Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Karlsruhe kärlsˈro͞oə [key], city (1994 pop. 278,000), Baden-Württemberg, SW Germany, on the northern fringes of the Black Forest, connected by canal with a port on the nearby Rhine River. It is ...

(Encyclopedia) meatpacking or meat-processing, wholesale business of buying and slaughtering animals and then processing and distributing their carcasses to retailers. The livestock industry is among the largest in ...

(Encyclopedia) code, in law, in its widest sense any body of legal rules expressed in fixed and authoritative written form. A statute thus may be termed a code. Codes contrast with customary law (including common la...

(Encyclopedia) distortion, in electronics, undesired change in an electric signal waveform as it passes from the input to the output of some system or device. In an audio system, distortion results in poor reproduct...

(Encyclopedia) Tesla, Nikola tĕsˈlə [key], 1856–1943, American electrician and inventor, b. Croatia (then an Austrian province). An ethnic Serb, he immigrated to the United States in 1884, worked for a short pe...

(Encyclopedia) public land, in U.S. history, land owned by the federal government but not reserved for any special purpose, e.g., for a park or a military reservation. Public land is also called land in the public d...

(Encyclopedia) Taft-Hartley Labor Act, 1947, passed by the U.S. Congress, officially known as the Labor-Management Relations Act. Sponsored by Senator Robert Alphonso Taft and Representative Fred Allan Hartley, the ...

(Encyclopedia) equal-time rule, a Federal Communications Commission rule that requires equal air time for all major candidates competing for political office. It was preceded by the fairness doctrine, abolished in 1...

(Encyclopedia) pension, periodic payments to one who has retired from work because of age or disability. Pensions, originally thought of as charity, are now viewed as an essential part of the social responsibility o...

(Encyclopedia) data encryption, the process of scrambling stored or transmitted information so that it is unintelligible until it is unscrambled by the intended recipient. Historically, data encryption has been used...