omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Story environment. A story environment is a physical, adaptive, augmented 3D reality or virtual space that can become host to narratives. Distinct from a story world, these environments can be in close proximity and even overlapping, and may have quite different narrative themes. The stories may be heavily scripted, or be created and shared by the space's users.

A story environment has potentially five levels:

Level 1 - Shared
Inhabitants create their own stories and shared mythology in a non specific narrative space.
Level 2 - Seeded
Catalyst writer/actor role plays and brings others into their story world in a generic narrative space
Level 3 - Influenced
Static - The environment is rich but only communicates in a visual static way
Living - The environment speaks to the participant, a monologue, pushes story at the participant e.g.; ghosts, residual lives, placed signage etc.:
Dynamic - The participant has a dialogue with the environment which responds to most things they do. E.g.: objects and bots respond to chat
Level 4 - Character
Environments that are richly rendered with strong back-stories and require the participant to improvise around a range character definitions with others who are also role playing. 
Improvised - human
Non-player characters are key role players

Level 5 - Scripted
The most passive where the participant inhabits a scripted part using two methods depending on the technology 
Automatically animating the participant and talking for the participant with others (automated) in group scenes
The participant delivers a pre-set script as actor

External links
Laboratory for Advanced Media Production Definitions
IBM Physically Interactive Story Environments
Hamlet on the Holodeck

Interactive fiction
MultiProcessor Specification. The MultiProcessor Specification (MPS) for the x86 architecture is an open standard describing enhancements to both operating systems and firmware, which will allow them to work with x86-compatible processors in a multi-processor configuration. MPS covers Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) architectures.

Version 1.1 of the specification was released on April 11, 1994.
Version 1.4 of the specification was released on July 1, 1995, which added extended configuration tables to improve support for multiple PCI bus configurations and improve expandability. 

The Linux kernel and FreeBSD are known to support the Intel MPS.
Windows NT are known to support MPS 1.1 and, through later Service Packs, also MPS 1.4.  Windows 2000 or higher are known to support MPS 1.4.
OS/2 are known to support MPS 1.1 only.
Mac OS X are known to support MPS 1.4 only.

There is a utility called 'mptable' which can be used to examine the MPS table on motherboards.

Since most newer machines support Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) which subsumes the MPS functionality, MPS has for the most part been supplanted by ACPI. MPS can still be useful on machines or with operating systems that do not support ACPI.

External links
MultiProcessor Specification
MPS Specification 1.4 (May 1997)
Intel MP Specification compatibility

Intel products
X86 architecture

BIOS
SYNTAX. In computer science, SYNTAX is a system used to generate lexical and syntactic analyzers (parsers) (both deterministic and non-deterministic) for all kinds of context-free grammars (CFGs) as well as some classes of contextual grammars. It has been developed at INRIA in France for several decades, mostly by Pierre Boullier, but has become free software since 2007 only. SYNTAX is distributed under the CeCILL license.

Context-free parsing
SYNTAX handles most classes of deterministic (unambiguous) grammars (LR, LALR, RLR as well as general context-free grammars. The deterministic version has been used in operational contexts (e.g., Ada), and is currently used both in the domain of compilation. The non-deterministic features include an Earley parser generator used for natural language processing. Parsers generated by SYNTAX include powerful error recovery mechanisms, and allow the execution of semantic actions and attribute evaluation on the abstract tree or on the shared parse forest.

Contextual parsing

The current version of SYNTAX (version 6.0 beta) includes also parser generators for other formalisms, used for natural language processing as well as bio-informatics. These formalisms are context-sensitive formalisms (TAG, RCG or formalisms that rely on context-free grammars and are extended thanks to attribute evaluation, in particular for natural language processing (LFG).

Error recovery

A nice feature of SYNTAX (compared to Lex/Yacc) is its built-in algorithm for automatically recovering from lexical and syntactic errors, by deleting extra characters or tokens, inserting missing characters or tokens, permuting characters or tokens, etc. This algorithm has a default behaviour that can be modified by providing a custom set of recovery rules adapted to the language for which the lexer and parser are built.

References

External links 
  SYNTAX web site
 Paper on the construction of compilers using SYNTAX and TRAIAN (Compiler Construction'02 Conference)

Compiling tools
Parser generators
Ferguson Electronics. Ferguson Electronics (formerly known as Ferguson Radio Corporation) is an electronics company specializing in small electronics items such as radios and set top boxes.

