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🔗 Sociology 🔗 Culture

The Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world is a map, or more precisely, a scatter plot created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey. It depicts closely linked cultural values that vary between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from traditional values to secular-rational ones and moving rightward reflects the shift from survival values to self-expression values.

According to the authors: "These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators—and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important orientations."

The authors stress that socio-economic status is not the sole factor determining a country's location, as their religious and cultural historical heritage is also an important factor.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biology

The blue field entoptic phenomenon is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the appearance of tiny bright dots (nicknamed blue-sky sprites) moving quickly along undulating pathways in the visual field, especially when looking into bright blue light such as the sky. The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less, and traveling short distances along seemingly random, undulating paths. Some of them seem to follow the same path as other dots before them. The dots may appear elongated along the path, like tiny worms. The dots' rate of travel appears to vary in synchrony with the heartbeat: they briefly accelerate at each beat. The dots appear in the central field of view, within 15 degrees from the fixation point. The left and right eye see different, seemingly random, dot patterns; a person viewing through both eyes sees a combination of both left and right visual field disturbances. While seeing the phenomenon, lightly pressing inward on the sides of the eyeballs at the lateral canthus causes the movement to stop being fluid and the dots to move only when the heart beats.

Most people are able to see this phenomenon in the sky, although it is relatively weak in most instances; many will not notice it until asked to pay attention. The dots are highly conspicuous against any monochromatic blue background of a wavelength of around 430 nm in place of the sky. The phenomenon is also known as Scheerer's phenomenon, after the German ophthalmologist Richard Scheerer, who first drew clinical attention to it in 1924.

🔗 History 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Trade 🔗 Politics/Libertarianism

Mercantilism is a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports of an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.

The concept aims to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus, and it includes measures aimed at accumulating monetary reserves by a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies may have contributed to war and motivated colonial expansion. Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

Mercantilism promotes government regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting and bolstering state power at the expense of rival national powers. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, were almost universally a feature of mercantilist policy. Before it fell into decline, mercantilism was dominant in modernized parts of Europe and some areas in Africa from the 16th to the 19th centuries, a period of proto-industrialization. Some commentators argue that it is still practised in the economies of industrializing countries in the form of economic interventionism.

With the efforts of supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization to reduce tariffs globally, non-tariff barriers to trade have assumed a greater importance in neomercantilism.

Since the 1970's, several deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department have formed gangs in which membership is exclusive to certain sheriff's deputies, often along ethnic lines, and requires certain acts, such as police violence (particularly against people of color), in order to be initiated into said gang. Members are often tattooed and are expected to maintain the blue wall of silence (i.e. not snitch or report misconduct on or about other officers), fabricate evidence, engage in police corruption, and engage in criminal activity such as vandalism and homicide, among other things. Historically, almost all instances of deputy gang violence has either been ignored by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office or the office has stood by the members of the deputy gangs, alongside the tolerance or assistance of the county sheriff. Although not unique to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, it suffers from the most prolific case of the existence of law enforcement gangs in the state.

🔗 Spaceflight

AMC-14 is a communications satellite. Initially owned by SES Americom, AMC-14 was designed to be placed in geostationary orbit, following launch on a Proton rocket. Built by Lockheed Martin and based on the A2100 satellite bus, AMC-14 was to have been located at 61.5° west longitude for DISH Network service.

It was launched atop a Proton-M/Briz-M rocket at 23:18:55 GMT on 14 March 2008, from LC-200/39 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The satellite was placed in an unusable orbit, following a malfunction of the Briz-M upper stage. Over a six-month period, it was maneuvered into a geosynchronous orbit, and is now near 35° East and in an inclined orbit.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program's source code. It was developed by Thomas J. McCabe, Sr. in 1976.

Cyclomatic complexity is computed using the control-flow graph of the program: the nodes of the graph correspond to indivisible groups of commands of a program, and a directed edge connects two nodes if the second command might be executed immediately after the first command. Cyclomatic complexity may also be applied to individual functions, modules, methods or classes within a program.

One testing strategy, called basis path testing by McCabe who first proposed it, is to test each linearly independent path through the program; in this case, the number of test cases will equal the cyclomatic complexity of the program.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Neurology

Type 3 diabetes is a proposed term to describe the interlinked association between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease. This term is used to look into potential triggers of Alzheimer's disease in people with diabetes.

The proposed progression from diabetes to Alzheimer's disease is inadequately understood; however there are a number of hypotheses describing potential links between the two diseases. The internal mechanism of Insulin resistance and other metabolic risk factors such as hyperglycaemia, caused by oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation are common processes thought to be contributors to the development of Alzheimer's disease in diabetics.

Diagnosis for this disease is different between patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is usually discovered in children and adolescence while type 2 diabetic patients are often diagnosed later in life. While Type 3 diabetes is not a diagnosis in itself, a diagnosis of suspected Alzheimer's disease can be established through observational signs and sometimes with neuroimaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to observe abnormalities in diabetic patient's brain tissue.

The techniques used to prevent the disease in patients with diabetes are similar to individuals who do not show signs of the disease. The four pillars of Alzheimer's disease prevention is currently used as a guide for individuals of whom are at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

Research into the effectiveness of Glucagon-like Peptide 1 and Melatonin administration to manage the progression of Alzheimer's disease in diabetic patients is currently being conducted to decrease the rate at which Alzheimer's disease progresses.

Labelling Alzheimer's disease as Type 3 Diabetes is generally controversial, and this definition is not a known medical diagnosis. While insulin resistance is a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease and some other dementias, causes of Alzheimer's disease are likely to be much more complex than being explained by insulin factors on their own, and indeed several patients with Alzheimer's disease have normal insulin metabolism.

🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Dentistry

A caries vaccine is a vaccine to prevent and protect against tooth decay. Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans) has been identified as the major etiological agent of human dental caries. The development of a vaccine for tooth decay has been under investigation since the 1970s. In 1972, a caries vaccine was said to be in animal testing in England, and that it would have begun human testing soon. However, intrinsic difficulties in developing it, coupled with lack of strong economic interests, are the reasons why still no such vaccine is commercially available today. Several types of vaccines are being developed at research centres, with some kind of caries vaccines being considered to diminish or prevent dental caries' impact on young people.

🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Ecology

In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring. The focus on either an increased quantity of offspring at the expense of individual parental investment of r-strategists, or on a reduced quantity of offspring with a corresponding increased parental investment of K-strategists, varies widely, seemingly to promote success in particular environments.

The terminology of r/K-selection was coined by the ecologists Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson in 1967 based on their work on island biogeography; although the concept of the evolution of life history strategies has a longer history (see e.g. plant strategies).

The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s, when it was criticized by several empirical studies. A life-history paradigm has replaced the r/K selection paradigm but continues to incorporate many of its important themes.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Football

Three-sided football (often referred to as 3SF) is a variation of association football played with three teams instead of the usual two. It was devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn to explain his notion of triolectics, his refinement on the Marxian concept of dialectics, as well as to disrupt one's everyday idea of football. Played on a hexagonal pitch [1], the game can be adapted for similarity to soccer as well as other versions of football.

Unlike conventional football, where the winner is determined by the highest scoring of the two teams, in three-sided football the winning team is that which concedes the fewest goals.