Aaron Burr
(1756–1836)US Democratic Republican statesman. After losing the presidential election to Jefferson in 1800, Burr was elected Vice-President. He was defeated in the contest for the governorship of New ...
abacus
An ancient device for performing arithmetic calculations by sliding beads along rods or in grooves. Despite the spread of electronic calculators and computers, the abacus is still widely used in the ...
abduction
An inference process widely used in artificial intelligence, particularly in expert systems and rule-based systems. In diagnosis, for example, there may be a rule like “if measles then red spots” so ...
aberrant decoding
Making sense of a message or text in terms of a different code from the one used to encode it (Eco). This can be the basis for cultural misunderstandings: for example, the hand gesture made by ...
abortion
There is no actual prohibition in the Bible against aborting a foetus. Nevertheless, in the unanimously accepted Jewish consensus, abortion is a very serious offence, though foeticide is not treated ...
above-the-line
A term which now has come to mean mass audience advertising and promotional campaigns—for example, to describe campaigns that are targeted at high volumes of consumers in a large number of countries ...
Abraham Lincoln
(1809–65)US Republican statesman, 16th President of the USA (1861–65). His election as President on an anti‐slavery platform antipathetic to the interests of the southern states helped precipitate ...
absent presence
1. In poststructuralist theory, a concept most closely associated with Derrida, for whom it refers to the mythical status of the supposed hub of any system of ideas (see also deconstruction; ...
absent signifier
1. A particular feature which is perceived as missing from a representation in any medium, especially where it is ‘notable by its absence’, breaching expectations. See also commutation test; ...
academies
Are societies or institutions for the cultivation and promotion of literature, the arts or science, or of some particular branch of science such as medicine, for example, the Académie de ...
