Beta (β) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. Beta or BETA may also refer to:
Media
Film & Television
- Beta Quadrant, one of four quadrants in the galaxy in Star Trek.
- Beta Hirogen, the second in command of a Hirogen hunting party, as seen in Star Trek: Voyager.
- BETA, an organization in the 1986 TV series The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers
- Beta, a 1992 Bollywood film directed by Indra Kumar
- Beings of the Extra Terrestrial origin which is Adversary of human race (BETA) an alien race from the video game series Muv-Luv.
Internet and computing
See also the “Technology” section below
- Beta version, a website or software project either in pre-release, during testing or shortly after release to the public.
- Beta, a term used for editor in the fanfiction community.
- B3ta, a British humour webcommunity
- Perpetual beta, a term used to describe software or a system which never leaves the development stage of beta.
Music
- Beta Recordings, a record label
Misc
- Beta (Magic: The Gathering), the second (revised) part of the first set of the card game Magic: The Gathering
- β is used (along with other Greek letters) in the Earthbound, or Mother, series of Nintendo role-playing games as a classification of the strength of a PSI technique
Places
- Beta, Harghita (or Béta), a village in the commune of Mugeni, Harghita County, Romania
Science
Biology
- Beta (plant), 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
- Beta cell, a type of cell in the pancreas, which produces insulin
- Beta sheet, a secondary protein structure
Finance
- Beta coefficient, a parameter in Capital Asset Pricing Model that describes how sensitive the expected return of a stock (or portfolio) is to the market
Mathematics
- β error in statistics refers to the probability of a Type II error (failing to reject a null hypothesis when it is in fact false)
- Beta distribution, in statistics — a family of continuous probability distributions
- Euler's Beta function, a special function also known as the Euler integral of the first kind
- Dirichlet beta function
- 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
Physics
- Beta (plasma physics), β, in plasma physics — the ratio of thermal to magnetic pressure in plasma
- Beta (velocity), β, in special relativity — the speed of an object relative to the speed of light
- 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 (β−) or positrons (β+) 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
- Phase Constant, β, in electromagnetics and electrical engineering, is used as the phase constant or wavenumber in the theory of plane waves
Psychology
Technology
Automotive
Computers-related
Other technology-related
- Beta (time signal), a time signal service broadcast in the very low frequency range in Russia
- Beta, β, the common-emitter current gain of a bipolar junction transistor
- Betamax, home videocassette tape recording format developed by Sony
- Betacam, a family of half-inch professional videotape products developed by Sony
Other uses
See also
- Betta, a genus of fish, often misspelled “beta”
- ß, a German letter that resembles β
References
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