omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Public interface. In computer science, a public interface is the logical point at which independent software entities interact. The entities may interact with each other within a single computer, across a network, or across a variety of other topologies.

It is important that public interfaces will be stable and designed to support future changes, enhancements, and deprecation in order for the interaction to continue.

Design

Guidance
A project must provide additional documents that describe plans and procedures that can be used to evaluate the project’s compliance.
architecture design document.
coding standards document.
software release plan document.
document with a plan for deprecating obsolete interfaces.
The programmer must create fully insulated classes and insulate the  public interfaces from compile-time dependencies.

Best practices
Present complete and coherent sets of concepts to the user.
Design interfaces to be statically typed. 
Minimize the interface’s dependencies on other interfaces. 
Express interfaces in terms of application-level types.
Use assertions only to aid development and integration.

Example

C++ interface 
Use protocol classes to define public interfaces.
The characteristics of a protocol class are:
It neither contains nor inherits from classes that contain member data, non-virtual functions, or private (or protected) members of any kind.
It has a non-inline virtual destructor defined with an empty implementation.
All member functions other than the destructor, including inherited functions, are declared pure virtual and left undefined.
Benefits
The benefits of using protocol classes include:
Insulating applications from the external client
Insulating changes that are internal to the interface
Insulating changes to the public interface from changes to the implementation of the interface
Insulation has costs, but these tend to be outweighed by the gains in interoperability and reusability.
Costs:
Going through the implementation pointer
Addition of one level of indirection per access
Addition of the size of the implementation pointer per object to memory requirements

Other information
Various methodologies, such as refactoring, support the determination of interfaces. Refactoring generally applies to the entire software implementation, but is especially helpful in properly flushing out interfaces.  There are other approaches defined through the pattern community.

References 

Software architecture
Body in white. Body in white (BIW) is the stage in automobile manufacturing in which a car body's frame has been joined together, that is before painting and before the motor, chassis sub-assemblies, or trim (glass, door locks/handles, seats, upholstery, electronics, etc.) have been integrated into the structure. Assembly involves different techniques such as welding (spot, MIG/MAG, or friction stir), riveting, clinching, bonding and laser brazing.

The term derives from manufacturing practices before steel unibody monocoques, when automobile bodies were made by outside firms on a separate chassis with an engine, suspension, and bumpers attached. The manufacturers built or purchased wooden bodies (with thin, non-structural metal sheets on the outside) to bolt onto the frame. The bodies were painted white prior to the final color.

A folk etymology for "body in white" is the appearance of a car body after it is dipped into a white bath of primer (undercoat paint)— despite the primer's actual gray color. BIW could also refer to when car bodywork would be made of timber – all timber products, furniture, etc., are considered to be "in the white" when at the stage of raw timber before finishing or varnishing.

In car design, the "body in white" phase is where the final contours of the car body are worked out, in preparation for the ordering of the expensive production stamping die. Extensive computer simulations of crash-worthiness, manufacturability, and automotive aerodynamics are required before a clay model from the design studio can be converted into a body in white ready for production.

Factories may offer BIW cars to racers, who then may replace up to 90% of the car with aftermarket parts, and niche manufacturers like Ruf Automobile start their cars with BIWs from other makers.

Related terms
A related term in the automotive industry is "body in black". This can refer to a car body that is formed of alternate materials such as composites rather than conventional metal; these composite materials, such as carbon fiber, are black rather than white. "Body in black" can also refer to a step in the design process in which a mock-up of a new car skin is built, in order to perform exacting measurements during the design and pre-production processes.

References

External links
Images and information on body-in-white, Cambridge University

Automotive engineering
MLD. MLD may refer to:


Medicine
 Manual lymphatic drainage
 Metachromatic leukodystrophy, a rare neurometabolic genetic condition

Science and technology

 Masking Level Difference, see Auditory masking
 Mean log deviation in statistics and econometrics
 Mixed layer depth in hydrography
 Multicast Listener Discovery, in computer networking
 Million liter per day, in environmental engineering

Other

 ICAO airline designator of Air Moldova
 Maldives, ITU country code
 Maniac Latin Disciples, a street gang
 Marine Luchtvaart Dienst, the Dutch Naval Aviation Service
 Mutually locally derivable, a mathematical property of aperiodic tile sets
 EU Money Laundering Directive
 Miluo East railway station, China Railway pinyin code MLD
 Moderate Learning Difficulties, a recognised form of Special Educational Needs (SEN)
Monolingual learner's dictionary, type of dictionary designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. 
Moreland railway station, Melbourne
Alfa Pendular. Alfa Pendular is the name of the flagship Pendolino high-speed tilting train of Portuguese state railway company CP. It connects the cities of Guimarães, Braga, Porto, Aveiro, Coimbra, Santarém, Lisbon, Albufeira and Faro, among others at speeds of up to 220 km/h (135 mph).

