dance fly, (family Empididae), any member of a family of insects in the fly order, Diptera, that are named for their erratic movements while in flight. Dance flies are small with a disproportionately large thorax and a long tapering abdomen. In males, the abdomen usually bears conspicuous genitalia

empire, major political unit in which the metropolis, or single sovereign authority, exercises control over territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples through formal annexations or various forms of informal domination. Empire has been a characteristic form of political

electronic game: Personal computer games: Empire had been developed as part of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) Project at the University of Illinois during the early 1970s, and the possibilities of social interaction and networked-based graphics were thoroughly explored in this project and the games that resulted…

Naomi Campbell: Personal life and later career: …shows American Horror Story (2015), Empire (2015–16), and Star (2017–18). She developed a modeling competition reality show, The Face, in 2013. Additionally, she was named a contributing editor for the British edition of Vogue in 2017. She received a Fashion Icon Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America…

underground film: …did a study of the Empire State Building, Empire (1964), that lasts eight hours. During the 1920s filmmaking was stimulated by nonobjective art, represented by the Dadaist, Cubist, and Surrealist movements. Leading filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Sergey Eisenstein made private experiments in addition to their publicly…

Sir Henry Parkes: …following year he launched the Empire, a newspaper he ran until 1858 and through which he campaigned for fully representative government. He first held public office in 1854 and served almost without interruption as a representative and often as a minister or premier until 1894.

Helen Hunt: …and in the TV miniseries Empire Falls (2005), which was based on a novel by Richard Russo. In 2007 Hunt directed her first feature-length film, Then She Found Me, a comedy-drama that she also cowrote, produced, and starred in.

Funny Cide: …favourite of the field was Empire Maker, who had beaten Funny Cide in the Wood Memorial. With his odds set at nearly 13–1, Funny Cide surprised many in the racing world with his length-and-three-quarters win.

public relations: …to 1933 in England, the Empire Marketing Board used large-scale publicity to promote trade; it has been called “the archetype of government public relations departments.” In Great Britain, as in the United States, the appointment of public relations directors by various government departments during World War II was a prelude…

Russia: The Petrine state: …tsardom of Muscovy into the Empire of All Russias, and he himself received the title of emperor from the Senate at the conclusion of the peace with Sweden. Not only did the title aim at identifying the new Russia with European political tradition, but it also bespoke the new conception…

Olivia Colman: Films: The Lobster, The Favourite, and The Lost Daughter: Joyride and in Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, about employees at a struggling movie theater in the 1980s. She also lent her voice to several animated films, including The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), and to the TV miniseries Watership Down (2018).…

Alberto Lista: Among his best-known works are El imperio de la estupidez (1798; “The Empire of Stupidity”), a critical work in the manner of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad; Ensayos literarios y críticos (1844; “Literary and Critical Essays”); and Lecciones de literatura española (1836; “Lessons in Spanish Literature”), lectures given at the University of…

Matapa, a Southern African empire ruled by a line of kings known as the Mwene Matapa. Matapa encompassed the territory between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, in what is now Zimbabwe and Mozambique, from the 14th to the 17th century. It is associated with the historical site known as Great

Kathy Acker: Literary works and other projects: …other works of fiction are Empire of the Senseless (1988) and Literal Madness (1988), a collection of her novels Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Florida.

J.G. Ballard: …in his largely autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984; film 1987). The devastated city and nearby countryside also provided settings for several of his apocalyptic novels. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, but left without a degree. His first short stories appeared in the 1950s. Beginning in the 1960s, Ballard…

Steven Spielberg: Commercial success: Empire of the Sun (1987), scripted by Tom Stoppard, was a carefully detailed re-creation of the World War II prison-camp milieu of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel of the same name. But where The Color Purple was able to convey emotional truth, Empire of the Sun…

