omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Reading machine. A reading machine is a piece of assistive technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has found.

Development 

The first prototype of reading machine, called optophone, was developed by Dr. Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe of Birmingham University in 1913. Five vertically-aligned photodetectors were used to scan a line of printed text. Each cell generated a different tone (G, C, D, E, G8) when detecting black print, so that each character was associated with a specific time-varying chords of tones. With some practice, blind users were able to interpret this audio output as a meaningful message. However, the reading speed of this device was very slow (approximately one word per minute).

From 1944 until up to the 1970s, new prototypes of reading machine were developed at Haskins Laboratories under contract from the Veterans Administration. The research project was conducted by Caryl Parker Haskins, Franklin S. Cooper and Alvin Liberman. Their first attempts to improve the optophone all ended in failures, and users were still unable to read more than 5 words per minutes in average, even after long training sessions. This observation led Liberman to suppose that the limitation was cognitive rather than technical, and to formulate his motor theory of speech perception. He realized that the speech signal was not heard like an acoustic "alphabet" or "cipher," but as a "code" of overlapping speech gestures, due to coarticulation. Therefore, a reading machine cannot simply convert the printed characters into a series of abstract sounds, rather it must be able to identify the characters and to produce a speech sound as output using a speech synthesizer.

The first commercial reading machine for the blind was developed by Kurzweil Computer Products (later acquired by Xerox Corporation) in 1975. Walter Cronkite used this machine to give his signature sound off, "And that's the way it is, January 13, 1976."

In the mid-1960s, Francis F. Lee joined Dr. Samuel Jefferson Mason's Cognitive Information Processing Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on a reading machine for the blind, the first system that would scan text and produce continuous speech. Early reading machines were desk-based and large, found in libraries, schools, and hospitals or owned by wealthy individuals. In 2009, a cellphone running Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind software works as a reading machine.

References

Assistive technology
Blindness equipment
Dropship: United Peace Force. Dropship: United Peace Force is a 2002 combat flight simulation video game developed by SCEE Studio Camden and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 2. The player assumes the role of a pilot in the United Peace Force, a fictional multinational military organisation charged with combating terrorism and organized crime across the world. The game itself is set in 2050. Developer Studio Camden was a former division of Psygnosis, and was moved to Sony during development; it was the last game they developed before being merged into London Studio.

Gameplay
The game features a number of futuristic aircraft, including agile fighters, and slower transport aircraft.  The game also features levels in which the player drives military vehicles such as armored personnel carriers.

Unlike many science fiction flight simulator games, Dropship is set in the near future, and the vehicles and weapons, although futuristic, are grounded in reality, and bear many recognizable traits of modern military aircraft. The game has missions where the player must fly low not to be spotted, protect vulnerable craft and deliver/pick up valuable cargo.  Another feature of the game is the VTOL ability of most of the game's aircraft, allowing the player to switch to a hover mode and land the aircraft manually.

Reception

The game received "generally favourable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Maxim gave it a favourable review, a few weeks before it was released Stateside. Four-Eyed Dragon of GamePro said, "Despite the fair controls, Dropship still performs with flying colors."

Toonami, Cartoon Network's after-school action programming block at the time, reviewed the game in June 2002. In the review, TOM (Steven Blum) said the game "doesn't look too sharp, but it plays okay" and that the problem was he couldn't get beyond the sixth level; "it's driving [him] nuts." The score the game was given ended up being a ? out of 10, as TOM had not yet finished the game.

Notes

References

External links

2002 video games
BAM! Entertainment games
Combat flight simulators
PlayStation 2 games
PlayStation 2-only games
Sony Interactive Entertainment games
Video games developed in the United Kingdom
Video games scored by Alastair Lindsay
Video games set in the 2050s
Single-player video games
P-y method. In geotechnical civil engineering, the p–y is a method of analyzing the ability of deep foundations to resist loads applied in the lateral direction. This method uses the finite difference method and p-y graphs to find a solution. P–y graphs are graphs which relate the force applied to soil to the lateral deflection of the soil. In essence, non-linear springs are attached to the foundation in place of the soil. The springs can be represented by the following equation:

 
where  is the non-linear spring stiffness defined by the p–y curve,  is the deflection of the spring, and  is the force applied to the spring.