History 
Ferguson is one of the older electronics companies, alongside Ultra, Dynatron, Pye and Bush in the United Kingdom. It was originally an American–Canadian pre-War company making radio sets for the U.K. market based upon contemporary American models. After World War II, it became Ferguson Radio Corporation, making radio receivers and, later, televisions. Later still, it became part of the British Radio Corporation. It was taken over by Thorn Electrical Industries in the late 1950s, but the Ferguson name continued to be used by Thorn, and its successor Thorn EMI.

Throughout the company's early history, Ferguson products were very popular across its wide customer base. By the early 1960s its wide product range included a most comprehensive range of audio and TV equipment. Small, battery-operated portable transistor radios to solid oak 6 ft wide hydraulic lid radiograms sporting fully automatic stackable Garrard turntables, multi-channel radios and 2-foot-wide stereo speakers were commonplace in many UK households. Open reel tape recorders and hi-fis followed.

Sales held well, with 1980s new introductions including personal cassette players, CD players and video recorders.

The 1980s saw much competition from foreign brands such as JVC, Tandy, Hitachi and Sanyo. This took its toll on the Ferguson brand and in 1987 it was sold off to the French electronics company Thomson. Thomson group itself subsequently withdrew from the competitive European consumer electronics market. In the UK, the Ferguson brand was licensed initially to DSI (Dixons and Currys). DSI ceased using it in 2006 and competitor Comet took up the licence and used it until 2012. Comet used the brand on Freeview and Freesat set-top boxes, DVD players and DAB radios. Although Comet went into administration in November 2012, it had discontinued using the Ferguson brand earlier in the year.

Today 
In 2017 Ferguson in the UK was relaunched by a British television manufacturer Cello Electronics. Cello has licensed the name from Technicolor (Thomson) to be used for a new range of televisions manufactured in County Durham.

UK Trademarks 
There are currently several Ferguson trademarks registered for class 09, audio visual equipment, in the UK:
EU010787471 Registered by Ferguson Sp. z.o.o. 04/04/2012 but opposed and UKUK00000652009 EU003131927  Registered by Thomson Multimedia now Technicolor, dates back to 26/09/1946.

References

External links
 List of Ferguson televisions
 Ferguson UK Website

British brands
Electronics companies of the United Kingdom
Electronics industry in London
Manufacturing companies of the United Kingdom
Radio manufacturers
KRISTAL Audio Engine. The KRISTAL Audio Engine (commonly referred to as KRISTAL or KAE) is a digital audio workstation for Microsoft Windows. It is free for personal & educational use, with licensing options for commercial use.

The successor to this product became what is now known as Studio One.

History

Initial Development 

KRISTAL began development in 1999, as the university thesis project of Matthias Juwan. At that time it had a different look and feel, and was known as the Crystal Audio Engine, a name derived from the song The Crystal Ship by The Doors.

Following a public beta period, the initial version, renamed to the KRISTAL Audio Engine, was released in 2004, under the developer name of Kreatives.

K2 and KristalLabs 
On 24 December 2004 the KRISTAL development team announced that they were working on the successor to the KRISTAL Audio Engine, based on a new infrastructure. The development team planned for this successor to include cross-platform support for both Windows and macOS. The new software, known as K2, entered the Alpha development stage in July 2005.
On 18 September 2006, it was announced that all work and rights to the source code of K2 had been taken over by KristalLabs Software Ltd., a private start-up company co-founded by KRISTAL lead developer, Matthias Juwan, and Wolfgang Kundrus, who had previously worked on Cubase, Nuendo and HALion. Ownership for the original KRISTAL Audio Engine, however, did not transition to KristalLabs.

PreSonus and Studio One 

KristalLabs further developed K2 in cooperation with the American music technology company, PreSonus, before becoming part of PreSonus in 2009. Following this acquisition, the final result of the K2 development was re-branded and released as the first version of the PreSonus DAW, Studio One, for macOS and Windows. The former KristalLabs logo (representing a series of hexagons, like the one from the original KRISTAL Audio Engine logo, tessellated together) was used as the basis for the logo of Studio One.

Since this time, all versions of Studio One have been developed and released by PreSonus.

Functionality 
KRISTAL is free for personal & educational use, with licensing options for commercial use.

The primary window of the application is a digital mixer, but it provides separate, built-in components for additional functionality, such as audio sequencing and live audio input/recording. It includes built-in effects, such as EQ, chorus, delay and reverb, but also supports the use of third-party VST plug-ins. It can support up to 16 channels of audio; however, it does not provide support for MIDI.

The application uses 32-bit audio processing and supports both MME & ASIO drivers. In addition to its native Kristal project files, it is also compatible with WAVE, AIFF, FLAC and OGG Vorbis files.

