omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Plastarch material. Plastarch Material (PSM) is a biodegradable, thermoplastic resin. It is composed of starch combined with several other biodegradable materials. The starch is modified in order to obtain heat-resistant properties, making PSM one of few bioplastics capable of withstanding high temperatures.  PSM began to be commercially available in 2005.

PSM is stable in the atmosphere, but biodegradable in compost, wet soil, fresh water, seawater, and activated sludge where microorganisms exist.  It has a softening temperature of 257 °F (125 °C) and a melting temperature of 313 °F (156 °C).

It is also hygroscopic. The material has to be dried in a material dryer at 150 °F (66 °C) for five hours or 180 °F (82 °C) for three hours. For injection molding and extrusion the barrel temperatures should be at 340° +/- 10 °F (171 °C) with the nozzle/die at 360 °F (182 °C).

Due to how similar PSM is to other plastics (such as polypropylene and CPET), PSM can run on many existing thermoforming and injection molding lines.  PSM is currently used for a wide variety of applications in the plastic market, such as food packaging and utensils, personal care items, plastic bags, temporary construction tubing, industrial foam packaging, industrial and agricultural film, window insulation, construction stakes, and horticulture planters.

Since PSM is derived from a renewable resource (corn starch), it has become an attractive alternative to petrochemical-derived products. Unlike plastic, PSM can also be disposed of through incineration, resulting in non-toxic smoke and a white residue which can be used as fertilizer. However, concerns have been expressed about the impact of such technologies on food prices.

Biodegradability concerns 
Some PSM products - such as cutlery - contain a mix of PSM and plastics. These plastics prevent the PSM from degrading, making the entire product non-biodegradable.

References

Polymer chemistry
Thermoplastics
Transparent materials
European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment. The European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment (EUROCAE) is an international organisation that deals exclusively with aviation standardisation, for both airborne and ground systems and equipment. It was created in 1963 in Lucerne, Switzerland by a decision of the European Civil Aviation Conference as a European forum focusing on electronic equipment for air transport. The organisation's offices are based in Saint-Denis, France near Paris.

History and operations 
EUROCAE has now been operating for more than 50 years as a non-profit organisation whose membership comprises aviation stakeholders made up of regulators, manufacturers, services providers, users (such as airlines and airports) and academia. The membership is not limited to the European region.

From the outset, EUROCAE has developed performance specifications and other documents exclusively dedicated to the aviation community. EUROCAE documents are widely referenced by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) as Guidance Material and by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) as means of compliance to European Technical Standard Orders (ETSOs) and other regulatory documents.

To achieve the desired global harmonisation of aviation standards, EUROCAE has a close cooperation with RTCA, Inc. and SAE International. About 50% of the EUROCAE Working Groups (WG) work jointly with RTCA, and another 10% with SAE. The joint development of standards and the subsequent reference of those standards by EASA and the FAA as Acceptable Means of Compliance allows for a globally harmonised implementation of specific applications or systems based on the state of the art technology. This includes aircraft but also satellites.

EUROCAE documents are also produced in the context of the applicable ICAO standards and are coherent with existing ARINC specifications to ensure global interoperability.

Organisation 
EUROCAE has currently more than 450 members, according to its own statements.

EUROCAE documents (ED) are developed by the Working Groups (WG) composed of voluntary experts from the member organisations of EUROCAE and – in case of joint activities -  RTCA and SAE. Before publication EDs undergo a rigorous internal and external scrutiny process (Open Consultation) to ensure the high quality of the approved standards. Since its creation EUROCAE has published more than 250 EDs.

The EUROCAE governance is led by the Council, which is composed of senior staff from full members of the Association who are elected by the annual General Assembly. A Technical Advisory Committee consisting of technical experts in various aviation domains advises the Council in technical decisions. The day-to-day work of the organisation is carried out by the EUROCAE Secretariat, a collective term for the Secretary General, Programme Managers and administrative staff.

References

External links
EUROCAE

Avionics
International aviation organizations
Safety organizations
Business organizations based in Europe
J. Anthony Hall. J. Anthony Hall FREng is a leading British software engineer specializing in the use of formal methods, especially the Z notation.

Anthony Hall was educated at the University of Oxford with a BA in chemistry and a DPhil in theoretical chemistry. His subsequent posts have included:
 ICI Research Fellow, Department of Theoretical Chemistry, University of Sheffield (1971–1973)
 Principal Scientific Officer, British Museum Research Laboratory (1973–1980)
 Senior Consultant, Systems Programming Limited (1980–1984)
 Principal Consultant, Systems Designers (1984–1986)
 Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon University (1994)
 Principal Consultant, Praxis Critical Systems (1986–2004)

In particular, Hall has worked on software development using formal methods for the UK National Air Traffic Services (NATS). He has been an invited speaker at conferences concerned with formal methods, requirements engineering and software engineering.

