The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is the principle federal agency managing public land RESOURCES in the United States. Created in 1849, the DOI manages almost half a billion acres of federal property.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is a cabinet-level agency in the federal government created in 1913 with a mission “to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) is the major department managing the federal government’s domestic and international trade policies.

Demographics are population measures such as age, race, gender, occupation, and INCOME. Demographics are often used by businesspeople to define market segments on which to focus their efforts.

Deming’s 14 points comprise a philosophy about business and efforts to achieve quality devised by Dr. W. Edward Deming (1900–1993), a mathematical physicist. In 1950 Deming was invited to Japan to teach.

Demand, or the law of demand, is the relationship between price and quantity demanded for a good or service in a market. The law of demand states there is an inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded; that is, the higher the price the lower the quantity demanded, and the lower the price, the higher the quantity demanded.

The Delphi technique—named after the Oracle of Delphi, to whom ancient Greeks would travel to seek advice about the future—is a marketing-management tool used by businesses for forecasting.

Deflation is a sustained decrease in the general level of prices in an economy. It is the opposite of INFLATION, an increase in the general level of prices. Falling prices are a result from either increasing productivity, which allows producers to increase output and INCOME; or declining DEMAND.

Default is the failure of a debtor to meet the provisions agreed upon in a loan agreement.

A decision tree is a map of the reasoning process businesspeople use to make choices. Decision trees are excellent tools for making financial or number-based decisions where a lot of detailed data needs to be considered.

Also known as deceptive acts, deceptive practices, and deceptive sales practices, deceptive trade practices are methods of doing business that are likely to mislead individual consumers or other businesses, usually through the use of deceitful, false, incomplete, or otherwise misleading statements.

See FAIR DEBT COLLECTIONS PRACTICES ACT.

The accounting terms debit and credit mean “left” and “right,” respectively. Abbreviated dr. (from the Latin debere) and cr. (from the Latin credere), debits and credits are integral parts of financial or double-entry accounting.

The Davis-Bacon Act, signed by President Herbert Hoover in 1931, requires contractors working for the federal government to pay the “prevailing” local wage. Expanded to include projects receiving federal funding or loan guarantees, the act effectively requires contractors to pay UNION scale wages.

Database management is the process of organizing and manipulating a database. A database is a collection of organized data that is alterable (create, update, and delete), accessible, has a purpose, minimizes/eliminates redundancy, imports and exports data, has data independence, and has data integrity.

Damages, for legal purposes, are compensatory or punitive monetary awards. Persons suffering loss or injury (for example, in a car accident) sue in court to recover damages to which they are entitled by law.