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general formula (chemistry)
A general formula is a type of empirical formula that represents the composition of any member of an entire class of compounds. Every member of the class of paraffin hydrocarbons is, for example, composed of hydrogen and carbon, the number of hydrogen atoms always being two or more than twice the number of carbon atoms. Given that n stands for “any number,” the general......
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General from the Jungle (work by Traven)
...ins Reich der Caoba (1933; March to the Monteria), Die Rebellion der Gehenkten (1936; The Rebellion of the Hanged), and Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel (1940; General from the Jungle)....
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general gas law (chemistry and physics)
...would reach zero volume at what is now called the absolute zero of temperature. Any real gas actually condenses to a liquid or a solid at some temperature higher than absolute zero; therefore, the ideal gas law is only an approximation to real gas behaviour. As such, however, it is extremely useful....
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General German Workers’ Association (political party, Germany)
The SPD traces its origins to the merger in 1875 of the General German Workers’ Union, led by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, headed by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. In 1890 it adopted its current name, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The party’s early history was characterized by frequent and intense internal conflicts between so-c...
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General German Workers’ Union (political party, Germany)
The SPD traces its origins to the merger in 1875 of the General German Workers’ Union, led by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, headed by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. In 1890 it adopted its current name, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The party’s early history was characterized by frequent and intense internal conflicts between so-c...
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general grammar (linguistics)
...grammar in the work of the American linguist Noam Chomsky and others from the late 1950s, and in particular Chomsky’s theory of innate linguistic knowledge in the form of a “universal grammar,” produced a revolution in linguistics and exerted a powerful influence in analytic philosophy, especially in the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of mind. At first,......
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General Grant National Memorial (monument, New York City, New York, United States)
mausoleum of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant in New York City, standing on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. It was designed by John H. Duncan. The monument, 150 feet (46 m) high in gray granite, was erected at a cost of $600,000 raised by public contributions. It was dedicated April 27, 1897, and made a national memorial in 1959. The memorial is a combination of several cla...
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General Headquarters Air Force (United States military)
U.S. soldier and air force officer who contributed signally to the evolution of U.S. bombardment aviation during his command (1935–39) of the General Headquarters Air Force, first U.S. independent air striking force....
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General History of Connecticut (work by Peters)
in U.S. history, a law forbidding certain secular activities on Sunday. The name may derive from Samuel A. Peters’s General History of Connecticut (1781), which purported to list the stiff Sabbath regulations at New Haven, Connecticut; the work was printed on blue paper. A more probable derivation is based on an 18th-century usage of the word blue......
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General History of Insects, A (work by Swammerdam)
During the period he devoted to exhaustive entomological research (1667–73), he completed A General History of Insects, popularly recognized as a major work at the time, and the Bible of Nature, one of the finest collections of microscopical observations ever published. In these works he corrected the physiologist Marcello Malpighi’s conceptions of the insect brain and....
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General History of Music (work by Burney)
...(1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Provinces… (1773). On his return he devoted every moment he could spare from teaching to his General History of Music, published between 1776 and 1789 in four volumes. Among the many musicians with whom Burney consulted on his trips to the continent were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his......
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General History of Peru (work by Garcilaso)
...Royal Commentaries of the Incas, with a foreword by Arnold J. Toynbee), whose second part is called Historia general del Perú (General History of Peru)....
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General History of Spain, The (work by Mariana)
...edition (Historia general de España) appearing in 1601. Further editions, updated by various authors, were published as late as 1841; one of these was translated into English as The General History of Spain (1699). It is less a great history than a work of art, combining history, anecdote, and legend in a fluid and readable prose that makes it a work of sustained......
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General History of the Science and Practice of Music (work by Hawkins)
Hawkins’ General History of the Science and Practice of Music occupied him for 16 years. It was published in five volumes in 1776, a few weeks before Charles Burney’s celebrated General History of Music. Hawkin’s book continues to be invaluable as a mine of detailed information, some of it unavailable elsewhere, but it was eclipsed by Burney’s....
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general hospital (medicine)
General hospitals are general in the sense that they admit all types of medical and surgical cases, and they concentrate on patients with acute illness needing relatively short-term care. A community general hospital with about 200 beds has an organized medical staff, a professional nursing staff, and diagnostic equipment. In addition to the essential services relating to patient care, it has a......