Since 2004, Hall has been an independent consultant. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of York. Hall was the founding chair of ForTIA, the Formal Techniques Industry Association.

Selected publications 
 Anthony Hall, Seven Myths of Formal Methods, IEEE Software, September 1990, pp. 11–19.
 Anthony Hall and Roderick Chapman, Correctness by Construction: Developing a Commercial Secure System, IEEE Software, January/February 2002, pp. 18–25.

References 
 Career history

External links 
 Anthony Hall website
 

Living people
British computer programmers
British computer scientists
Formal methods people
Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Fellows of the British Computer Society
Alumni of the University of Oxford
Employees of the British Museum
Academics of the University of Sheffield
British software engineers
Year of birth missing (living people)
Missile (1988 film). Missile is a 1988 American documentary film by Frederick Wiseman.

Summary
It chronicles the 14-week training course for the men and women of the United States Air Force who are charged with manning the ICBM silos in remote places like Minot AFB and Whiteman AFB. The film shows discussions of the ethics of nuclear war, shows scenes from the daily lives of trainees, and shows demonstrations of training exercises such as counterterrorism, the launching of nuclear missiles, the command and control process, and basic military training. Most scenes in the film are of classroom training, interspersed with exercises in training facilities. The film includes a scene of an Air Force church service memorial for the astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Production
In the typical cinéma vérité style of Wiseman's films, the documentary is unadorned by commentary, narration, or music.

References

External links

Official website

1988 documentary films
1988 films
American documentary films
Documentary films about the Cold War
Films directed by Frederick Wiseman
Documentary films about nuclear war and weapons
Documentary films about the United States Air Force
Intercontinental ballistic missiles of the United States
1980s English-language films
1980s American films
English-language documentary films
Marine Wing Support Group 17. Marine Wing Support Group 17 (MWSG-17) was a United States Marine Corps aviation ground support unit based at Marine Corps Base Camp Butler, Japan.  They were composed of two squadrons that provided the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing (1st MAW) and III Marine Expeditionary Force with complete airfield operation services (less air traffic control), engineer and transportation support, medical assistance, food services, security support, and other direct combat and combat service support to the Aviation Combat Element.
The Group was disbanded on 4 June 2012 and its subordinate units passed to other commands in 1st Marine Aircraft Wing.

Mission
Provide the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing with organic and deployable aviation ground support to contingencies and exercises within the USPACOM area of responsibility.

Subordinate units
 Marine Wing Support Squadron 171
 Marine Wing Support Squadron 172
 Personnel Support Detachment 17

History
Marine Wing Support Group 17 was activated on 1 July 1953 at Itami, Japan and designated as Marine Wing Service Group 17. Later that same year, MWSG-17 was relocated to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan where its Marines served until 1966. That year it was re-designated as Marine Wing Support Group 17 and deployed to the Republic of Vietnam. MWSG-17 actively participated in the Vietnam War from June 1966 until August 1970 while operating from Da Nang Air Base, Vietnam. During this period, the Group earned a Presidential Unit Citation as well as a Meritorious Unit Commendation. In the summer of 1970, MWSG-17 returned home from Vietnam to MCAS Iwakuni. Nine years later, MWSG-17 moved to Okinawa, Japan and took up residence at Camp Foster.  The Group was disbanded on 4 June 2012 and its subordinate units passed to other commands in 1st Marine Aircraft Wing.

See also

 Organization of the United States Marine Corps
 List of United States Marine Corps aviation support squadrons

External links
  MWSG-17's official website

References 

United States Marine Corps wing support groups
Inactive units of the United States Marine Corps
Chemical process modeling. Chemical process modeling is a computer modeling technique used in chemical engineering process design. It typically involves using purpose-built software to define a system of interconnected components, which are then solved so that the steady-state or dynamic behavior of the system can be predicted. The system components and connections are represented as a process flow diagram.  Simulations can be as simple as the mixing of two substances in a tank, or as complex as an entire alumina refinery.

Chemical process modeling requires a knowledge of the properties of the chemicals involved in the simulation, as well as the physical properties and characteristics of the components of the system, such as tanks, pumps, pipes, pressure vessels, and so on.

