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🔗 Computing

Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a file format for coding digital images, which was created by programmer Fabrice Bellard in 2014. He has proposed it as a replacement for the JPEG image format as the more compression-efficient alternative in terms of image quality or file size.

It is based on the intra-frame encoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video compression standard. Tests on photographic images in July 2014 found that BPG produced smaller files for a given quality than JPEG, JPEG XR and WebP.

The format has been designed to be portable and work in low memory environments, and used in portable handheld and IoT devices, where those properties are particularly important. Current research works on designing and developing more energy-efficient BPG hardware which can then be integrated in portable devices such as digital cameras.

While there is no built-in native support for BPG in any mainstream browsers, websites can still deliver BPG images to all browsers by including a JavaScript library written by Bellard.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Physiology

The effects of stress on memory include interference with a person's capacity to encode memory and the ability to retrieve information. Stimuli, like stress, improved memory when it was related to learning the subject. During times of stress, the body reacts by secreting stress hormones into the bloodstream. Stress can cause acute and chronic changes in certain brain areas which can cause long-term damage. Over-secretion of stress hormones most frequently impairs long-term delayed recall memory, but can enhance short-term, immediate recall memory. This enhancement is particularly relative in emotional memory. In particular, the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are affected. One class of stress hormone responsible for negatively affecting long-term, delayed recall memory is the glucocorticoids (GCs), the most notable of which is cortisol. Glucocorticoids facilitate and impair the actions of stress in the brain memory process. Cortisol is a known biomarker for stress. Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus regulates the production of cortisol through negative feedback because it has many receptors that are sensitive to these stress hormones. However, an excess of cortisol can impair the ability of the hippocampus to both encode and recall memories. These stress hormones are also hindering the hippocampus from receiving enough energy by diverting glucose levels to surrounding muscles.

Stress affects many memory functions and cognitive functioning of the brain. There are different levels of stress and the high levels can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic stress level is triggered by a cognitive challenge whereas extrinsic can be triggered by a condition not related to a cognitive task. Intrinsic stress can be acutely and chronically experienced by a person. The varying effects of stress on performance or stress hormones are often compared to or known as "inverted-u" which induce areas in learning, memory and plasticity. Chronic stress can affect the brain structure and cognition.

Studies considered the effects of both intrinsic and extrinsic stress on memory functions, using for both of them Pavlovian conditioning and spatial learning. In regard to intrinsic memory functions, the study evaluated how stress affected memory functions that was triggered by a learning challenge. In regard to extrinsic stress, the study focused on stress that was not related to cognitive task but was elicited by other situations. The results determined that intrinsic stress was facilitated by memory consolidation process and extrinsic stress was determined to be heterogeneous in regard to memory consolidation. Researchers found that high stress conditions were a good representative of the effect that extrinsic stress can cause on memory functioning. It was also proven that extrinsic stress does affect spatial learning whereas acute extrinsic stress does not.

🔗 Computing

Refal ("[of] Recursive functions' algorithmic language") "is functional programming language oriented toward symbolic computations", including "string processing, language translation, [and] artificial intelligence". It is one of the oldest members of this family, first conceived of in 1966 as a theoretical tool, with the first implementation appearing in 1968. Refal was intended to combine mathematical simplicity with practicality for writing large and sophisticated programs.

One of the first functional programming languages to do so, and unlike Lisp of its time, Refal is based on pattern matching. Its pattern matching works in conjunction with term rewriting.

The basic data structure of Lisp and Prolog is a linear list built by cons operation in a sequential manner, thus with O(n) access to list's nth element. Refal's lists are built and scanned from both ends, with pattern matching working for nested lists as well as the top-level one. In effect, the basic data structure of Refal is a tree rather than a list. This gives freedom and convenience in creating data structures while using only mathematically simple control mechanisms of pattern matching and substitution.

Refal also includes a feature called the freezer to support efficient partial evaluation.

Refal can be applied to the processing and transformation of tree structures, similarly to XSLT.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics

Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions that alter its outcome.

🔗 Biography

Albert Stevens (1887–1966), also known as patient CAL-1, was a victim of a human radiation experiment, and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 µCi) of plutonium without his knowledge or informed consent.

Plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination. Stevens died of heart disease some 20 years later, having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 Sv (6400 rem) over that period, i.e. an average of 3 Sv per year or 350 μSv/h. The current annual permitted dose for a radiation worker in the United States is 0.05 Sv (or 5 rem), i.e. an average of 5.7 μSv/h.

🔗 Military history 🔗 European history 🔗 Military history/Balkan military history 🔗 Organized crime 🔗 Albania 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War

The Albanian Civil War was a period of civil disorder in Albania in 1997, sparked by pyramid scheme failures. The government was toppled and more than 2,000 people were killed. It is considered to be either a rebellion, a civil war, or a rebellion that escalated into a civil war.

By January 1997, Albanian citizens, who had lost a total of $1.2 billion (an average of $400 per person countrywide) took their protest to the streets. Beginning in February, thousands of citizens launched daily protests demanding reimbursement by the government, which they believed was profiting from the schemes. On 1 March, Prime Minister Aleksandër Meksi resigned and on 2 March, President Sali Berisha declared a state of emergency. On 11 March the Socialist Party of Albania won a major victory when its leader, Bashkim Fino, was appointed prime minister. However, the transfer of power did not halt the unrest, and protests spread to northern Albania. Although the government quelled revolts in the north, the ability of the government and military to maintain order began to collapse, especially in the southern half of Albania, which fell under the control of rebels and criminal gangs.

All major population centres were engulfed in demonstrations by 13 March and foreign countries began to evacuate their citizens. These evacuations included Operation Libelle, Operation Silver Wake and Operation Kosmas.. The United Nations Security Council, in Resolution 1101, authorised a force of 7,000 troops on 28 March to direct relief efforts and restore order in Albania. The UN feared the unrest would spread beyond Albania's borders and send refugees throughout Europe. On 15 April, Operation Alba was launched and helped restore rule of law in the country. After the unrest, looted weapons were made available to the Kosovo Liberation Army, many making their way to the Kosovo War (1998–99).

🔗 California 🔗 Technology 🔗 Politics 🔗 Objectivism 🔗 Politics/Libertarianism

"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism". In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.

The original essay was published in Mute magazine in 1995 and later appeared on the nettime Internet mailing list for debate. A final version was published in Science as Culture in 1996. The critique has since been revised in several different versions and languages.

Andrew Leonard of Salon called Barbrook & Cameron's work "one of the most penetrating critiques of neo-conservative digital hypesterism yet published."

🔗 United States 🔗 Nevada 🔗 Micronations

The Republic of Molossia, also known as Molossia, is a micronation claiming sovereignty over 1.28 acres of land near Dayton, Nevada. The micronation has not received recognition from any of the member states of the United Nations. It was founded by Kevin Baugh. On April 16, 2016, Baugh hosted a tour of Molossia, sponsored by the website Atlas Obscura. He continues to pay property taxes on the land to Storey County (the recognized local government), although he calls it "foreign aid". He has stated "We all want to think we have our own country, but you know the U.S. is a lot bigger".

🔗 United States 🔗 Books 🔗 Science Fiction

The Astronautilia (Czech: Hvězdoplavba; full title in Greek: Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου ΑΣΤΡΟΝΑΥΤΙΛΙΑ ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική; i.e. "An unknown poet's Starvoyage, or the Cosmic Micro-Odyssey") is the magnum opus, written in 1994 under the hellenised pseudonym Ἰωάννης Πυρεῖα, of Czech poet and writer Jan Křesadlo, one of the most unusual works of twentieth-century Czech literature. It was published shortly after his death, as a commemorative first edition.

While no full English translation exists as yet, there is a sample chapter translation online, and a German translation of the fully transcribed and annotated Greek text is in preparation.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Physics

The hafnium controversy is a debate over the possibility of 'triggering' rapid energy releases, via gamma ray emission, from a nuclear isomer of hafnium, ^178m2Hf. The energy release is potentially 5 orders of magnitude (100,000 times) more energetic than a chemical reaction, but 2 orders of magnitude less than a nuclear fission reaction. In 1998, a group led by Carl Collins of the University of Texas at Dallas reported having successfully initiated such a trigger. Signal-to-noise ratios were small in those first experiments, and to date no other group has been able to duplicate these results. Peter Zimmerman described claims of weaponization potential as having been based on "very bad science".