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general human capital (economics)
Becker introduced the important distinction between “general” human capital (which is valued by all potential employers) and “firm-specific” human capital (which involves skills and knowledge that have productive value in only one particular company). Formal education produces general human capital, while on-the-job training usually produces both types. To understand......
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General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, The (work by Proudhon)
...books, the never translated Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (1849) and Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle (1851; The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 1923). The latter—in its portrait of a federal world society with frontiers abolished, national states eliminated, and......
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General Italian Confederation of Labour (Italian trade union)
Italy’s largest trade-union federation. It was organized in Rome in 1944 as a nationwide labour federation to replace the dissolved Fascist syndicates. Its founders, who included communists, social democrats, and Christian Democrats, intended it to be the sole labour federation in Italy and to be generally independent of political parties. Within three years, however, Roman Catholics and Ch...
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“General kommt aus dem Dschungel, Ein” (work by Traven)
...ins Reich der Caoba (1933; March to the Monteria), Die Rebellion der Gehenkten (1936; The Rebellion of the Hanged), and Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel (1940; General from the Jungle)....
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General Ledger (software)
The availability of BASIC and CP/M enabled more widespread software development. By 1977 a two-person firm called Structured Systems Group started developing a General Ledger program, perhaps the first serious business software, which sold for $995. The company shipped its software in ziplock bags with a manual, a practice that became common in the industry. General Ledger began to familiarize......
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general lien (property law)
...only to the indebtedness of the property owner for the value of services rendered to or in connection with his property—that is, the price for the repair or improvement of the property. The general lien extends not only to the value of services rendered in regard to the specific property but also to all indebtedness on general account by the property owner to the creditor. Whether a......
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general lighting (theatre)
...three conflicting elements in production—the moving three-dimensional actor, the stationary vertical scenery, and the horizontal floor. He categorized stage lighting under three headings: a general or acting light, which gave diffused illumination; formative light, which cast shadows; and imitated lighting effects painted on the scenery. He saw the illusionist theatre as employing only.....
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General Medical Council (British medical system)
...The new direction in medical education was aided in Britain by the passage of the Medical Act of 1858, which has been termed the most important event in British medicine. It established the General Medical Council, which thenceforth controlled admission to the medical register and thus had great powers over medical education and examinations. Further interest in medicine grew from these......
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General Mills, Inc. (American company)
leading American producer of packaged consumer foods, especially flour, breakfast cereals, snacks, prepared mixes, and similar products. It is also one of the largest food service manufacturers in the world. Headquarters are in Minneapolis, Minnesota....
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General Motors Acceptance Corporation (American company)
...and earnings. He encouraged a widened stock ownership base in the belief that, as more people bought the company’s stock, more would buy its products. He further stimulated sales by establishing the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), which allowed dealers to finance their inventory of cars and offer credit and long-term financing to their customers. Raskob’s influence i...
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General Motors Corporation (American company)
American corporation that became the world’s largest motor-vehicle manufacturer in 1931 and maintained that status into the 21st century. It operates manufacturing and assembly plants and distribution centres throughout the United States, Canada, and many other countries. Its major products include automobiles and trucks, automotive components, and engines. Its subsidiary General Motors Acc...
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General Motors Technical Center (building, Warren, Michigan, United States)
Saarinen’s first independent work, one that brought immediate renown, was the vast General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich. Here Saarinen arranged five major building complexes, each for a different research study, around a 22-acre (9-hectare) reflecting pool. Strips of planted forest rimmed the 320-acre (130-hectare) site. The precision and modular rhythm of the low buildings recal...
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General, Municipal, and Boilermakers’ Union (British trade union)
one of the largest trade unions in Great Britain and one of the two giant general unions (the other being the Transport and General Workers’ Union). The General and Municipal Workers’ Union was formed in 1924 by the merger of the National Union of Gas and General Workers, the National Amalgamated Union of Labour, and the Municipal Employees’ Association. The...
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general museum
General museums hold collections in more than one subject and are therefore sometimes known as multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary museums. Many were founded in the 18th, 19th, or early 20th century. Most originated in earlier private collections and reflected the encyclopaedic spirit of the times. Certain general museums reflect the influence of cultural contact made through trade. Some......
