Eideard

For the people of Samoa, December 30 will be a day that never existed as the island nation makes an historic leap across the international dateline.

At midnight on Thursday December 29, Samoa’s calendar will leap straight to Saturday December 31, as it redraws the dateline to move to the western side after more than a century on the east. The country will go from being the last place in the world to see sunset to one of the first to see the sunrise.

The shift, aimed at improving trade, initially angered tourism operators, which will no longer be able to lure visitors with the sight of the final sunset. But the tourism sector quickly switched to a new offering: visitors can now celebrate two New Year’s Eves – one on Samoa and one on American Samoa, which remains on the western side. The two countries – about an hour’s flight apart – are also planning offers of double birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries.

The switch has also caused concern among some religious groups, particularly those whose Sabbath incorporates Friday – a day that, for this week only, will be eternally erased.

Some of the island’s 7000-odd Seventh Day Adventist members have said they will not recognise the change and will continue to observe the existing seven-day cycle. “God will not recognise our manmade right to drop a day from the calendar, thus changing the weekly cycle,” said a local Adventist, Noeline Cutts, who noted that Sunday-keeping Christians will henceforth “unknowingly” be celebrating Sabbath on Saturdays.

Hilarious!

The dateline change was pushed by Samoa’s colourful, outspoken and somewhat whimsical Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, who has previously made a switch to driving on the left in 2009 and introduced daylight saving with little warning in 2010. The country last shifted time zones in 1892 when an American trader convinced the island to align with California. With the opportunity to repeat the same day, the country celebrated two consecutive Fourth of Julys…

The dateline, which passes through the Pacific near the 180º meridian, is not set by an international treaty or organisation and has long been wobbly, mainly to ensure some countries are not left with territory on both sides. Samoa is currently about 20 miles from the dateline.

RTFA for more delightful tales of local politics including an apparent concern that someone will someday shift Samoa, again, and they will end up covered with snow next door to Russia.

The human brain stores some kinds of memories for a lifetime. But when our eyes are open and looking at things, our gray matter also creates temporary memories that help us process complex tasks during the few seconds these visual memories exist. For decades, scientists have held that such short-term memories don’t suddenly disappear, but grow gradually more imprecise over the course of several seconds.

Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found just the opposite. Their subjects retained temporary memories of an object’s color or shape for at least four seconds. After that, the memories began to wink out like streetlights at daybreak, remaining quite accurate until they suddenly disappeared…

Published in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the study found that subjects “either had the memory or didn’t have the memory,” Luck said, “and the probability of having it decreased between four and ten seconds. The memories did not gradually fade away.”

The finding provides insight into the underlying mechanisms behind memory formation and retention. “The memories are not like flashlights that get progressively weaker as the battery runs low,” Luck said. “They are more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.” This could be important in everyday life, he explained, because it would provide a mechanism to help us avoid the confusion that might arise if we tried to make decisions on the basis of weak, inaccurate memories.

Zhang and Luck are currently incorporating these findings into a study of short-term memory dysfunction in people with schizophrenia.

Now I’m going to have to read a copy of the article. The conclusions are easy enough to understand and make sense – given the electrical nature of the process. But, I’d love to see a truly broad study of the phenomenon.

The digital transition has begun in earnest, and early reports suggest a relatively modest level of disruption for television viewers.

The National Association of Broadcasters said stations are averaging 50 to 200 calls from viewers with questions about the switchover from analog transmission, while the Federal Communications Commission has received 28,000 phone calls from viewers. From the whole country.

That’s with one-third of TV stations having switched to digital signals. The NAB said 421 stations flipped the switch Tuesday, joining 220 local affiliates that had already made the change in advance of the June 12 deadline for compliance.

“These findings from local stations, coupled with the FCC data, paint the picture that, by and large, TV households affected in those markets were ready,” said Jonathan Collegio. “Given the large number of broadcast-only households affected during (Tuesday’s) transition, a relatively small percentage of viewers so far have needed assistance.”

The NAB said call centers in Virginia received about 150 calls. Stations in Rockford, Ill., received 200 calls, and stations in Topeka, Kan., received 300.

Nielsen released an update saying that 5 million U.S. households — or 4.4 percent of all homes — remain unprepared. This is an improvement of more than 800,000 homes since Nielsen reported readiness status at the beginning of February. The Albuquerque/Santa Fe, N.M., market continues to be the least prepared.

That’s us, folks. Even in the “least prepared” market, there has barely been a peep about the transition. Yes, only about 20% of the signals have converted to digital in the Abq/Santa Fe DMA; but, so far, I can’t even find a post-transition news article!

The-sky-is-falling crowd got it wrong.

About 40 percent of the nation’s hundreds of TV stations will be broadcasting completely in digital signals next week, even after regulators delayed a mandatory nationwide switch to “DTV” by months.

The Federal Communications Commission has said 681 of the nearly 1800 television broadcast stations will have already stopped broadcasting in older, analog signals, or will by next week.

The U.S. House of Representatives last week voted to delay the mandatory change by four months — to June 12 from February 17. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill into law shortly.

The delayed bill gave television stations, which say they’ve spent millions of dollars preparing and educating viewers of the switch-over, the option to transition to all digital on the original date, next Tuesday.

The major U.S. television networks CBS Corp, General Electric Co’s NBC and Walt Disney Co’s ABC, vowed last week to continue to transmit TV signals in analog. But the networks own only about 100 of the 1800 or so broadcast television stations in the U.S..

Foot-draggers line up alongside mouth-breathers, bible-thumpers and monkey-jumpers.