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20-letter words containing a, b, s, e, n

  • bureau of the census — the division of the Department of Commerce that gathers, tabulates, and correlates census statistics.
  • call someone's bluff — to challenge someone to give proof of his claims
  • carbon sequestration — the prevention of greenhouse gas build-up in the earth's atmosphere by methods such as planting trees to absorb carbon dioxide or pumping carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs
  • case based reasoning — (artificial intelligence)   (CBR) A technique for problem solving which looks for previous examples which are similar to the current problem. This is useful where heuristic knowledge is not available. There are many situations where experts are not happy to be questioned about their knowledge by people who want to write the knowledge in rules, for use in expert systems. In most of these situations, the natural way for an expert to describe his or her knowledge is through examples, stories or cases (which are all basically the same thing). Such an expert will teach trainees about the expertise by apprenticeship, i.e. by giving examples and by asking the trainees to remember them, copy them and adapt them in solving new problems if they describe situations that are similar to the new problems. CBR aims to exploit such knowledge. Some key research areas are efficient indexing, how to define "similarity" between cases and how to use temporal information.
  • central bedfordshire — a unitary authority of S central England. Pop: 252 100 (2007 est). Area: 712 sq km (275 sq miles)
  • change-speed gearbox — A change-speed gearbox is a set of movable or constant gears which allows the speed ratio between input and output shafts to be changed either manually or automatically.
  • chebyshev polynomial — a polynomial solution of the Tchebycheff equation, of the form T n (x) = cos(n cos −1 x), where n is an integer.
  • checkbook journalism — the practice of paying for a news story or an interview, or for exclusive broadcasting or publishing rights.
  • come back to someone — (of something forgotten) to return to someone's memory
  • compensating balance — Also, compensated balance, compensation balance. a balance wheel in a timepiece, designed to compensate for variations in tension in the hair spring caused by changes in temperature.
  • conservative baptist — a member of a Protestant denomination (Conservative Baptist Association of America) organized in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1948.
  • constant de rebecque — Henri Benjamin [ahn-ree ban-zha-man] /ɑ̃ˈri bɛ̃ ʒaˈmɛ̃/ (Show IPA), (Benjamin Constant) 1767–1830, French statesman and author, born in Switzerland.
  • constituent assembly — A constituent assembly is a body of representatives that is elected to create or change their country's constitution.
  • controlled substance — a drug regulated by the Federal Controlled Substances Acts, including opiates, depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens
  • cytosine arabinoside — cytarabine.
  • database transaction — (database)   A set of related changes applied to a database. The term typically implies that either all of the changes should be applied or, in the event of an error, none of them, i.e. the transaction should be atomic. Atomicity is one of the ACID properties a transaction can have, another is isolation - preventing interference between processes trying to access the database cocurrently. This is usually achieved by some form of locking - where one process takes exclusive control of a database table or row for the duration of the transaction, preventing other processes from accessing the locked data. The canonical example of a transaction is transferring money between two bank accounts by subtracting it from one and adding it to the other. Some relational database management systems require the user to explicitly start a transaction and then either commit it (if all the individual steps are successful) or roll it back (if there are any errors).
  • disability allowance — an amount of money paid by the government to people who are unable to work because of a disability. This is a general term or, in the UK, a shorter way of referring to what is officially called the Disability Living Allowance
  • disability insurance — insurance providing income to a policyholder who is disabled and cannot work.
  • distribution channel — trade: retailer
  • drum and bugle corps — a marching band of drum players and buglers.
  • duck-billed dinosaur — hadrosaur.
  • dun & bradstreet — an agency furnishing subscribers with information as to the financial standing and credit rating of businesses
  • eat out of sb's hand — If you have someone eating out of your hand, they are completely under your control.
  • electoral boundaries — the way that a country or area is divided for the purposes of voting in an election
  • enabling legislation — legislation conferring certain specified powers on a person or organization
  • endorsement in blank — an endorsement on a bill of exchange, cheque, etc, naming no payee and thus making the endorsed sum payable to the bearer
  • enterprise javabeans — (specification, business, programming)   (EJB) A server-side component architecture for writing reusable business logic and portable enterprise applications. EJB is the basis of Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Enterprise JavaBean components are written entirely in Java and run on any EJB compliant server. They are operating system, platform, and middleware independent, preventing vendor lock-in. EJB servers provide system-level services (the "plumbing") such as transactions, security, threading, and persistence. The EJB architecture is inherently transactional, distributed, multi-tier, scalable, secure, and wire protocol neutral - any protocol can be used: IIOP, JRMP, HTTP, DCOM etc. EJB 1.1 requires RMI for communication with components. EJB 2.0 is expected to require support for RMI/IIOP. EJB applications can serve assorted clients: browsers, Java, ActiveX, CORBA etc. EJB can be used to wrap legacy systems. EJB 1.1 was released in December 1999. EJB 2.0 is in development. Sun claims broad industry adoption. 30 vendors are shipping server products implementing EJB. Supporting vendors include IBM, Fujitsu, Sybase, Borland, Oracle, and Symantec. An alternative is Microsoft's MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server).
  • equilibrium constant — The equilibrium constant is the ratio between the amount of reactants and the amount of product for a particular chemical reaction, used to calculate chemical behavior.
  • feast of tabernacles — Sukkoth.
  • federal reserve bank — a U.S. federal banking system that is under the control of a central board of governors (Federal Reserve Board) with a central bank (Federal Reserve Bank) in each of 12 districts and that has wide powers in controlling credit and the flow of money as well as in performing other functions, as regulating and supervising its member banks.
  • fold-and-thrust belt — a linear or arcuate region of the earth's surface that has been subjected to severe folding and thrust faulting
  • fontainebleau school — a group of artists, many of them Italian and Flemish, who worked on the decorations of the palace of Fontainebleau in the 16th century.
  • for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
  • forbidden transition — an electronic transition in an atom, molecule, etc, that is not permitted by electric dipole selection rules
  • general public virus — (software, legal)   A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
  • greatest lower bound — a lower bound that is greater than or equal to all the lower bounds of a given set: 1 is the greatest lower bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbreviation: glb.
  • how about something? — what is your wish, opinion, or information concerning something (or someone)?
  • hudson's bay blanket — a woollen blanket with wide stripes
  • hungarian bromegrass — a pasture grass, Bromus inermis, native to Europe, having smooth blades.
  • in a class by itself — unique
  • in bad circumstances — (of a person) in a bad financial situation
  • information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
  • integration by parts — Mathematics. a method of evaluating an integral by use of the formula, ∫udv = uv − ∫vdu.
  • intelligent database — (database)   A database management system which performs data validation and processing traditionally done by application programs. Most DBMSs provide some data validation, e.g. rejecting invalid dates or alphabetic data entered into money fields, but often most processing is done by application programs. There is however no limit to the amount of processing that can be done by an intelligent database as long as the process is a standard function for that data. Examples of techniques used to implement intelligent databases are constraints, triggers and stored procedures. Moving processing to the database aids data integrity because it is guaranteed to be consistent across all uses of the data. Mainframe databases have increasingly become more intelligent and personal computer database systems are rapidly following.
  • intestinal amebiasis — amebic dysentery.
  • isosorbide dinitrate — a coronary vasodilator, C 6 H 8 N 2 O 8 , used in the prophylaxis and treatment of angina.
  • labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
  • land-office business — a lively, booming, expanding, or very profitable business.
  • law of large numbers — the theorem in probability theory that the number of successes increases as the number of experiments increases and approximates the probability times the number of experiments for a large number of experiments.
  • like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
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