Herman Frasch: …in 1885 he organized the Empire Oil Company, Petrolia, Ont. For this firm he devised a method (also called the Frasch process) of removing sulfur from crude oil. He also patented processes for manufacturing white lead, sodium carbonate, and carbon for the filaments in electric light bulbs. The Union Sulphur…

Renée Zellweger: Dazed and Confused and Jerry Maguire: 45 (1994) and Empire Records (1995), and she starred with a then equally unknown Matthew McConaughey in The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994; rereleased as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation). Zellweger’s surprise casting as the love interest of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire catapulted her…

British Broadcasting Corporation: BBC World Service radio broadcasts began in 1932 as the Empire Service. By the early 21st century the service broadcast in more than 40 languages to roughly 120 million people worldwide. World Service Television began broadcasting in 1991 and unveiled a 24-hour news channel, BBC News…

New York, constituent state of the United States of America, one of the 13 original colonies and states. New York is bounded to the west and north by Lake Erie, the Canadian province of Ontario, Lake Ontario, and the Canadian province of Quebec; to the east by the New England states of Vermont,

Empire State Building, steel-framed skyscraper rising 102 stories that was completed in New York City in 1931 and was the tallest building in the world until 1971. The Empire State Building is located in Midtown Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. It remains one of the most distinctive and

Alicia Keys: Musical success: … on the chart-topping single “Empire State of Mind,” and in December she released her fourth studio album, The Element of Freedom. The Grammy-winning Girl on Fire (2012) featured a roster of guest producers and vocalists that included Nicki Minaj, Dr. Dre, and Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz. The socially conscious…

Irvin Kershner: Star Wars, James Bond, and RoboCop: …his at USC, to helm The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second installment in the original series. With Lucas relegating his contribution to the basic plot, Kershner made arguably the best of the series’s original three films. He then turned to the blockbuster James Bond franchise with Never Say Never…

Empire style, major phase of Neoclassical art that flourished in France during the time of the First Empire (1804–14). The Empire style was encouraged by Napoleon’s desire for a style inspired by the grandeur of ancient Egypt and imperial Rome. In architecture it was exemplified by such Parisian

climate classification: Empirical classifications: Most empirical classifications are those that seek to group climates based on one or more aspects of the climate system. While many such phenomena have been used in this way, natural vegetation stands out as one of prime importance. The view held by…

empirical evidence, information gathered directly or indirectly through observation or experimentation that may be used to confirm or disconfirm a scientific theory or to help justify, or establish as reasonable, a person’s belief in a given proposition. A belief may be said to be justified if

chemical formula: An empirical formula consists of symbols representing elements in a compound, such as Na for sodium and Cl for chlorine, and subscripts indicating the relative number of atoms of each constituent element. (A subscript is not used, however, unless the number is more than one.) Thus,…

philosophy of science: Difficulties: …the notion of a scientific law. Laws are generalizations about a range of natural phenomena, sometimes universal (“Any two bodies attract one another with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them”) and sometimes statistical (“The chance…

climate classification: Empirical classifications: Most empirical classifications are those that seek to group climates based on one or more aspects of the climate system. While many such phenomena have been used in this way, natural vegetation stands out as one of prime importance. The view held by…

philosophy of mind: Philosophy of mind and empirical psychology: Philosophy is often concerned with the most general questions about the nature of things: What is the nature of beauty? What is it to have genuine knowledge? What makes an action virtuous or an assertion true? Such questions can be asked with respect…

psychological testing: Primary characteristics of methods or instruments: Empirical validity (also called statistical or predictive validity) describes how closely scores on a test correspond (correlate) with behaviour as measured in other contexts. Students’ scores on a test of academic aptitude, for example, may be compared with their school grades (a commonly used criterion).…

empiricism, in philosophy, the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience. This broad definition accords

