The ao dai (pronounced "ow zai" in the north and "ow yai" in the south and literally meaning "long dress") is the traditional dress of the Vietnamese people. The ao dai is a contoured, full-length ...

Orenthal James Simpson (O.J.), rose through college to become a star professional football player and national icon. He took his fame from sports to Hollywood where he continued in a successful career of acting in both movies and advertisi...

The Oakland Raiders, a professional football franchise based in California, operates under the motto "Commitment to Excellence." Yet turmoil has been as much a hallmark of the team's history as high-quality play. Estab...

Gradual Commitment 1.Why is this explanation referred to as "gradual commitment"? This is because it means agreeing to do something gradually - in small steps. 2.Why is it also known as the "foot-in-the-door" technique? This is becaus...

The "struct" data type is specific to the C and C++ programming languages. The original data type came from C and then was subsumed into C++. While the C++ version retains the original semantics and syntax of the original, it has been exte...

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is not a programming language; it is a formal expression language used to express constraints and conditions on object-oriented models. The evaluation of an OCL expression always delivers a value. It do...

The sociology of knowledge as a subdiscipline in sociology deals with the social and group origins of ideas. In its brief history as a field of study, it has included the entire ideational realm (knowledge, ideas, theories, and mentalities...

A class declaration is a blueprint for what a class will look like, the data members it will contain, and the functions it will have. In C++ a class declaration is typically made in a "header file" or "include file." A class declaration is...

The most sensitive, sophisticated, and flexible instrument of observation available today is the human being. All the recent advances in technology have not changed this central fact; we can monitor communications, transcribe conversations...

Astronomers study the universe by measuring electromagnetic radiation—gamma rays, X rays, optical and infrared radiation, and radio waves—emitted by planets, stars, galaxies, and other distant objects. Because Earth's ...

Obsidian is volcanic glass with a chemical composition similar to that of rhyolite or granite. It is most commonly black, although greenish to reddish and banded varieties also occur. In addition to its dark color and glassy luster, obsidi...

OCCASIONALISM. [This entry deals specifically with Islamic occasionalism.] The adjective occasional, as applied to causes or events, is used by medieval European theologians such as Thomas Aquinas to mean an "indirect cause which de...

Few noticeable changes have occurred in the occupational situations of African-Americans since the 1990s. In 2002 African-Americans accounted for 10.9 percent of the civilian labor force age sixteen and over. Of the entire employed popula...

The only Americans, other than American Indians, who ever experienced extended, large-scale enemy occupation were the people of the Confederate South. The "enemy" was the U.S. army, which set forth in 1861 to conquer the Conf...

There are various occupational lung diseases. Among them are: Asbestosis, a chronic, progressive inflammation of the lung; it is a consequence of prolonged exposure to large quantities of asbestos, a material once widely used in constructi...

A relatively new concern that dates roughly to the post-Industrial Revolution era, occupation health and safety is a field that involves measures to prevent or minimize dangers to people in their places of work, i.e., the office, farm, bui...

The American Occupational Therapy Association defines occupational therapy as "the therapeutic use of self-care, work/productive activities, and play/leisure activities to increase independent function, enhance development, and prevent dis...

When people think of the ocean, they usually think of the clear, blue waters just beyond the shores where creatures of every color and size dwell. The scientific name for this area is the Pelagic zone, the area of the ocean where most o...

"The will to understand, conserve, and protect ocean life is at the very core of the Ocean Conservatory's mission. To fulfill this mission, the Ocean Conservatory seeks to: protect marine ecosystems, prevent marine pollutio...

Ocean disposal of society's waste got its start indirectly long before the Agricultural Age when nearby streams, lakes, and estuaries were useful as waste repositories. As civilization moved to the coastal zone and navigation began ...

Two-thirds of Earth's surface is covered by oceans. These bodies of water are vast reservoirs of renewable energy. In a four-day period, the planet's oceans absorb an amount of thermal energy from the sun and kinetic energy from the win...

Ocean dumping is internationally defined as "any deliberate disposal at sea of wastes or other matter from vessels, aircraft, platforms, or other man-made structures at sea, and any deliberate disposal at sea of vessels, aircraft,...

For many years, scientists have been aware of one enormous reservoir of energy on the earth's surface: the oceans. As sunlight falls on the oceans, its energy is absorbed by seawater. The oceans are in one sense, therefore, a huge...

A deep-sea trench is a narrow, elongate, v-shaped depression in the ocean floor. Trenches are the deepest parts of the ocean, and the lowest points on Earth, reaching depths of nearly 7 mi (10 km) below sea level. These long, narrow, curvi...