The trains were assembled in Portugal by ADtranz at the former Sorefame works at Amadora, based on contracting partnership between Fiat-Ferroviaria as the main contractor and ADtranz and Siemens as the main subcontractors.

Beginning 2017, the trains were refurbished, introducing new interiors, livery, seating and features such as Wi-Fi and power outlets.

Description 
The Alfa Pendular high speed train is a six car electric multiple unit (EMU), which is derived from and closely resembles the Giugiaro designed Italian Fiat-Ferroviaria ETR 480 Pendolino train. The bogies had to be redesigned to operate on Portugal's  track.

There are 8 traction motors, installed on all but the two middle vehicles of the train, developing .  This M-M-T-T-M-M arrangement spreads the weight of the train, giving it a weight of only  per axle, which helps its cornering ability at high speed.

During testing, a top speed of  was reached close to Espinho in 1998.

Tilting technology 
Its tilting train technology, with a maximum tilt angle of 8°, allows the train to navigate curves at higher speeds than conventional trains. The combination of the resulting high cornering velocity and the tilting movement of the carriages helps ensure a comfortable ride for the passengers, although the jostle and sway compensating for track irregularities may cause "motion sickness" in those susceptible.  The hydraulic tilting system is governed by two gyroscopes in the head cars. The curve is found on the base of the elevation of the external track.

The use of this train did not require particular modifications to the existing rail network, but it is expensive in terms of maintenance of the rolling stock because of the complexity of the tilting system.

Stations 
The stations served by the Alfa Pendular are from north to south:
Braga
Famalicão
Trofa
Porto-Campanhã
Vila Nova de Gaia
Espinho
Aveiro
Coimbra-B
Pombal
Entroncamento
Santarém
Lisboa–Oriente
Lisboa–Santa Apolónia (off the lines from/to Faro)
Lisboa-Entrecampos
Pinhal Novo

Loulé

See also 

 List of high speed trains

References

External links 

 

Pendolino
Tilting trains
High-speed rail in Portugal
Electric multiple units of Portugal
Fiat Ferroviaria
Siemens multiple units
Adtranz multiple units
Homologous temperature. Homologous temperature expresses the thermodynamic temperature of a material as a fraction of the thermodynamic temperature of its melting point (i.e. using the Kelvin scale):

For example, the homologous temperature of lead at room temperature (25 °C) is approximately 0.50 (TH = T/Tmp = 298 K/601 K = 0.50).

Significance of the homologous temperature 
The homologous temperature of a substance is useful for determining the rate of steady state creep (diffusion-dependent deformation). A higher homologous temperature results in an exponentially higher rate of diffusion dependent deformation.

Additionally, for a given fixed homologous temperature, two materials with different melting points would have similar diffusion-dependent deformation behaviour. For example, solder (Tmp = 456 K) at 115 °C would have comparable mechanical properties to copper (Tmp = 1358 K) at 881 °C, because they would both be at 0.85Tmp despite being at different absolute temperatures.

In electronics applications, where circuits typically operate over a −55 °C to +125 °C range, eutectic tin-lead (Sn63) solder is working at 0.48Tmp to 0.87Tmp. The upper temperature is high relative to the melting point; from this we can deduce that solder will have limited mechanical strength (as a bulk material) and significant creep under stress. This is borne out by its comparatively low values for tensile strength, shear strength and modulus of elasticity. Copper, on the other hand, has a much higher melting point, so foils are working at only 0.16Tmp to 0.29Tmp and their properties are little affected by temperature.

References

Scales of temperature
Irrigation in Saudi Arabia. Center pivot irrigation in Saudi Arabia is typical of many isolated irrigation projects scattered throughout the arid and hyper-arid regions of the Earth. Nonrenewable fossil water is mined from depths as great as 1 km (3,000 ft), pumped to the surface, and distributed via large center pivot irrigation feeds. The circles of green irrigated vegetation may comprise a variety of agricultural commodities from alfalfa to wheat. Diameters of the normally circular fields range from a few hundred meters to as much as .

The projects often trace out a narrow, sinuous, and seemingly random path. Actually, engineers generally seek ancient river channels now buried by the sand seas. The fossil waters mined in these projects accumulated during periods of wetter climate in the Pleistocene glacial epochs, between 10,000 and 2 million years ago, and are not being replenished under current climatic conditions. The projects, therefore, will have limited production as the reservoirs are drained.

A network of dams has been built to trap and use precious seasonal floods. Vast underground water reservoirs have been tapped through deep wells. Desalination plants have been built to produce fresh water from the sea for urban and industrial use, thereby freeing other sources for agriculture. Facilities have also been put into place to treat urban and industrial run-off for agricultural irrigation. These efforts collectively have helped transform vast tracts of the desert into fertile farmland. Land under cultivation grew from under  in 1976 to more than 8 million acres (32,000 km2) in 1993.