The p–y curves vary depending on soil type.

The available geotechnical engineering software programs for the p–y method include FB-MultiPier by the Bridge Software Institute, DeepFND by Deep Excavation LLC, PileLAT by Innovative Geotechnics, LPile by Ensoft, and PyPile by Yong Technology.

References

 Salgado, R. (2007).  "The Engineering of Foundations."  McGraw-Hill, in press. (1)
 Hasani, H., Golafshani, A., Estekanchi, H. Seismic performance evaluation of jacket-type offshore platforms using endurance time method considering soil-pile-superstructure interaction. Scientia Iranica, 2017; 24(4): 1843-1854. doi: 10.24200/sci.2017.4275 http://scientiairanica.sharif.edu/article_4275_f79d8b4fdd0cc8d159b91b1a3b968585.pdf

Soil mechanics
Barry Thornton. Sir Barry Michael Thornton' is a British retired officer who was a senior commander in the Royal Air Force.

Personal life
Thornton was educated at Baines Grammar School and the University of Nottingham.

He is married to Delia Thornton, a trained midwife and family law barrister. The couple has two sons, Oliver and William.

Military career
Thornton joined the Royal Air Force in 1976. He was given command of the Engineering and Supply Wing at RAF Honington in 1988 and subsequently deployed to Tabuk Air Base during the Gulf War. In 1991 he took command of the RAF's nuclear weapon inspection team. Then in 1997 he joined the Defence Procurement Agency as the Director of Maritime Projects with responsibility for the Merlin and Nimrod programmes. In 2000 he became Controller of Aircraft on the Air Force Board and in 2003 he was made Director General Equipment Support (Air) and then Director General Logistics (Strike) at the Defence Logistics Organisation. He became the last Commander in Chief Personnel and Training Command in January 2006 serving until April 2007 when the command was merged into Air Command: he then took up the post of Chief of Defence Material (Air) at Defence Equipment & Support. He retired in May 2009.

References

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Year of birth missing (living people)
Royal Air Force air marshals
Fellows of the Royal Aeronautical Society
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Living people
Alumni of the University of Nottingham
Nebraska Kansas Colorado Railway. The Nebraska Kansas Colorado Railway , formerly the Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado RailNet, is based in Grant, Nebraska, and operates about  of track in southwestern Nebraska, northern Kansas and northeastern Colorado.  It carries mainly agricultural-related products, especially grains, as well as coal to the Nebraska Public Power District's Gerald Gentleman Station which is Nebraska's largest coal-fired power plant. It is owned by OmniTRAX.

External links
 
Nebraska Kansas Colorado Railway Inc.

Nebraska railroads
Colorado railroads
Kansas railroads
Regional railroads in the United States
OmniTRAX
Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company. The Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company (WB&I) was a fabricator and erector of iron and steel bridges and other large structures.

According to one source it was founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1888.  According to another source, the firm was founded by three brothers in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1870 as Weinhagen Brothers, Engineers, which in 1880 became known as the Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company, and was incorporated in 1891 using that name.  The 1887 Turtleville bridge was believed to be one of the earlier truss bridges constructed by the firm.

The Riemer family of Elm Grove, Wisconsin was heavily affiliated with the company until it was sold in the 1970s.  A competitor to American Bridge Company, (in at least one case both firms submitted bids that matched to the penny), this firm was responsible for many bridges and other large structures in the United States Midwest and elsewhere. The Historic American Engineering Record shows at least 16 projects where WB&I were believed to be either the prime, steel or fabrication contractors.

A number of the firm's works are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).