Wilfrid Sellars: …publication of his essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” a critique of a conception of mind and knowledge inherited from René Descartes (1596–1650). Sellars there attacked what he called the “myth of the given,” the Cartesian idea that one can have immediate and indubitable perceptual knowledge of one’s…

empiricism: Broader senses: …call a doctor an “Empiric” has been to call him a quack—a usage traceable to a sect of medical men who were opposed to the elaborate medical—and in some views metaphysical—theories inherited from the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (129–c. 216 ce). The medical empiricists opposed to Galen preferred…

mental disorder: The psychotherapies: …psychotherapies into “religio-magical” and “empirico-scientific” categories, with religio-magical approaches relying on the shared beliefs of the therapist and patient in spiritual or other supernatural processes or powers. This article is concerned, however, with the latter forms of psychotherapy—those that have been developed through scientific psychology and are implemented by…

music: Ancient Greek ideas: …3rd-century voice was that of Sextus Empiricus, who said that music was an art of tones and rhythms only that meant nothing outside itself.

Richard Avenarius: …theory of knowledge known as empiriocriticism, according to which the major task of philosophy is to develop a “natural concept of the world” based on pure experience. Traditional metaphysicians believed in two categories of experience, inner and outer, and held that outer experience applies to sensory perception, which supplies raw…

employee association, in U.S. private industry, an organization of employees that is concerned primarily with welfare and recreational activities. In public employment, employee associations also advocate legislative and administrative action in matters of compensation and working conditions.

fringe benefit, any nonwage payment or benefit (e.g., pension plans, profit-sharing programs, vacation pay, and company-paid life, health, and unemployment insurance programs) granted to employees by employers. It may be required by law, granted unilaterally by employers, or obtained through

human resources management, the management of the people in working organizations. It is also frequently called personnel management, industrial relations, employee relations, manpower management, and personnel administration. It represents a major subcategory of general management, focusing

organized labour: Establishment of industrial unionism: , company unions) that they had hoped would satisfy the requirements of New Deal labour policy. But when that strategy failed, managers were prepared to have their workplace regimes incorporated into contractual relationships with independent unions within the terms of the Wagner Act.

What’s better than earning a salary? How about earning a salary with incentive stock options that pay off if your employer does well (thanks in part to your hard work)? Employers like them, too. Not only do they help to align incentives, but depending on how the options are structured, the employer

employee training, vocational instruction for employed persons. During and after World War II, in-service training by employers became a common practice. The rapid changeover in industry from peace to war led to training schemes for semiskilled workers, for workers transferred to new jobs, and for

Roy Del Ruth: Early films: …anything to increase circulation, and Employees’ Entrance (1933) starred Warren William as an unscrupulous department-store manager who wreaks havoc on the lives of those around him. Del Ruth handled five more films in 1933: The Little Giant, with Edward G. Robinson in good comic form as a beer baron who,…

ARCHIVED TOPIC: This topic was archived on March 11, 2025, and will no longer be updated. Although the debate about employer vaccine mandates in the United States recently centered upon COVID-19 requirements, mandates and the debate about them are as old as the country itself. The first American

United Kingdom: Gladstone and Disraeli: By the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875, “masters” and “men” were put on an equal footing regarding breaches of contract, while by the Trade-Union Act of 1875, which went much further than the Liberal Act of 1871, trade unionists were allowed to engage in peaceful picketing…

Abundance and Unemployment: Our Future: …significant and rapid loss of jobs, from truck driver to anesthesiologist. Don’t get me wrong: it is not the magnitude of this change that worries me. I believe that people are continually losing their jobs to increasing technology and ultimately “upskilling” themselves (in partnership with technology) to become even better…

government economic policy: Stabilization theory: …the United States in the Employment Act of 1946, which stated: “The Congress hereby declares that it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal Government to . . . promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power.” The Employment Act was less specific as to policy than the British…

employment agency, an organization to help workers find employment and employers find workers. Employment agencies may be either privately owned or publicly provided or managed. Their services are available to the unemployed, to those who seek different or better jobs, and to employers. A private

New Zealand: Labour and taxation: …after the passage of the Employment Contracts Act (1991), which ended compulsory union membership, the number of union members fell dramatically.