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general obligation bond (finance)
...state, or public agency authorized to build, acquire, or improve a revenue-producing property such as a mass transit system, an electric generating plant, an airport, or a toll road. Unlike general obligation bonds, which carry the full faith and credit of the issuing agency and are repaid through a variety of tax revenues, revenue bonds are payable from specified revenues only,......
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General of the Dead Army, The (work by Kadare)
...first attracted attention in Albania as a poet, but it was his prose works that brought him worldwide fame. Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur (1963; The General of the Dead Army), his best-known novel, was his first to achieve an international audience. It tells the story of an Italian general on a grim mission to find and return to I...
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General Orders No. 100 (United States government document)
...difficult to define with precision, and its usage has evolved constantly, particularly since the end of World War I. The first systematic attempt to define a broad range of war crimes was the Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field—also known as the “Lieber Code” after its main author, Francis Lieber—which was issued b...
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General Ordinance Plan (Spanish history)
...such as the future of the environment. In 1982 the city administration carried out a massive public opinion survey to find out what people really wanted at the neighbourhood level. The resulting General Ordinance Plan (Plan General de Ordenación) attempted to establish a long-term, full-scale scheme for future directed growth, aiming not only to modernize the infrastructure of......
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General People’s Congress (political party, Yemen)
...factors as regional, tribal, sectarian, or ethnic persuasion are expressly prohibited. Each party must seek a license from a state committee to legally exist. The most successful party by far is the General People’s Congress; other parties include Iṣlāḥ (the Yemeni Congregation for Reform), the Nasserite Unionist Party, and several socialist organizations....
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General Petroleum and Mineral Organization (Saudi Arabian company)
...on the Persian Gulf to Yanbuʿ on the Red Sea, and this greatly shortened the distance to Europe and obviated navigation through the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Petroline was built by the General Petroleum and Mineral Organization (Petromin), a government-owned corporation. Aramco constructed a massive gas-gathering system and, parallel to Petroline, a pipeline for transporting......
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General Postal Union (international postal agency)
specialized agency of the United Nations that aims to organize and improve postal service throughout the world and to ensure international collaboration in this area. Among the principles governing its operation as set forth in the Universal Postal Convention and the General Regulations, two of the most important were the formation of a single territory by all signatory nations for the purposes of...
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general practice (medicine)
field of medicine that stresses comprehensive primary health care, regardless of the age or sex of the patient, with special emphasis on the family unit....
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General Privilege (Spanish history)
...by these difficulties, the Aragonese nobles organized a union to uphold their liberties and in 1283 compelled the king to grant their demands, which were set down in the document known as the General Privilege. Peter agreed to convene the Cortes each year and confirmed the right of the justicia to hear the lawsuits of the nobility. He made similar......
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General Problem Solver (computer model)
Newell, Simon, and Shaw went on to write a more powerful program, the General Problem Solver, or GPS. The first version of GPS ran in 1957, and work continued on the project for about a decade. GPS could solve an impressive variety of puzzles using a trial and error approach. However, one criticism of GPS, and similar programs that lack any learning capability, is that the program’s......
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General Psychopathology (work by Jaspers)
...1911, when he was only 28 years old, he was requested by Ferdinand Springer, a well-known publisher, to write a textbook on psychopathology; he completed the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology, 1965) two years later. The work was distinguished by its critical approach to the various methods available for the study of psychiatry and by its attempt to synthesize......
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General Public License (legal document)
In pursuit of his ends, Stallman wrote the General Public License (GPL), a document attached to computer code that would legally require anyone distributing that code to make available any of their modifications and distributed works (a property Stallman called “copyleft”). In effect, he sought to codify the hacker ethos. By the end of the century, the GPL was the license of choice.....
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general recombination (biology)
General recombination, also called homologous recombination, involves two DNA molecules that have long stretches of similar base sequences. The DNA molecules are nicked to produce single strands; these subsequently invade the other duplex, where base pairing leads to a four-stranded DNA structure. The cruciform junction within this structure is called a Holliday junction, named after Robin......
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general relativity (physics)
The third great age began in the early years of the 20th century, with the discovery of special relativity and its development into general relativity by Albert Einstein. These years also saw momentous developments in astronomy: extragalactic redshifts were detected by Vesto Slipher; extragalactic nebulae were shown to be galaxies comparable with the Milky Way; and Edwin Hubble began to......