See also 
 Manufacturing process management
 Process simulation
 Process optimization
 Process design (chemical engineering)
 Process systems engineering

External links 

 
Parameter calibration in chemical reaction network models

References 

Production and manufacturing software
Chemical process engineering
Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute is on the campus of the University of Southern California. G. K. Surya Prakash serves as the Director and holds the George A. and Judith A. Olah Nobel Laureate Chair of Chemistry.

The institute conducts research in polymer science, materials chemistry, and hydrocarbon chemistry.

References

External links
Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute

Chemical research institutes
Research institutes in California
Institutes of the University of Southern California
Integrated Media Systems Center. The Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) is on the campus of the University of Southern California, United States. It was founded using a grant from the US National Science Foundation in 1996 for the study of Integrated Media Systems.
The original mission was focused on the advancement the integration of digital video, immersive audio, text, animation and graphics to  transform the way people work, communicate, learn, teach, entertain and play. By using cross-disciplinary programs of research and education, the Center has taken multimedia to a new level of technological sophistication.

References

External links 
 
 More information on IMSC

1996 establishments in California
Centers of the University of Southern California
Research institutes in California
Information technology research institutes
Digital media schools
Center for Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems. Center for Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems is on the campus of the University of Southern California.

The Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems (BMES) vision is realized first by identifying the unmet medical needs in the 3 testbeds of blindness, paralysis, and central nervous system impairments. The solutions to these needs are then developed by designing and synthesizing engineered system specifications from medical, scientific, and engineering disciplines.  Furthermore, to develop these novel biomimetic microelectronic systems, our BMES ERC's work  is concentrated in three thrust areas of enabling technology that are at the heart of immediate and long-term interest to the rapidly growing medical device industry.

Areas of Research   
The three testbed areas are 1) Retinal Prosthesis (Restoring Vision to the blind) 2) Neuromuscular Prosthesis (reanimating paralyzed limbs) 3) Cortical Prosthesis (Repairing cognitive disability).  The three thrust areas are 1) mixed-signal systems on a chip, 2) power and data management, and 3) interface technology (electrode and electronic packaging technologies).

The Center has approximately 45 faculty that it works with at USC, Caltech and UC Santa Cruz, and an industrial advisory board of approximately ten companies.

References

Centers of the University of Southern California
Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering. Founded in 1998, Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California (AMI-USC) was a 501c(3) non-profit organization dedicated to biomedical engineering technology development. The institute was located on the University Park Campus of USC in Los Angeles, California and focuses on helping to bridge the gap between discovery research and product commercialization. As of 2022, the institutefinancial endowment was $230 million, with over $150 million donated by medical device entrepreneur and philanthropist Alfred E. Mann.

In 2015, a former employee of AMI-USC filed a lawsuit against the institute, USC, and two of AMI-USC's executives. The plaintiff accused the institute of sexual harassment and wrongful termination. The plaintiff was represented by The Bloom Firm, led by attorney Lisa Bloom. The case was settled via arbitration.

In 2022, USC President Dr. Carol Folt announced that most of AMI-USC's endowment will be reallocated to help support medical research and commercialization efforts of other entities within or affiliated with USC. These include the USC School of Pharmacy, USC Viterbi School of Engineering Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Children's Hospital Los Angeles. 

In 2023, AMI-USC was effectively dissolved by the USC administration. The institute's operations, management, staff, and volunteer Board of Directors were terminated after prior notification. Control over any remaining financial assets was transferred to USC Research and Innovation (OORI).  AMI-USC no longer operates as an independent 501c(3) non-profit organization.

References

Institutes of the University of Southern California
Medical research institutes in California
Research institutes established in 1998
1998 establishments in California
Science and technology in Greater Los Angeles
Operation High Dive. Operation High Dive (also known as Project High Dive) was a secret project carried out during the 1950s by the United States Air Force. It tested high-altitude parachutes using anthropomorphic dummies. The dummies went into a 200 rpm flat spin, which would be fatal to a human. Further investigations on this led to Project Excelsior. It may later have been confused with Project Mogul and thus helped form the account of the Roswell incident.

References

External links
History of Research in Space Biology and Biodynamics - Part IV
Anthropomorphic dummy balloon drop test

Ballooning
Military parachuting
Airborne operations
Military projects of the United States
Cold War military history of the United States
Pulay stress. The Pulay stress or Pulay forces (named for Peter Pulay) is an error that occurs in the stress tensor (or Jacobian matrix) obtained from self-consistent field calculations (Hartree–Fock or density functional theory) due to the incompleteness of the basis set.

