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Technical Glossary
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PAL
Means phase-alternating line, a television standard mostly used in Europe. PAL is a display with 50 fields per second, displayed at 25 frames per second. PAL is a development of the NTSC system, and provides superior colour.
PCI slot
Or peripheral component interconnect. PCI is a connection slot between a microprocessor and attached devices. PCI is installed on most new personal computers.
Pixel
Short for picture element. It is the smallest unit of the computer screen represented as a point with a specified colour and intensity level.
Portal
A web site that acts as a gateway to particular information by providing links and often search facilities to certain areas of knowledge. A social science portal would aim to collect web resources on social science and present links to them in structured, organized lists. Many search engines (such as Yahoo!) incorporate portal services by including categorized links to web sites in addition to their traditional search service