See also 
 Comparison of digital audio editors

References

External links 
 
 KRISTAL User Community

Digital audio workstation software
Music production software
Music software
Audio editors
Windows multimedia software
2004 software
Xujiahui Tower. The Xujiahui Center is a complex of skyscrapers under construction in Shanghai, China. Upon its completion in 2024, the main tower will be the fourth tallest building in Shanghai, after the Shanghai Tower, Shanghai World Financial Center, and the Jin Mao Tower.

External links

Proposed buildings and structures in Shanghai
Skyscrapers in Shanghai
Proposed skyscrapers in China
2024 in Shanghai
Central apparatus room. In broadcast facilities and television studios, a central apparatus room (CAR, pronounced "C-A-R"),  central machine room, or central equipment room (CER), or central technical area (CTA), or rack room is where shared equipment common to all technical areas is located.  Some broadcast facilities have several of these rooms. It should be air-conditioned, however low-noise specifications such as acoustical treatments are optional. Equipment is connected either directly with an attached foldout monitor, keyboard and mouse or remotely via KVM switch, SSH, VNC, RS-232 or remote desktop.

Equipment

These rooms contain broadcast and broadcast IT mission critical gear necessary to broadcast and television operations. CARs usually house audio routers, video routers, video servers, compressors and multiplexers that utilize broadcast automation systems with broadcast programming applications to playout television programs.

They contain broadcast and monitoring equipment, through which all the operations are monitored by the transmission engineer, without disturbing the studio recordings. CER may also house analog and digital TV transmission systems, satellite up-link systems, digital processing synchronizers, video patch panels, and audio patch panels, including video monitors.

Common equipment 

 19-inch racks
 Antenna tracking system
 Audio router
 Broadcast delay
 Camera control units (CCUs)
 Conditional access system
 Character generator subtitling systems
 Distribution frame
 Digital TV encoder
 Fiber optic transceiver
 Frame synchronizers
 GPS receivers
 High-power amplifiers for transmission (television transmitter)
 Integrated receiver/decoder (IRD)
 IF distribution.
 Media storage
 Multiplexer
 Network switch
 Audio monitoring tools
 Radio frequency devices
 Router
 Serial digital interface (SDI) audio de-embedder
 Talkback (recording)
 Transport stream analyzer
 VTRs and/or VCRs (formerly, replaced with video servers)
 Video router
 Video server (also called playout server)
Video switcher frame or main unit
 video monitoring tools
 Video monitor
 Vectorscope
 Waveform monitor

See also
 Broadcast engineering
 Data center
 Master control room (MCR)
 Network operations center (NOC)
 Production control room (PCR)
 Server room
 Server farm
 Transmission control room (TCR)

References 

Broadcasting
Broadcast engineering
Rooms
Television terminology
Thiele tube. The Thiele tube, named after the German chemist Johannes Thiele, is a laboratory glassware designed to contain and heat an oil bath. Such a setup is commonly used in the determination of the melting point or boiling point of a substance. The apparatus resembles a glass test tube with an attached handle.

Operation 
Oil is poured into the tube, and then the "handle" is heated, either by a small flame or some other heating element.  The shape of the Thiele tube allows for formation of convection currents in the oil when it is  heated.  These currents maintain a fairly uniform temperature  distribution throughout the oil in the tube.  The side arm of the tube is designed  to generate these convection  currents and thus transfer the heat  from the flame evenly and rapidly throughout the heating  oil.  The sample, packed in a capillary tube, is  attached  to the thermometer, and held by means of a rubber band or a small slice of  rubber tubing. The Thiele tube is usually heated using a microburner with a small flame.

Melting point determination 
A sample in a sealed capillary, attached to a thermometer with a rubber band, is immersed in the tube. Heating is commenced, and the temperature ranges at which the sample melts can then be observed. During heating, the point at which melting is observed and the temperature constant is the melting point of the sample. A more modern method uses dedicated equipment, known as a melting point apparatus. A slow heating rate  at the melting point is needed in order to get an accurate measurement.  Record the temperature on the thermometer when the sample starts to melt and  record the temperature again when all of the sample has melted (this gives you the melting point range, which is what is usually quoted in chemical literature).

Boiling point determination 

A Thiele tube can be used to measure the boiling point of a liquid by the Siwoloboff method. A sample in a fusion tube is attached to a thermometer with a rubber band, and immersed in the tube. A sealed capillary, open end pointing down, is placed in the fusion tube. The Thiele tube is heated; dissolved gases evolve from the sample first. Once the sample starts to boil, heating is stopped, and the temperature starts to fall. The temperature at which the liquid sample is sucked into the sealed capillary is the boiling point of the sample.