A plane-wave density functional calculation on a crystal with specified lattice vectors will typically include in the basis set all plane waves with energies below the specified energy cutoff. This corresponds to all points on the reciprocal lattice that lie within a sphere whose radius is related to the energy cutoff. Consider what happens when the lattice vectors are varied, resulting in a change in the reciprocal lattice vectors. The points on the reciprocal lattice which represent the basis set will no longer correspond to a sphere, but an ellipsoid. This change in the basis set will result in errors in the calculated  ground state energy change.

The Pulay stress is often nearly isotropic, and tends to result in an underestimate of the equilibrium volume. Pulay stress can be reduced by increasing the energy cutoff. Another way to mitigate the effect of Pulay stress on the equilibrium cell shape is to calculate the energy at different lattice vectors with a fixed energy cutoff.

Similarly, the error occurs in any calculation where the basis set explicitly depends on the position of atomic nuclei (which are to change during the geometry optimization). In this case, the Hellmann–Feynman theorem – which is used to avoid derivation of many-parameter wave function (expanded in a basis set) – is only valid for the complete basis set. Otherwise, the terms in theorem's expression containing derivatives of the wavefunction persist, giving rise to additional forces – the Pulay forces:

The presence of Pulay forces makes the optimized geometry parameters converge slower with increasing basis set. The way to eliminate the erroneous forces is to use nuclear-position-independent basis functions, to explicitly calculate and then subtract them from the conventionally obtained forces, or to self-consistently optimize the center of localization of the orbitals.

References

Density functional theory
Excluded volume. The concept of excluded volume was introduced by Werner Kuhn in 1934 and applied to polymer molecules shortly thereafter by Paul Flory. Excluded volume gives rise to depletion forces.

In liquid state theory 

In liquid state theory, the 'excluded volume' of a molecule is the volume that is inaccessible to other molecules in the system as a result of the presence of the first molecule. The excluded volume of a hard sphere is eight times its volume—however, for a two-molecule system, this volume is distributed among the two particles, giving the conventional result of four times the volume; this is an important quantity in the Van der Waals equation of state. The calculation of the excluded volume for particles with non-spherical shapes is usually difficult, since it depends on the relative orientation of the particles. The distance of closest approach of hard ellipses and their excluded area has been recently considered.

In polymer science 

In polymer science, excluded volume refers to the idea that one part of a long chain molecule can not occupy space that is already occupied by another part of the same molecule.  Excluded volume causes the ends of a polymer chain in a solution to be further apart (on average) than they would be were there no excluded volume (e.g. in case of ideal chain model). The recognition that excluded volume was an important factor in analyzing long-chain molecules in solutions provided an important conceptual breakthrough, and led to the explanation of several puzzling experimental results of the day. It also led to the concept of the theta point, the set of conditions at which an experiment can be conducted that causes the excluded volume effect to be neutralized. At the theta point, the chain reverts to ideal chain characteristics.  The long-range interactions arising from excluded volume are eliminated, allowing the experimenter to more easily measure short-range features such as structural geometry, bond rotation potentials, and steric interactions between near-neighboring groups. Flory correctly identified that the chain dimension in polymer melts would have the size computed for a chain in ideal solution if excluded volume interactions were neutralized by experimenting at the theta point.

See also
Distance of closest approach
Steric effects
Mayer f-function

References 

Polymer physics
Rubber properties
Big Loo. Big Loo was a toy robot manufactured by Louis Marx and Company for the 1963 Christmas holiday season. It retailed for $9.99. The toy, primarily made of injection molded hi-impact polystyrene parts, stood three-feet tall (37-inches), a foot wide, and nine inches deep.

Its key features included a sight scope with cross-hairs, two flashing battery-powered red eyes with an on-off switch, a hand-cranked mechanical voice box that played ten messages, two rubber-tipped darts that were fired from triggers on the back, a left arm that held four red balls which were fired from a spring in the left elbow, and a right arm that had a grasping claw able to pick up objects.  One foot was equipped with a spring-powered rocket.  It could also squirt water from its navel and was equipped with a compass, whistle, bell, a Morse code clicker with chart, and could bend over at the waist .

Big Loo was featured on the cover of the Los Lobos album Colossal Head.

External links
Marx Museum, The Big Toys
Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, Robots and Space Toys Gallery - Big Loo
Toy and Train Museum
Big Loo - Your Friend From The Moon

Toy brands
1960s toys
Toy robots
Products introduced in 1963
NacelleVerse