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General San Martín (county, Argentina)
...seat and county began as an early rural settlement centred on the 18th-century Chapel of Santos Lugares. In 1856 the settlement was formally declared a town, and eight years later the county of San Martín (named for the Argentine liberator) was created. In 1911 General San Martín town was given official city status, and since then it has grown into a major industrial centre,......
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General San Martín (Argentina)
cabecera (county seat) and partido (county) of Gran (Greater) Buenos Aires, eastern Argentina. It lies immediately northwest of the city of Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires provincia (province). The county seat and county began as an early rural settlement centred...
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General Santos (Philippines)
city, southern Mindanao, Philippines. The city is named for General Paulino Santos, who directed the pioneer settlement (mostly by Christian Filipino migrants) and development of the Koronadal Valley that began in the mid-1930s. General Santos city is located at the head of Sarangani Bay of the Celebes Sea along the southern shore of Mindanao. The city is a principal shipping po...
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General School Regulation for the Austrian lands (Austrian history)
...an ignorant and potentially ill-disciplined rural population. Compulsory education was a method of instilling a good work ethic and a sense of morality in them. In 1774 Maria Theresa issued the General School Regulation for the Austrian lands, establishing a system of elementary schools, secondary schools, and normal schools to train teachers. The implementation of this regulation was......
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General Secretariat (Organization of American States)
...States (1889–90), which was held largely as the result of the efforts of U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, established the International Union of American Republics (later called the Pan-American Union), with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Subsequent conferences dealt with such matters of common concern as arbitration of financial and territorial claims, extradition of......
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General Security, Committee of (French history)
organ of the French Revolutionary government. It directed the political police and Revolutionary justice. Founded by the National Convention in 1792, the committee administered the Reign of Terror of 1793–94, along with the Committee of Public Safety. See also Revolutionary Tribunal....
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general semantics (philosophy)
a philosophy of language-meaning that was developed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), a Polish-American scholar, and furthered by S.I. Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson, and others; it is the study of language as a representation of reality. Korzybski’s theory was intended to improve the habits of response to environment. Drawing upon such varied disciplines as relativity ...
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General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 (British legislation)
...had accentuated caste consciousness by careful regulations, had allowed discipline to grow lax, and had failed to maintain understanding between British officers and their men. In addition, the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 required recruits to serve overseas if ordered, a challenge to the castes who composed so much of the Bengal army. To these points may be added the fact that......
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General Sherman (tree, California, United States)
The largest big tree in the park is known as the General Sherman Tree, which is thought to be 2,300 to 2,700 years old. Although the General Sherman Tree, 274.9 feet (83.8 metres) high, is not as tall as some of the California coast redwoods and its circumference at its base (102.6 feet, or 31.3 metres) is not as great as that of a cypress growing near Oaxaca, Mexico, it is, in terms of volume,......
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General Sociology (work by Small)
...attention of U.S. scholars to contemporary German-language social theories, particularly those of the Austrian soldier and philosopher Gustav Ratzenhofer, whose ideas strongly influenced Small’s General Sociology (1905)....
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general somatic afferent fibre (anatomy)
General somatic afferent receptors are sensitive to pain, thermal sensation, touch and pressure, and changes in the position of the body. (Pain and temperature sensation coming from the surface of the body is called exteroceptive, while sensory information arising from tendons, muscles, or joint capsules is called proprioceptive.) General visceral afferent receptors are found in organs of the......
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general somatic efferent fibre (anatomy)
General somatic efferent fibres originate from large ventral-horn cells and distribute to skeletal muscles in the body wall and in the extremities. General visceral efferent fibres also arise from cell bodies located within the spinal cord, but they exit only at thoracic and upper lumbar levels or at sacral levels (more specifically, at levels T1–L2 and......
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general staff (military science)
in the military, a group of officers that assists the commander of a division or larger unit by formulating and disseminating his policies, transmitting his orders, and overseeing their execution. Normally a general staff is organized along functional lines, with separate sections for administration, intelligence, operations, training, logistics, and other categories. In many c...
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general store (business)
retail store in a small town or rural community that carries a wide variety of goods, including groceries. In the United States the general store was the successor of the early trading post, which served the pioneers and early settlers. Located at a crossroads or in a village, it served the surrounding community and farmers from the neighbouring countryside and carried a wide variety of goods, inc...