References 

Laboratory glassware
Jean-Marc Jézéquel. Professor Jean-Marc Jézéquel is a French computer scientist.

Professionally, Jean-Marc Jézéquel worked as a computer scientist at the University of Rennes, France. His research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of Model-driven architecture.
From January 2012 to December 2020, he was Director of IRISA and then President of Informatics Europe.

Education and academic career
Jean-Marc Jézéquel received an engineering degree from Telecom Bretagne in 1986 and a PhD from the University of Rennes 1 in Rennes in 1989. 
He then worked for the Transpac (network) company on an Intelligent Network project. In 1991, he became  a researcher (Chargé de recherche) at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). During most of 1996, he has been an invited researcher in Pr. Yonezawa's lab, in the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Since October 2000, he has been Professor of Software Engineering at University of Rennes, where he pursued research on the foundations of Model Driven Engineering. From 2000 to 2012 he headed an Inria research team called Triskell.

From January 2012 to December 2020, he was Director of IRISA, a 800 people public research lab in informatics.

From January 2021 to December 2023, he was Vice President of Informatics Europe, before becoming its President since 2024.

In 2016 he received the Silver Medal from CNRS.

In 2020, he received the Career Award from the IEEE/ACM Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems conference, which recognizes his long-standing scientific contributions to the MDE community and his exemplary activity for the younger members of the MODELS community.

From January 2022 to April 2022, he was a visiting professor at McGill University.

In 2023 he has  been appointed as a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.

Publications 
Books, a selection
 Engineering Modeling Languages: Turning Domain Knowledge into Tools, CRC Press, 2016.
 Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles : des concepts à la pratique, Éditions Ellipses, 2012 
 Design Patterns and Contracts, Addison-Wesley, 1999
 Object Oriented Software Engineering with Eiffel, Addison-Wesley, 1996

Articles, a selection:
 Design by contract: The lessons of Ariane, with Bertrand Meyer, 1997
 Making components contract aware, Computer 32 (7), 1999
 Refactoring UML models, UML 2001
 Weaving executability into object-oriented meta-languages, MODELS 2005
 Automatic test generation: A use case driven approach IEEE Trans on Software Engineering, 2006
 Models at runtime to support dynamic adaptation, Computer 42 (10), 2009

Notes and references

External links
 JM Jézéquel's web page

Living people
French computer scientists
1964 births
Juan R. Cruz. Juan R. Cruz (born: January 5, 1946) is a Puerto Rican aerospace engineer who played an instrumental role in the design and development of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) parachute.

Early years
Cruz was born and raised in Puerto Rico.  After earning a B.S. (Bachelor of Science) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he briefly worked at Beech Aircraft Corporation in Wichita, KS; he then went on to earn a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in aerospace engineering. During his years at MIT he was involved with the Monarch  and Daedalus human powered aircraft teams.

Career in NASA
Cruz is a senior aerospace engineer in the Exploration Systems Engineering Branch at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. His responsibilities are focused on research and development of entry, descent, and landing (EDL) systems for robotic and human exploration missions. He was a member of the highly successful Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Science laboratory (MSL) projects that placed rovers on the surface of Mars in 2004 and 2012. His contributions to the MER and MSL projects centered on the design and qualification of the supersonic parachute. In October, 2004 he was among a group of scientists who received an "Exceptional Achievement Award", from NASA.

Mars Exploration Rover mission

The MER-A rover, Spirit, was launched on June 10, 2003, at 17:59 UTC, and MER-B, Opportunity, on July 7, 2003. Spirit landed in Gusev crater on January 4, 2004, and Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum on the opposite side of Mars from Spirit, on January 25, 2004. Cruz was among the scientists from Langley who helped develop the parachute which helped slow the spacecraft during entry, descent and landing.

According to Cruz:

There are challenges to testing these parachutes because we can not test it at exactly the right conditions. Earth's atmosphere is the one we have to work with and the Martian atmosphere is very different, so you have to make adjustments in how you test the parachute. Another issue is the wind tunnel models we used in our tests were ten-percent scale models, about five feet in diameter.

Cruz is also a member of the Phoenix (Mars 2007), Mars Science Laboratory (Mars 2011), and Crew Exploration Vehicle EDL teams. He has undertaken research on advanced missions to Mars, including robotic airplanes, as well as having been a technical reviewer for the Genesis, Huygens, and Stardust missions. Prior to his involvement with exploration programs he conducted research on high-altitude unmanned aircraft.

See also

References

1946 births
Puerto Rican scientists
Living people
MIT School of Engineering alumni
NASA people