United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), specialized agency of the United Nations, with headquarters in Paris. Its counterpart in the League of Nations was the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation. UNESCO was founded in 1945 and became an agency of the United Nations in 1946. It has 193 members and six associate members. The organization's policies are decided by the general conference, which meets every two years; it consists of one representative for each member. The executive board, with 58 members elected for four-year terms, and a secretariat, headed by a director-general, carry out the program. National commissions or cooperating bodies of member states act as liaisons between UNESCO and national educational, scientific, and cultural organizations. UNESCO seeks to further world peace by encouraging free interchange of ideas and of cultural and scientific achievements and by improving education.

After World War II, UNESCO worked for the physical reconstruction of the educational facilities of war-devastated countries by building up library and museum collections. Since 1950 it has organized projects for primary education in Latin America, Asia, and Africa; it has also encouraged cultural exchanges between East and West, undertaking translations of important writings and organizing personal exchanges. A most important long-range UNESCO program concerns the problem of "fundamental education"—teaching people to read and write and to meet the problems of their environment. Centers to train educators have been established in Cambodia, India, South Korea, Liberia, Thailand, and Turkey, and fundamental-education centers have been set up in Latin America and in the Middle East.

In 1959, UNESCO set up an international committee to preserve and restore cultural property, which played a leading role in preserving Egyptian monuments threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam (see under Aswan). Funds were collected and experts assembled from all over the world in a successful effort to save the monuments, including the famous Abu-Simbel temples of Ramses II. In the 1970s and 80s, UNESCO was mired in controversy over the insistence of the developing nations, supported by the Soviet bloc, that it establish a "New World Information Order." At issue was a move to establish an international press code and licensing system for journalists, facilitating press controls by governments. The United States withdrew its membership (1984), followed by Great Britain and Singapore, charging UNESCO with budgetary extravagance and hostility to free press and free markets. By the mid-1990s, however, UNESCO was helping E European journalists adjust to a free press. Great Britain rejoined in 1997, the United States in 2003, and Singapore in 2007.

The belief that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by God out of nothing. Biblical creationists believe that the story told in Genesis of God's six-day creation of the universe and all living things is literally correct. Scientific creationists believe that a creator made all that exists, though they may not hold that the Genesis story is a literal history of that creation. Creationism became the object of renewed interest among conservative religious groups following the wide dissemination of the theory of biological evolution, first systematically propounded by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859). In the early 20th century some U.S. states banned the teaching of evolution, leading to the Scopes Trial. In the late 20th century many creationists advocated a view known as intelligent design, which was essentially a scientifically modern version of the argument from design for the existence of God as set forth in the late 18th century by the Anglican clergyman William Paley.

Learn more about creationism with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Scientific Atlanta Inc, a Cisco company, is a Georgia-based manufacturer of cable television, telecommunications, and broadband equipment. Both Scientific Atlanta and Cisco can trace their roots to academia. Scientific Atlanta was founded in 1951 by a group of rogue engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, while Cisco’s founders were computer scientists from Stanford University who started the company in 1984.

Scientific Atlanta is a leading supplier of transmission networks for broadband access to the home, set-tops, cable modems and digital interactive subscriber systems for video, high-speed Internet, voice over IP (VoIP) networks, and worldwide customer service and support. Products for the cable TV industry, such as fiber optic network equipment, digital cable boxes (as well as universal remotes to go with them), and cable modems, dominate Scientific Atlanta's sales. Scientific Atlanta also supplies distribution technology to networks such as Bloomberg Television, CNN, ESPN and many others.

On November 18, 2005, Scientific Atlanta announced that it would be purchased by Cisco Systems in a US$6.9 billion cash deal.

On February 25, 2006, Cisco Systems announced that it had completed acquisition of Scientific Atlanta in a cash deal that paid $43 per share. The total cash value of the deal was roughly US$7 billion, or US$5.1 billion net of Scientific Atlanta's cash balance, and also about US$5.1 billion over their 2005 shareholders' equity. In its fiscal year 2005, Scientific Atlanta earned $1.36 per common share (diluted).

Scientific Atlanta is still led by CEO Jim McDonald as a part of Cisco's Service Provider Routing Technology Group under the direction of Senior Vice President and General Manager Tony Bates. One of Scientific Alanta's biggest success stories in the last couple of years has been the European division that is located in Kortrijk, Belgium. The company was honored at the 2008 Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for development of interactive Video-on-Demand infrastructure and signaling, leading to large scale VOD implementations.

External links

• Scientific Atlanta official site