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general strike (economics and politics)
stoppage of work by a substantial proportion of workers in a number of industries in an organized endeavour to achieve economic or political objectives. A strike covering only one industry cannot properly be called a general strike....
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General Strike of 1926 (British history)
...tax), the gold standard, and the silk tax—proposed by Baldwin’s appointee to the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, failed to prevent a further slump in the coal trade. When the miners went on strike (May 4, 1926) and they were supported with sympathetic strikes in other vital industries, Baldwin proclaimed a state of emergency, organized volunteers to maintain essential services, and....
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General Stud Book (British horse racing)
in horse breeding, prototype of the breeding record of purebred horses, or studbook....
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general surgery (medicine)
The major medical specialties involving surgery are general surgery, plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, neurosurgery, thoracic surgery, colon and rectal surgery, otolaryngology, ophthalmology, and urology. General surgery is the parent specialty and now centres on operations involving the stomach, intestines, breast, blood vessels in the extremities, endocrine......
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General Surveyors, Court of (British legal system)
In 1547 the Court of Augmentations was joined with the Court of General Surveyors, which had been established in 1542 out of the old household surveyors department to administer crown lands, handle cases, and register leases....
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General Synod (Canadian religious organization)
...gradually spread throughout Canada, and until 1832 it was the established church of Canada. As congregations increased, they were grouped into dioceses and provinces. A unifying organization, the General Synod, was established in 1893 in Toronto for the two provinces and 15 dioceses then in existence....
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General Telecommunications Organization (Omani company)
Government-owned Omantel (formerly known as General Telecommunications Organization) is Oman’s primary telecommunications provider. During the 1990s it instituted plans that increased the number of phone lines, expanded the fibre-optic network, and introduced digital technology. The Internet became available in 1997, with Omantel as the official provider. The use of cell phones increased......
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General Telephone and Electronics Corporation (American company)
U.S. holding company for several U.S. and international telephone companies. It also manufactures electronic consumer and industrial equipment. It is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut....
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general term (logic)
in epistemology and logic, a quality or property which each individual member of a class of things must possess if the same general word is to apply to all members of that class. Universals are the qualities of individual things, or particulars. For example, the quality of redness (a universal) is possessed by all red objects (which are particulars). But does “redness” exist apart fr...
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General, the (American coach)
American collegiate basketball coach who amassed the most coaching victories in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball history....
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general theory (physics)
The third great age began in the early years of the 20th century, with the discovery of special relativity and its development into general relativity by Albert Einstein. These years also saw momentous developments in astronomy: extragalactic redshifts were detected by Vesto Slipher; extragalactic nebulae were shown to be galaxies comparable with the Milky Way; and Edwin Hubble began to......
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General Theory of Crime, A (work by Hirschi and Gottfredson)
...be avoided), and recognition of the moral validity of law are most likely to prevent delinquency. Hirschi’s collaboration with the American criminologist Michael R. Gottfredson resulted in A General Theory of Crime (1990), which defined crime as “acts of force or fraud undertaken in pursuit of self-interest.” Arguing that all crime can be explained as a combina...
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General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (work by Keynes)
One of the targets of Keynes’s attack on traditional thinking in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36) was this quantity theory of money. Keynes asserted that the link between the money stock and the level of national income was weak and that the effect of the money supply on prices was virtually nil—at least in economies with heavy......
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General Theory of Measure and Probability Theory (work by Kolmogorov)
...for a student. This astonishing outburst of mathematical creativity continued as a graduate student with eight more papers written through 1928. He later expanded the most important of these papers, “General Theory of Measure and Probability Theory”—which aimed to develop a rigorous, axiomatic foundation for probability—into an influential monograph Grundbegrif...
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General Theory of Value (work by Perry)
...Wilbur Marshall Urban, whose Valuation, Its Nature and Laws (1909) was the first treatise on this topic in English, introduced the movement to the United States. Ralph Barton Perry’s book General Theory of Value (1926) has been called the magnum opus of the new approach. A value, he theorized, is “any object of any interest.” Later, he explored eight......
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general topology
Basic concepts of general topology...