Selected works
Not meant as an exhaustive list, here are a few projects that WB&I is known to have participated in:
Heath M. Robinson Memorial Cut River Bridge - US-2, Michigan - 1947
Green Bay Road Bridge - Manitowoc Rapids, Wisconsin - 1887
Turtleville Iron Bridge (1887), near Beloit, Wisconsin, a Pratt truss bridge, NRHP-listed
Ashfork-Bainbridge Steel Dam- Arizona - 1898
Redridge Steel Dam - Michigan - 1901
Hauser Dam - 1907
Brownsville & Matamoros International Bridge - Texas - 1908
MacArthur Bridge - Iowa/Illinois - 1917
Ironton-Russell Bridge - Ironton, Ohio - 1922 
U.S. Rt. 90 Pearl River Bridge - Mississippi / Louisiana - 1933
Jefferson Street Viaduct (1936), over Des Moines River, Ottumwa, Iowa, NRHP-listed
Hutsonville Bridge - Indiana - 1939
 Aloha Stadium - Hawaii
 Lincoln Center movable stage.
 Shirley Railroad Bridge - Arkansas - 1908, NRHP-listed as Middle Fork of the Little Red River Bridge, Co. Rd. 125 over the Middle Fork of the Little Red River Shirley, Arkansas
Seventh Street-Black River Bridge, Seventh St. over Black R. Port Huron, Michigan, NRHP-listed 
St. Francis River Bridge, US 70, over the St. Francis River Madison, Arkansas, NRHP-listed
Waverly Bridge, spans Tombigbee River between Waverly & Columbus, Mississippi, NRHP-listed
Wasena Bridge, spans the Roanoke River in the Wasena Historic District of Roanoke, Virginia - 1939

Notes

Bridge companies
Companies based in Milwaukee
Engineering companies of the United States
1888 establishments in Wisconsin
Construction and civil engineering companies established in 1888
American companies established in 1888
Manufacturing companies established in 1888
Manufacturing companies based in Wisconsin
Spin (b-boy move). A spin is a b-boying move that involves rotation of the breaker's body about some axis in contact with the ground. It is possible to perform a spin on virtually any part of the body, but bare skin often causes painful and spin-killing friction with the floor. To solve this problem, many breakers employ pieces of cloth or wear long clothing, pads, or caps. When the dancer uses his hands to aid in speeding up the spin, it is called tapping. A dancer may tap for a few rotations and then glide for subsequent rotations. Spins form an integral part of many breakers' routines, while others eschew them in favor of more complex-looking repeated movements, back and forth, after each rotation in a given direction.

Variants
1990s and 2000s are spinning handstands sometimes considered to be power moves. The term 1990 was created by ken swift of the Rocksteady crew but the actual move of spinning on one hand was created by Spinner of the Dynamic Rockers who at the time called it a hand spin. Kenny's move was a little different where he went up on a one arm hand stand and dropped to a shoulder spin. Spinner's move is the one that many b-boys around the world have named the 1990.
Back Spin - A spin on the upper back. The legs are often tucked into the chest and the move is often linked with windmills. This move was developed by JoJo of the Rock Steady Crew. The current record holder for most backspins is Bboy RTHYM with a total of 92 spins performed on June 3, 2021. The former record was also held by RTHYM with 83 spins.
Hand Glide - A one-armed spinning breakdance move. The breaker balances on one arm that has the elbow stabbed into the torso. The other hand pulls against the floor to spin the body in a circle. The move is usually performed with a glove to reduce friction.
Sideways Hand Glide - This variation looks like a Freeze (breakdance move) but is executed on the side after the handglide pick up speed the usually go to the side.
Headspins - The body is balanced vertically with only the head in contact with the floor. This spin is perhaps the one most commonly associated with breakdancing. Kid Freeze was considered the best in head spin in the early '80s the pioneer and master of headspin.
Knee Spin - A spin on one or both knees, normally usually in the kneeling position. Breakers often perform freezes or stylish movements of the upper body while spinning.
Chair Kneespin - A spin on one knee and bringing the right or left foot in front of the non spinning knee ankle of the non spinning foot is placed usually in front of spinning knee kneeling position. Breakers often perform stylish movements of the upper body while performing the (Chair Kneespin) spinning back to their feet.
Icey-Ice - Spinning in a chair position having the head grounded.
Side Chair Spin - Spinning in a side chair position.
Air Chair Spin - Spinning in an air chair position.