Antonin Scalia: Judicial philosophy: …ruling for the majority in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which reduced the level of scrutiny that courts needed to apply in considering the validity of government restrictions on the free exercise of religion.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.: Dissenting opinions: In Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (1990), however, the court held that the balancing test must be abandoned because it “would create an extraordinary right to ignore generally applicable laws that are not supported by ‘compelling governmental interest’ on the basis…

Immanuel Kant: Tutor and Privatdozent: Continet Monadologiam Physicam (1756; The Employment in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, of Which Sample I Contains the Physical Monadology)—also known as the Monodologia Physica—contrasted the Newtonian methods of thinking with those employed in the philosophy then prevailing in German universities. This was the philosophy of Gottfried…

workers’ compensation, social welfare program through which employers bear some of the cost of their employees’ work-related injuries and occupational diseases. Workers’ compensation was first introduced in Germany in 1884, and by the middle of the 20th century most countries in the world had some

payroll tax, levy imposed on wages and salaries. In contrast to income taxes, payroll taxes do not include income from capital sources such as dividends and interest. Taxes on payrolls are seldom used as a source of general revenues, although in some developing countries the income tax base may

government economic policy: Stabilization theory: …system does not automatically generate full employment and stable prices and that governments should pursue deliberate stabilization policies. There has been much controversy among economists over the substance and meaning of Keynes’s theoretical contribution. Essentially, he argued that high levels of unemployment might persist indefinitely unless governments took monetary and…

leafhopper: The potato leafhopper (Empoasca fabae) is a destructive potato pest that causes that plant’s leaves to turn brown and curl; the insect plugs the plant’s xylem and phloem vessels, thus interfering with the transportation of food products. Adult potato leafhoppers are green with white spots on…

leafhopper: The apple leafhopper (Empoasca maligna) causes apple foliage to pale and become specked with white spots. The adult insects are greenish white, and they are host specific for either apple or rose. There is one generation per year.

Empoli, town, Toscana (Tuscany) regione, north-central Italy, on the lower Arno River. During the medieval Florentine wars, Empoli was the scene of the Ghibelline congress of 1260, where Farinata degli Uberti successfully opposed the destruction of defeated Florence, an episode referred to in

Emporia, city, seat (1860) of Lyon county, east-central Kansas, U.S. It lies between the Cottonwood and Neosho rivers. Established in 1857 by a town company whose charter prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol within the town site, it was named after a legendary ancient city in North Africa

Emporia: The Emporia Gazette became probably the best-known and respected “small-town” newspaper in the United States under the editorship of William Allen White, who bought it in 1895. The William Allen White House is a state historic site. The city is now the trading and shipping…

Emporia State University, public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Emporia, Kansas, U.S. It consists of the schools of Business and of Library and Information Management, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Teachers College. In addition to undergraduate studies, the

Emporia State University, public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Emporia, Kansas, U.S. It consists of the schools of Business and of Library and Information Management, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Teachers College. In addition to undergraduate studies, the

Phocaea: …as Massilia (Marseille, France) and Emporion (Ampurias in northeastern Spain). When Phocaea was besieged by the Persians about 545 bce, most of the citizens chose emigration rather than submission. In 190 bce, allied with the Seleucids against Rome and Pergamum, the Phocaeans so savagely repelled the Roman forces that the…

Phocaea: …as Massilia (Marseille, France) and Emporion (Ampurias in northeastern Spain). When Phocaea was besieged by the Persians about 545 bce, most of the citizens chose emigration rather than submission. In 190 bce, allied with the Seleucids against Rome and Pergamum, the Phocaeans so savagely repelled the Roman forces that the…

Steve Forbes: …of free-market economics, he founded Empower America, a group advocating so-called supply-side policies, including low taxes and deregulation, as the best means of stimulating growth.

