Beta

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Beta (β) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. Beta or BETA may also refer to:

[edit] Media

• B3ta, a British humour webcommunity
• BETA, an organization in the 1986 TV series The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers
• Beta, a caste in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
• Beta, a 1992 Bollywood film directed by Indra Kumar
• Beta reader (or betareader), a person who reads a written work, generally fiction, with the aim of improving grammar, spelling, characterization, and general style of a story prior to its release to the general public
• Beta Recordings, a record label
• Limited Edition Beta (or shortly Beta), the second (reviced) part of the first set of card game Magic: The Gathering
• β (along with other Greek letters) is used in the Earthbound, or Mother, series of Nintendo RPGs as a classification of the strength of a PSI technique

[edit] Places

• Beta (or Béta), a village in the commune of Mugeni, Harghita County, Romania

[edit] Science

[edit] Biology

• Beta, a genus of flowering plants, mostly referred to as “beets”
• Beta male, a rank in a community of social animals
• Beta-endorphin, a kind of neurotransmitter
• Beta carbon, in organic chemistry — the second carbon atom in a chain when counting from a functional group (the carbon atom that attaches to the group is called alpha carbon)
• Beta cell, a type of cell in the pancreas, which produces insulin
• Beta sheet, a secondary protein structure

[edit] Finance

• Beta coefficient, a parameter in Capital Asset Pricing Model that describes how sensitive the expected return of a stock (or portefolio) is to the market. It gives an indication of how sensitive a stock (or portfolio) is to macroeconomic events. Beta does not measure firm specific events. Contrary to popular belief, Beta does not tell you the correlation of a stock's expected return to the marked. This should be obvious, as correlation coefficients have to between -1 and 1. While the Betas in CAPM cannot be below 0

[edit] Mathematics

• Beta function, a special function also known as the Euler integral of the first kind
• Beta distribution, in statistics — a family of continuous probability distributions
• β error (also called false negative rate), in statistics — the error of failing to reject a null hypothesis when it is in fact false
• Standardized coefficient (also sometimes called beta coefficient), in statistics — the estimate of an analysis performed on variables that have been standardized so that they have variances of 1

[edit] Physics

• Beta, β, in plasma physics — the ratio of thermal to magnetic pressure in plasma
• Beta, β, in special relativity — the speed of an object relative to the speed of light
• Beta angle, the angle between the orbital plane and a line drawn from the Sun to the Earth (see)
• Beta-function, β(g), in quantum field theory — a function that encodes the dependence of a coupling constant, g, on the energy scale, μ, of a given physical process
• Beta particle, a name used to refer to high-energy electrons or positrons emitted by certain types of radioactive nuclei
• Compressibility, β, a measure of the relative volume change of a fluid or solid as a response to a pressure change
• Thermodynamic beta, β, in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics — a numerical quantity related to the thermodynamic temperature of a system

[edit] Psychology

• Beta movement, a perceptual illusion whereby two or more still images are combined by the brain into surmised motion
• Type-beta personality, now commonly referred to as type-B (see Type A and Type B personality theory)

[edit] Technology

[edit] Automotive

• Beta, an Italian off-road motorcycles manufacturer
• Lancia Beta, a car produced by Lancia

[edit] Computers-related

• BETA, a programming language
• Beta-reduction, a reduction rule for lambda calculus (see also Beta normal form)
• Beta version, a development stage of software wherein the software application is released to an enthusiastic public for large-scale testing and bug discovery

[edit] Other technology-related

• Beta, a time signal service broadcasted in the VLF range in Russia
• Beta, the common-emitter current gain of a BJT
• Betamax, home videocassette tape recording format developed by Sony
  • Betacam, a family of half-inch professional videotape products developed by Sony

[edit] Other uses

• Beta, route guidance for rock climbers
• Hurricane Beta, a 2005 hurricane
• National Beta Club, a high school honor society
• Beta quadra, in socionics
• Beta Theta Pi fraternity, nicknamed Beta
• β, a symbol used to represent the voiced bilabial fricative sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet

[edit] See also

• ß, a German letter that resembles β
• Betta, a genus of fish, often misspelled “beta”

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