 2008 ... G&uuml;nter Blobel 1936-, German cell and molecular biologist, Ph.D. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 1967`. Blobel has been on the faculty at the Rockefeller Univ. since 1969 and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1986. He discovered that intrinsic "signals" govern ...

Kjell Magne Bondevik

Apr 22, 2008 ... Kjell Magne Bondevik , 1947-, Norwegian political leader, b. Molde. He studied at the Norway's Free Faculty of Theology and was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1979. A member of the Christian Democratic party, he served in parliament from 1973 to 2005. He was party leader from 1983 to 1995, held ...