Cuba: Transportation and telecommunications: The Cuban Aviation Enterprise (Empresa Cubana de Aviación), or Cubana, is the state-run airline. International airports operate at Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Camagüey, and Varadero, and domestic airports serve Guantánamo, Holguín, Las Tunas, La Colonia (in Pinar del Río), Nueva Gerona, and several other locations.

Varig, Brazilian airline founded on May 7, 1927, with the assistance of a Berlin trading concern, Kondor Syndicat, which had begun flights in the state of Rio Grande do Sul the previous January. Thereafter, Varig opened several more intrastate routes. Major expansion did not begin until 1953,

Angola: Resources and power: The National Diamond Enterprise of Angola, a parastatal company, is responsible for approving diamond concessions, and it also licenses buyers. In 1992–94 most Angolan diamonds on the market were mined and smuggled from regions controlled by UNITA. The Angolan government gained control of this area in…

Endesa, Spanish energy company that is one of the largest private conglomerates in the world. Headquarters are in Madrid. Endesa’s activities are aimed at generating, transporting, distributing, and selling electrical energy and related services. The company was founded by the Spanish government in

emperor: …female rulers were always called empress; both males and females held both titles, i.e., tsar (or tsaritsa) and imperator (or imperatritsa).

Cixi was the consort of the Xianfeng emperor (reigned 1850–61), mother of the Tongzhi emperor (reigned 1861–75), adoptive mother of the Guangxu emperor (reigned 1875–1908), and a towering presence over the Chinese empire for almost half a century. By maintaining authority over the Manchu imperial

Victoria was the consort of the emperor Frederick III of Germany and the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Great Britain. Well-educated and multilingual from childhood (spent largely at Windsor and Buckingham Palace), Victoria remained all her life strongly devoted to England and,

José Sarria was a Latino American drag performer and political activist who was the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States. (He ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—the legislative body of the city and county—in 1961). Sarria was the

Empress of Blandings, fictional creature, a huge Berkshire sow resembling a balloon with ears and a tail, in stories and novels by P.G. Wodehouse. She is the property and pride of Lord Emsworth, and she has won three consecutive Fat Pigs silver medals at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. In the

Oscar Hijuelos: Empress of the Splendid Season (1999) continues the examination of immigrant life, this time revealing the discrepancy between the characters’ rich self-images and their banal lives. In Beautiful María of My Soul; or, The True Story of María García y Cifuentes, the Lady Behind a…

Sir Richard Empson was an English lawyer and minister of King Henry VII, remembered, with Edmund Dudley, for his unpopular administration of the crown revenues. Empson studied law in the Middle Temple and from 1475 held posts in Northamptonshire and then in Lancaster. From March 1486 Henry VII

William Empson was an English critic and poet known for his immense influence on 20th-century literary criticism and for his rational, metaphysical poetry. Empson was educated at Winchester College and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He earned degrees in mathematics and in English literature,

emptiness, in mysticism and religion, a state of “pure consciousness” in which the mind has been emptied of all particular objects and images; also, the undifferentiated reality (a world without distinctions and multiplicity) or quality of reality that the emptied mind reflects or manifests. The

Alberto Moravia: La noia (1960; The Empty Canvas) is the story of a painter unable to find meaning either in love or work. Many of Moravia’s books were made into motion pictures.

Graham Greene: The unfinished manuscript The Empty Chair, a murder mystery that Greene began writing in 1926, was discovered in 2008; serialization of it began the following year.

the Who: …Who-like rock records such as Empty Glass (1980) to The Iron Man (1989), a less-successful experiment in musical theatre that nevertheless paved the way for the triumphant delivery of Tommy to Broadway in 1993. Townshend, Daltrey, and Entwistle reunited for tours in 1989 and 1996–97. The Who was about to…

Abraham Cruzvillegas: Empty Lot was an installation for the inaugural Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern in London. The artist did not regard it finished until the exhibition closed on April 3, 2016. Six months earlier his team had collected earth from 36 locations across Greater London to…

microscope: The theory of image formation: This latter condition is called empty magnification.

