Mary Beth Wayne

The San Peoples Land 2
Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something — an integer quantity represented by a sequence of digits, typically — that can be stored or transmitted through a network. Two examples of usual encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode. While most character encodings map characters to numbers and/or bit sequences, Morse codeinstead represents characters using a series of electrical impulses of varying length.

Historically, the term character has been widely used by industry professionals to refer to an encoded character, often as defined by the programming language or API. Likewise, character set has been widely used to refer to a specific repertoire of characters that have been mapped to specific bit sequences or numerical codes. The term glyph is used to describe a particular visual appearance of a character. Many computer fonts consist of glyphs that are indexed by the numerical code of the corresponding character.

With the advent and widespread acceptance of Unicode[2] and bit-agnostic coded character sets,[clarification needed] a character is increasingly being seen as a unit of information, independent of any particular visual manifestation. The ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) International Standard defines character, or abstract character as "a member of a set of elements used for the organisation, control, or representation of data". Unicode's definition supplements this with explanatory notes that encourage the reader to differentiate between characters, graphemes, and glyphs, among other things. Such differentiation is an instance of the wider theme of the separation of presentation and content.

For example, the Hebrew letter aleph ("א") is often used by mathematicians to denote certain kinds of infinity, but it is also used in ordinary Hebrew text. In Unicode, these two uses are considered different characters, and have two different Unicode numerical identifiers ("code points"), though they may be rendered identically. Conversely, the Chinese logogram for water ("水") may have a slightly different appearance in Japanese texts than it does in Chinese texts, and local typefaces may reflect this. But nonetheless in Unicode they are considered the same character, and share the same code point.

The Unicode standard also differentiates between these abstract characters and coded characters or encoded characters that have been paired with numeric codes that facilitate their representation in computers.

Background
Backgrounding is an intermediate stage sometimes used in cattle production which begins after weaning and ends upon placement in a feedlot. Background feeding relies more heavily on forage (e.g., pasture, hay) in combination with grains to increase a calf’s weight by several hundred pounds and to build up immunity to diseases before it enters a feedlot. Some cattle operations specialize in backgrounding.

This article incorporates public domain material from the Congressional Research Service document "Report for Congress: Agriculture: A Glossary of Terms, Programs, and Laws, 2005 Edition" by Jasper Womach.

Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving the conflicts that occur when articles about two or more different topics could have the same "natural" page title. This categorycontains disambiguation pages: non-article pages containing links to other Wikipedia articles and disambiguation pages.

Disambiguation pages are added to Category:Disambiguation pages by placing the template on the page itself. Other templates are available that place articles in more specific disambiguation subcategories. A page may also be assessed as "disambiguation-class" by various WikiProjects by including "|class=Disambig" in a WikiProject template on the talk page of the disambiguation page. This places the talk page in a subcategory of Category:Disambig-Class articles. For the Manual of Style guideline about disambiguation pages, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages.
 * Do not add articles to these sub-categories or create additional sub-categories until you read Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)—most of the sub-categories do not comply with the MOS and will be removed.
 * Links to disambiguation pages other than from the top of articles are usually mistakes. Find and fix them at disambiguation pages with links.

Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous, most often because it refers to more than one subject covered by Wikipedia, either as the main topic of an article, or as a subtopic covered by an article in addition to the article's main topic. For example, the word "Mercury" can refer to a chemical element, a planet, a Roman god, and many other things.

There are three important aspects to disambiguation: This page discusses the standard ways of handling the above issues. For detailed advice about the format of disambiguation pages, see the style manual.
 * Naming articles in such a way that each has a unique title. For example, three of the articles dealing with topics ordinarily called "Mercury" are titled Mercury (element), Mercury (planet)and Mercury (mythology).
 * Making the links for ambiguous terms point to the correct article title. For example, an editor of an astronomy article may have created a link to Mercury, and this should be corrected to point to Mercury (planet).
 * Ensuring that a reader who searches for a topic using a particular term can get to the information on that topic quickly and easily, whichever of the possible topics it might be. For example, the page Mercury is a disambiguation page—a non-article page which lists various meanings of "Mercury" and which links to the articles that cover them. (As discussed below, however, ambiguous terms do not always require a disambiguation page.)