References 

Breakdance moves
Pollucite. Pollucite is a zeolite mineral with the formula  with iron, calcium, rubidium and potassium as common substituting elements. It is important as a significant ore of caesium and sometimes rubidium. It forms a solid solution series with analcime. It crystallizes in the isometric-hexoctahedral crystal system as colorless, white, gray, or rarely pink and blue masses. Well-formed crystals are rare. It has a Mohs hardness of 6.5 and a specific gravity of 2.9, with a brittle fracture and no cleavage.

Discovery and occurrence

It was first described by August Breithaupt in 1846 for occurrences on the island of Elba, Italy. It is named for Pollux, the twin of Castor on the grounds that it is often found associated with petalite (previously known as castorite). The high caesium content was missed by the first analysis by Karl Friedrich Plattner in 1848, but after the discovery of caesium in 1860 a second analysis in 1864 was able to show the high caesium content of pollucite.

Its typical occurrence is in lithium-rich granite pegmatites in association with quartz, spodumene, petalite, amblygonite, lepidolite, elbaite, cassiterite, columbite, apatite, eucryptite, muscovite, albite and microcline.

About 82% of the world's known reserves of pollucite occur near Bernic Lake in Manitoba, Canada, where they are mined for their caesium content for use in caesium formate oil drilling assistance. This ore is about 23% to 25% caesium by weight.

References

 

Caesium minerals
Sodium minerals
Aluminium minerals
Zeolites
Cubic minerals
Minerals in space group 230
Luminescent minerals
Segelerite. Segelerite is a complex phosphate mineral with formula CaMgFe3+OH(PO4)2·H2O. It occurs in pegmatites and forms striking green or chartreuse crystals. It was discovered in 1974 in the Black Hills of South Dakota by an amateur mineralogist from New York, Curt G. Segeler (1901–1989), after whom it is named.

It is closely related to overite which is virtually the same mineral except that the iron is replaced by aluminium. Another mineral in the same series is juonniite wherein the iron is also replaced, this time by scandium.

References

Webmineral.com - Segelerite
Mindat.org - Segelerite
Handbook of Mineralogy - Segelerite

Calcium minerals
Magnesium minerals
Iron(III) minerals
Phosphate minerals
Orthorhombic minerals
Minerals in space group 61
International Rectifier. International Rectifier was an American power management technology company manufacturing analog and mixed-signal ICs, advanced circuit devices, integrated power systems, and high-performance integrated components for computing. On 13 January 2015, the company became a part of Infineon Technologies.

IR's products, as a part of Infineon Technologies' overall semiconductor portfolio, continue to be used in many applications including lighting, automobile, satellite, aircraft, and defense systems; as well as key components in power supply systems in electronics-based products that include especially microcomputers, servers, networking and telecommunications equipment.

History
In the 1950s the company commercialized germanium rectifiers (1954) and created the first silicon-based rectifier (1959).
In 1974 they developed the first power and Darlington transistors which used glass passivation. In 1979 they developed first hexagonal power MOSFET Then in 1983, they developed the first intelligent power ICs.
In 1983 they lost a patent infringement lawsuit over the rights to doxycycline to Pfizer, Inc., resulting in a judgment of $55 million to Pfizer. To avoid bankruptcy, International Rectifier gave Pfizer its animal health and feed additive businesses.
In 2000, they developed FlipFET wafer packaging. Two years later, they developed DirectFET, a MOSFET packaging technology developed to address thermal limitations found in advanced computing, consumer, and communications applications. 

In 2003, they developed iMOTION Integrated Design Platform for motor control applications. In 2006, SmartRectifier IC was introduced for AC/DC applications. In 2007 the company launched SupIRBuck integrated voltage regulators. In 2008 a GaN-based power device platform was introduced. In 2011, they introduced PowIRstage devices and CHiL digital controllers. In 2012, they followed by launching micro-integrated power modules for motor control applications and COOLiRIGBTs for automotive.