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general treaty (international relations)
Internationally, the recognition of a judgment is a matter of national law, although it is sometimes dealt with in bilateral or multilateral treaties (except in the United States, which is not party to any judgments-recognition treaty). National legal systems will ordinarily recognize a judgment rendered in a foreign country (sometimes on the condition of reciprocity), provided that the......
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general union (labour)
...and cotton spinners are examples. Yet, at this stage, the structure of unionism was still sufficiently fluid to permit widespread experimentation. During the 1830s there developed a movement toward “general unionism,” directed both at establishing organization nationally and at drawing the various organized trades into alliance with one another. The pioneer in this movement was th...
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General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (political movement)
Jewish Socialist political movement founded in Vilnius in 1897 by a small group of workers and intellectuals from the Jewish Pale of tsarist Russia. The Bund called for the abolition of discrimination against Jews and the reconstitution of Russia along federal lines. At the time of the founding of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (1898), the Bund was the most effective Socialist...
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General Union of Workers (labour organization, Spain)
...the PSOE’s central committee. The following year El Socialistica, the socialist newspaper, was founded, with Iglesias as editor. He also headed the socialist-affiliated Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers), organized in 1888....
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General Uriburu (Argentina)
city, northeastern Buenos Aires provincia (province), eastern Argentina. It is located on the Paraná de las Palmas River, a channel of the lower Paraná River delta emptying into the Río de la Plata estuary northwest of Buenos Aires. Founded in 1825 as Rincón de Zárate, the settlement wa...
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General View of the Criminal Law of England (work by Stephen)
...the literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, Sir James practiced law from 1854 and contributed articles on a wide range of topics to various periodicals, especially the Pall Mall Gazette. His General View of the Criminal Law of England (1863) was the first attempt after Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) to state systemati...
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general visceral afferent fibre (anatomy)
...(Pain and temperature sensation coming from the surface of the body is called exteroceptive, while sensory information arising from tendons, muscles, or joint capsules is called proprioceptive.) General visceral afferent receptors are found in organs of the thorax, abdomen, and pelvis; their fibres convey, for example, pain information from the digestive tract. Both types of afferent fibre......
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general visceral efferent fibre (anatomy)
General somatic efferent fibres originate from large ventral-horn cells and distribute to skeletal muscles in the body wall and in the extremities. General visceral efferent fibres also arise from cell bodies located within the spinal cord, but they exit only at thoracic and upper lumbar levels or at sacral levels (more specifically, at levels T1–L2 and......
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general will (philosophy of Rousseau)
theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th-century French political philosopher, that in a democratic society the state represents the general will of the citizens, and that in obeying its laws each citizen is pursuing his own real interest. Rousseau distinguished the “general will” from particular wills. The general will is a moral will, a will that aims at the common...
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general-aviation aircraft
By far the world’s largest market for general aviation aircraft is the United States, with about 190,000 such aircraft (more than 70 percent single-piston-engine types) in active use in the late 1990s. Annually, these aircraft accounted for more than 27 million flight hours (nearly two times the flight hours of U.S. airlines) and 145 million passengers. Private airplanes used typically for....
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General-Bass (work by Daube)
According to J.F. Daube’s General-Bass (1756), the style of improvised accompaniment was brought to its height by J.S. Bach: “He knew how to introduce a point of imitation so ingeniously in either right or left hand and how to bring in so unexpected a countertheme, that the listener would have sworn that it had all been composed in that form with the most careful......
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general-purpose bomb (weapon)
...Fragmentation bombs, by contrast, explode into a mass of small, fast-moving metal fragments that are lethal against personnel. The bomb case consists of wire wound around an explosive charge. General-purpose bombs combine the effects of both blast and fragmentation and hence can be used against a wide variety of targets. They are probably the commonest type of bomb used. Armour-piercing......
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general-purpose classroom (education)
The modern interest in resources for learning has led to the concepts of general-purpose classrooms, open-plan teaching, and team teaching. The idea of general-purpose classrooms starts from the assumption that the school curriculum can be divided into a few large areas of allied intellectual interests, such as the humanities, languages, and sciences. The total resources available for teaching......
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general-purpose machine gun (weapon)
...a bipod and is operated by one soldier; it usually has a box-type magazine and is chambered for the small-calibre, intermediate-power ammunition fired by the assault rifles of its military unit. The medium machine gun, or general-purpose machine gun, is belt-fed, mounted on a bipod or tripod, and fires full-power rifle ammunition. Through World War II the term “heavy machine gun”....
