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Wadai
Historical African kingdom, central Africa. Located east of Lake Chad and west of Darfur, it was founded in the 16th cent. A Muslim dynasty was established there c.1630, and though long subordinate to Darfur, it became independent by the 1790s and began a period of rapid expansion. It came under French influence in 1899 and French control 1912-14. The area is now largely in E Chad.


Ada
High-level computer programming language whose development was initiated in 1975 by the U.S. Dept. of Defense and standardized in 1983. Ada (named for the countess of Lovelace) was intended to be a common language for use on the department's computers, which were produced by many different manufacturers. It is similar to Pascal but contains many additional features convenient for the development of large-scale, multiplatform programs. The 1995 revision, called Ada 95, supports object-oriented design methodology (see object-oriented programming).


Dada
Nihilistic movement in the arts that originated in Zurich in 1916 and flourished in New York, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover in the early 20th cent. The name, French for "hobbyhorse," selected by a chance procedure, was adopted by a group of artists incl. J. Arp, M. Duchamp, M. Ray, and F. Picabia to symbolize their emphasis on the illogical and absurd, growing out of disgust with bourgeois values and despair over World War I. The archetypal Dada forms of expression were the nonsense poem and the ready-made. Dada had far-reaching effects on the art of the 20th cent.; the creative techniques of accident and chance were sustained in Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, conceptual art, and Pop art.


Nadar
French photographer, caricaturist, and writer. When his father's bankruptcy forced him to leave medical school in 1838, he settled in Paris and began selling caricatures to humor magazines. By 1853 he had become an expert photographer and had opened a portrait studio. His studies of prominent Parisians such as C. Baudelaire (1855) and E. Delacroix (1855) were exceptional in their naturalness, in contrast to the stiff formality of most portraits of the time. His studio became a favorite meeting place of the Paris intelligentsia, and was the site of the first Impressionist exhibit. A tireless innovator, in 1855 he patented the idea of using aerial photographs in mapmaking and surveying, and in 1858 he himself made the first successful aerial photograph, from a balloon. He also wrote novels, essays, satires, and autobiographical works.


radar
System that uses electromagnetic echoes to detect and locate objects in space. It can also measure precisely the distance (range) to an object and the speed at which the object is moving toward or away from the observing unit. Radar (the name is derived from radio detecting and ranging) originated in the experimental work of H. Hertz in the late 1880s. During World War II, British ...

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