Joel Grey: Grey’s other films included The Empty Mirror (1996), in which he played Joseph Goebbels; Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000); Choke (2008); and tick, tick…BOOM! (2021), a musical directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The Golden Girls: Accolades, camp appeal, and legacy: A spin-off series, Empty Nest, debuted in 1988 and ran until 1995.

Rubʿ al-Khali, vast desert region in the southern Arabian Peninsula, constituting the largest portion of the Arabian Desert. It covers an area of about 250,000 square miles (650,000 square km) in a structural basin lying mainly in southeastern Saudi Arabia, with lesser portions in Yemen, Oman, and

formal logic: Set theory: …same, there is only one null class, which is therefore usually called the null class (or sometimes the empty class); it is symbolized by Λ or ø. The notation x = y is used for “x is identical with y,” and ∼(x = y) is usually abbreviated as x ≠…

history of logic: Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF): Axiom of elementary sets. There exists a set with no members: the null, or empty, set. For any two objects a and b, there exists a set (unit set) having as its only member a, as well as a set having as its only members…

Olga Tokarczuk: Novels and other works: …2024 she published Empuzjon (The Empusium), her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize. Set in a Polish sanitarium on the eve of World War I, the book is a subversive reimagining of Thomas Mann’s classic work The Magic Mountain (1924).

Olga Tokarczuk: Novels and other works: …2024 she published Empuzjon (The Empusium), her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize. Set in a Polish sanitarium on the eve of World War I, the book is a subversive reimagining of Thomas Mann’s classic work The Magic Mountain (1924).

empyema, accumulation of pus in a cavity of the body, usually in the pleura, which are the serous membranes covering the lungs. Empyema is the result of a microbial, usually bacterial, infection in a body cavity. Thoracic empyema may be characterized by fever, coughing, shortness of breath, and

Yunus Emre was a poet and mystic who exercised a powerful influence on Turkish literature. Though legend obscures the facts of his life, he is known to have been a Sufi (Islamic mystic) who sat for 40 years at the feet of his master, Tapduk Emre. Yunus Emre was well versed in mystical philosophy,

MRSA: Mechanisms of resistance: …strains of epidemic MRSA (EMRSA), which first appeared in the early 1990s—their emergence corresponding to the dramatic increase in MRSA infections in the following years. The mechanism of MRSA resistance to glycopeptide antibiotics remains unclear. It is suspected that, in people simultaneously infected with MRSA and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE),…

maglev: Electromagnetic suspension (EMS) and electrodynamic suspension (EDS): Electromagnetic suspension (EMS) uses the attractive force between magnets present on the train’s sides and underside and on the guideway to levitate the train. A variation on EMS, called Transrapid, employs an electromagnet to lift the train off the guideway. The attraction from magnets present…

European Union: Creation of the European Economic Community: …in the establishment of the European Monetary System in 1979.

Ems River, river, northwestern Germany. It rises on the south slope of the Teutoburger Forest and flows generally northwest and north through the Länder of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony to the east side of the Dollart (baylike enlargement of its estuary), immediately south of Emden. It

Ems telegram, report of an encounter between King William I of Prussia and the French ambassador; the telegram was sent from Ems (Bad Ems) in the Prussian Rhineland on July 13, 1870, to the Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Its publication in a version edited by Bismarck so as to purposely

Ukraine: Ukraine under direct imperial Russian rule: …a secret imperial decree, the Ems Ukaz, of Alexander II in 1876 and extended to the publication of belles lettres in Ukrainian, the importation of Ukrainian-language books, and public readings and stage performances in the language. The prohibition even extended to education—a major contributing factor to the low rate of…

Hieronymus Emser was a German theologian, lecturer, editor, and polemicist who is remembered chiefly for his long public controversy with Martin Luther at the onset of the Reformation. Emser studied humanities at the University of Tübingen and jurisprudence and theology at the University of Basel.