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🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 France 🔗 Computing/Software

Fabrice Bellard (French pronunciation: ​[fa.bʁis bɛ.laʁ]) is a computer programmer who created the FFmpeg and QEMU software projects. He has also developed a number of other programs, including the Tiny C Compiler.

This Help page is about Wikipedia books created on Wikipedia.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. For example, smooth forward motion emerges when a bicycle and its rider interoperate, but neither part can produce the behavior on their own.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.

In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism. Almost all accounts of emergentism include a form of epistemic or ontological irreducibility to the lower levels.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Australia 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Terence Chi-Shen Tao (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian-American mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics. He currently focuses on harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory. As of 2015, he holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Tao was a recipient of the 2006 Fields Medal and the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He is also a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of 275 research papers.

Tao is the second mathematician of Han Chinese descent to win the Fields medal after Shing-Tung Yau, and the first Australian citizen to win the medal.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Business

The Hindenburg Omen was a proposed technical analysis pattern, named after the Hindenburg disaster of May 6, 1937. It was created by Jim Miekka, who believed that it portended a stock market crash.

🔗 Typography

Irony punctuation is any proposed form of notation used to denote irony or sarcasm in text. Written English lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed. Among the oldest and most frequently attested is the percontation point proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s, and the irony mark, used by Marcellin Jobard and French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century. Both marks take the form of a reversed question mark, "⸮".

Irony punctuation is primarily used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. A bracketed exclamation point or question mark as well as scare quotes are also occasionally used to express irony or sarcasm.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 C/C++/C++

C++11 is a version of the standard for the programming language C++. It was approved by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on 12 August 2011, replacing C++03, superseded by C++14 on 18 August 2014 and later, by C++17. The name follows the tradition of naming language versions by the publication year of the specification, though it was formerly named C++0x because it was expected to be published before 2010.

Although one of the design goals was to prefer changes to the libraries over changes to the core language, C++11 does make several additions to the core language. Areas of the core language that were significantly improved include multithreading support, generic programming support, uniform initialization, and performance. Significant changes were also made to the C++ Standard Library, incorporating most of the C++ Technical Report 1 (TR1) libraries, except the library of mathematical special functions.

C++11 was published as ISO/IEC 14882:2011 in September 2011 and is available for a fee. The working draft most similar to the published C++11 standard is N3337, dated 16 January 2012; it has only editorial corrections from the C++11 standard.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Mathematics

The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. It asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be solved quickly.

It is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute, each of which carries a US$1,000,000 prize for the first correct solution.

The informal term quickly, used above, means the existence of an algorithm solving the task that runs in polynomial time, such that the time to complete the task varies as a polynomial function on the size of the input to the algorithm (as opposed to, say, exponential time). The general class of questions for which some algorithm can provide an answer in polynomial time is called "class P" or just "P". For some questions, there is no known way to find an answer quickly, but if one is provided with information showing what the answer is, it is possible to verify the answer quickly. The class of questions for which an answer can be verified in polynomial time is called NP, which stands for "nondeterministic polynomial time".

An answer to the P = NP question would determine whether problems that can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. If it turned out that P ≠ NP, which is widely believed, it would mean that there are problems in NP that are harder to compute than to verify: they could not be solved in polynomial time, but the answer could be verified in polynomial time.

Aside from being an important problem in computational theory, a proof either way would have profound implications for mathematics, cryptography, algorithm research, artificial intelligence, game theory, multimedia processing, philosophy, economics and many other fields.

🔗 Physics

The free will theorem of John H. Conway and Simon B. Kochen states that if we have a free will in the sense that our choices are not a function of the past, then, subject to certain assumptions, so must some elementary particles. Conway and Kochen's paper was published in Foundations of Physics in 2006. In 2009 they published a stronger version of the theorem in the Notices of the AMS. Later, in 2017, Kochen elaborated some details.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Transhumanism 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs

Modafinil, sold under the brand name Provigil among others, is a medication to treat sleepiness due to narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, or obstructive sleep apnea. While it has seen off-label use as a purported cognitive enhancer, the research on its effectiveness for this use is not conclusive. It is taken by mouth.

Common side effects include headache, anxiety, trouble sleeping, and nausea. Serious side effects may include allergic reactions such as anaphylaxis, Stevens–Johnson syndrome, misuse, and hallucinations. It is unclear if use during pregnancy is safe. The amount of medication used may need to be adjusted in those with kidney or liver problems. It is not recommended in those with an arrhythmia, significant hypertension, or left ventricular hypertrophy. How it works is not entirely clear. One possibility is that it may affect the areas of the brain involved with the sleep cycle.

Modafinil was approved for medical use in the United States in 1998. In the United States it is classified as a schedule IV controlled substance. In the United Kingdom it is a prescription only medication. It is available as a generic medication. In the United Kingdom it costs the NHS about £105.21 a month as of 2018. In the United States the wholesale cost per month is about US$34.20 as of 2018. In 2016, it was the 284th most prescribed medication in the United States, with more than a million prescriptions.