In 2014, the company was bought by Infineon Technologies for $3 billion. By 2015, International Rectifier had officially become a part of Infineon Technologies

Manufacturing
International Rectifier also had wafer fabrication and assembly facilities around the world. The locations include:

El Segundo, California
Temecula, California
Leominster, Massachusetts
Mesa, Arizona
San Jose, California
Newport, Wales
Tijuana, Mexico

References

External links

 
 International Rectifier Corporation History

Companies formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Equipment semiconductor companies
Companies based in El Segundo, California
2014 mergers and acquisitions
Electronics companies established in 1947
Electronics companies disestablished in 2014
1947 establishments in California
2014 disestablishments in California
Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
Defunct manufacturing companies based in Greater Los Angeles
Defunct computer companies of the United States
Defunct computer hardware companies
Kst (software). Kst is a plotting and data viewing program. It is a general purpose plotting software program that evolved out of a need to visualize and analyze astronomical data, but has also found subsequent use in the real time display of graphical information.  Kst is a KDE application and is freely available for anyone to download and use under the terms of the GPL.  It is noted for being able to graph real-time data acquisition.

History
Kst was initially developed by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist as a personal project.  By 2004 it had begun to be used in various universities and the European Space Agency and development was funded by the Canadian Space Agency.  Kst is written in C++ and based upon (but does not use) the Tk toolkit.  It is targeted towards large (million element) data sets.

Features
kst is a fast real-time large-dataset plotting and viewing tool with basic data analysis functionality.

Plot types
kst is able to plot histograms and 3-D with color and contour mapping for 3-D images.  It is also able to process Network Common Data Form (NETCDF) files for 2-d plotting

Real-time plotting capability
Kst has been chosen where there is a need to present plots in real-time.

Applications
Real-time applications vary in size from simple graphing of a sensor from a microcontroller such as arduino that may be set up by a hobbyist to a simple sensor to plotting of real time date from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope.  The program has been recommended for real time graphical display of an open energy monitoring project.

Inputs
Kst is able to accept a number input formats with Dirfiles being particularly suitable for streaming applications and plug-in extension filters enabling other input stream types and file formats to be added.

Scripting language
The tool offers a scripting language, termed KstScript based upon JavaScript syntax which can help automate workflows.

Alternatives
Some alternatives include MATLAB, Qtiplot, SciDAVis, Grace and LabPlot. However, some of these are part of a numerical analysis package.

Spin-off developments

Dirfile format
In the process of developing the kst application a spin-off was the emergence of the Dirfile file format standard for time-ordered binary data in an efficient manner.  It was developed under the Getdata project into an independent standard with its own API.

See also

 List of graphing software
 QtiPlot, for scientific graphing and data analysis
 SciDAVis
 LabPlot
 HippoDraw

External links
 kst webpage

Notes and references

Notes

References

Free plotting software
KDE Applications
Plotting software
Soft microprocessor. A soft microprocessor (also called softcore microprocessor or a soft processor) is a microprocessor core that can be wholly implemented using logic synthesis. It can be implemented via different semiconductor devices containing programmable logic (e.g., FPGA, CPLD), including both high-end and commodity variations.

Most systems, if they use a soft processor at all, only use a single soft processor. However, a few designers tile as many soft cores onto an FPGA as will fit. In those multi-core systems, rarely used resources can be shared between all the cores in a cluster.

While many people put exactly one soft microprocessor on a FPGA, a sufficiently large FPGA can hold two or more soft microprocessors, resulting in a multi-core processor. The number of soft processors on a single FPGA is limited only by the size of the FPGA. Some people have put dozens or hundreds of soft microprocessors on a single FPGA. This is one way to implement massive parallelism in computing and can likewise be applied to in-memory computing.

A soft microprocessor and its surrounding peripherals implemented in a FPGA is less vulnerable to obsolescence than a discrete processor.

Core comparison

See also 
 System-on-a-chip (SoC)
 Network-on-a-chip (NoC)
 Reconfigurable computing
 Field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
 VHDL
 Verilog
 SystemVerilog
 Hardware acceleration

References

External links 
 Soft CPU Cores for FPGA
 Detailed Comparison of 12 Soft Microprocessors
 FPGA CPU News
 Freedom CPU website
 Microprocessor cores on Opencores.org (Expand the "Processor" tab)
 NikTech 32 bit RISC Microprocessor MANIK.