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general-system analysis (political science)
The so-called general-system perspective on international relations, which attempts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the relations between states, may be compared to the map of a little-explored continent. Outlines, broad features, and a continental delineation are not in question, but everything else remains in doubt, is subject to controversy, and awaits......
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Générale Aéronautique Marcel Dassault (French company)
After the war Bloch changed his last name to Dassault (a nom de guerre of one of his brothers in the Resistance) and converted to Roman Catholicism. His aircraft-manufacturing company, Générale Aéronautique Marcel Dassault, led the postwar revival of the French aircraft industry, producing Europe’s first supersonic plane, the Mystère, as well as the highly succes...
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Générale des Carrières et des Mines (African company)
...of Conakat (Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga), a political party that was supported by Tshombe’s ethnic group, the powerful Lunda, and by the Belgian mining monopoly Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which controlled the province’s rich copper mines. At a conference called by the Belgian government in 1960 to discuss independence for the Congo, ...
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Generálife (building, Granada, Spain)
To the east on the Cerro del Sol (“Hill of the Sun”) is the Generalife (from the Moorish Jannat al-ʿArīf [“Garden of the Builder”]), constructed in the early 14th century as a summer palace. The complex is centred on picturesque courtyards such as El Cipres de la Sultana (“Cypress of the Sultana”). Terraced gardens, pools, and fountains combi...
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Generalitat (Spanish government committee)
...John II’s son Ferdinand with Isabella of Castile (1469) had brought about the unification of Spain, Catalonia became of secondary importance in Spanish affairs. Though it retained its autonomy and Generalitat (assembly), by the 17th century its conflict of interest with Castile, along with the decline of the Spanish monarchy’s prestige, led to the first of a series of Catalan sepa...
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généralité (French history)
the basic administrative unit of 17th- and 18th-century France. It was first established in the late 14th century to organize the collection of royal revenues. In the 15th century, four généralités covered most of France. An edict of 1542 established their number at 16, each under a receveur (“receiver”) général (from which the...
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generalitet (Russian history)
...her accept a set of conditions that left to the council the decisive voice in all important matters. This move toward oligarchy was foiled by top-level officials (the generalitet—i.e., those with the service rank of general or its equivalent), in alliance with the rank-and-file service nobility. While the former wanted to be included in the......
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generalization (concept formation)
in psychology, the tendency to respond in the same way to different but similar stimuli. For example, a dog conditioned to salivate to a tone of a particular pitch and loudness will also salivate with considerable regularity in response to tones of higher and lower pitch. The generalized response is predictable and orderly: it will measure less than that elicited by the original tone and will dim...
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generalized anxiety disorder (mental disorder)
Generalized anxiety disorder is the unrealistic or excessive worry about two or more life circumstances that is experienced more days than not for a period of six months or longer. Examples would be excessive worry about finances or danger to one’s child when there is no reason for this concern. The anxious behaviour indicative of this disorder includes symptoms of motor tension (e.g.,...
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generalized continuum hypothesis (mathematics)
Of far greater significance for the foundations of set theory is the status of AC relative to the other axioms of ZF. The status in ZF of the continuum hypothesis (CH) and its extension, the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH), are also of profound importance. In the following discussion of these questions, ZF denotes Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory without AC. The first finding was obtained by......
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generalized coordinates (mathematics)
...from the path that describes the actual history of the system. This led to independent coordinates that are necessary for the specifications of a system of a finite number of particles, or “generalized coordinates.” It also led to the so-called Lagrangian equations for a classical mechanical system in which the kinetic energy of the system is related to the generalized......
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generalized hologram
A further technique that has some value and relates to the earlier discussion of optical processing is the production of the so-called generalized or Fourier transform hologram. Here the reference beam is added coherently to a Fraunhofer diffraction pattern of the object or formed by a lens (as in the first stage of Figure 9)....
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generalized momentum (physics)
There is an even more powerful method called Hamilton’s equations. It begins by defining a generalized momentum pi, which is related to the Lagrangian and the generalized velocity q̇i by pi = ∂L/∂q̇i. A new function, the Hamiltonian, is then defined by H...
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