Saudi Arabia is suffering from a major depletion of the water in its underground aquifers and a resultant break down and disintegration of its agriculture as a consequence. As a result of the catastrophe, Saudi Arabia has bought agricultural land in the United States, Argentina, and Africa. Saudi Arabia ranked as a major buyer of agricultural land in foreign countries.

See also

Desert farming
Peak water
Environmental impact of irrigation
Water politics in the Middle East

External links
Crop Circles in the Desert: Nasa Image of the Day

References

Agriculture in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
Irrigation
International Conference on Software Engineering. The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is one of the largest annual software engineering conferences. It has an 'A*' rating in the Rankings of the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) and an 'A1' rating from the Brazilian ministry of education. Furthermore, it is the software engineering conference with the highest Microsoft Academic field rating. The first ICSE conference was in 1975 in Washington DC.

List of Conferences
Past and future ICSE conferences include:

References

External links
 Pointers to ICSE conference websites
 ICSE Steering Committee Information

Software engineering conferences
Hera (rocket). Hera is a target missile for development testing of missile defense systems such as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot PAC-3.

History
In 1992, the United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command awarded the Theater Missile Defense (TMD) Targets contract to Coleman Aerospace with Space Vector Corporation and Aerotherm as sub-contractors.  Coleman developed Hera using the second and third stages of the Minuteman II ("MMII") and the guidance section of the Pershing II.  The Rocket Systems Launch Program at Detachment 12, USAF Space and Missile Systems Center, provided technical program management services involved with removing the liquid injection thrust vector control system from the retired MMII second stages in favor of a flex-seal system enabling robust flight control from launch to burn out.  First launch was on April 24, 1995, at White Sands Missile Range.

Because of its range, Russia claims Hera qualifies as an IRBM and hence violates Item 1, Article 6 of the INF Treaty.

Hera is also used in the USAF Sounding Rocket Program.

There were twelve tests using the Hera missile system launched from Fort Wingate over the Datil Mountains to White Sands Missile Range between 1997 and 2004.  In March 2009, the tests were resumed with a thirteenth flight over the Datil Mountains.
Other tests using the HERA were conducted entirely within the missile range, such as the aborted 13 September 2006 test of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

During THAAD flight test FTT-11 on December 11, 2009, the Hera target missile failed to ignite following its airborne deployment, subsequently crashing into the ocean. In the wake of this incident, Missile Defense Agency Director LTG Patrick O'Reilly sharply criticized L-3 Coleman Aerospace quality control practices, and in March 2010 suspended further Hera purchases. The suspension was lifted on May 9, 2011 when the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center and the Missile Defense Agency were satisfied that Coleman had completed the necessary corrective actions.

On October 30, 2013, the Pentagon announced that L3-Coleman had won a $74 million contract to continue to develop and supply medium-range ballistic missile targets to the Missile Defense Agency, beating out three competing bidders including Orbital Sciences Corporation and Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

Notes

References
Designation Systems: Coleman Hera
Astronautix: Hera
Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies: The Use of "Hera" Missile Violates the INF Treaty
People's Daily: Russia Urges US to End "Hera" Ballistic Missile Development 
Вашингтон реанимирует "Першинги" (in Russian)

Pershing missile
Target missiles
Interactive Connectivity Establishment. Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is a technique used in computer networking to find ways for two computers to talk to each other as directly as possible in peer-to-peer networking. This is most commonly used for interactive media such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), peer-to-peer communications, video, and instant messaging. In such applications, communicating through a central server would be slow and expensive, but direct communication between client applications on the Internet is very tricky due to network address translators (NATs), firewalls, and other network barriers.

ICE is developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force MMUSIC working group and is published as RFC 8445, as of August 2018, and has obsolesced both RFC 5245 and RFC 4091.

Overview
Network address translation (NAT) became an effective technique in delaying the exhaustion of the available address pool of Internet Protocol version 4, which is inherently limited to around four billion unique addresses. NAT gateways track outbound requests from a private network and maintain the state of each established connection to later direct  responses from the peer on the public network to the peer in the private network, which would otherwise not be directly addressable.

VoIP, peer-to-peer, and many other applications require address information of communicating peers within the data streams of the connection, rather than only in the Internet Protocol packet headers. For example, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) communicates the IP address of network clients for registration with a location service, so that telephone calls may be routed to registered clients. ICE provides a framework with which a communicating peer may discover and communicate its public IP address so that it can be reached by other peers.

Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) is a standardized protocol for such address discovery including NAT classification. Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) places a third-party server to relay messages between two clients when direct media traffic between peers is not allowed by a firewall.

IETF specifications
 RFC 5389: Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN).
 RFC 8656: Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN): Relay Extensions to STUN.
 RFC 6544: TCP Candidates with Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE)
 RFC 8445: Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE): A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT) Traversal

See also

 Realm-Specific IP (RSIP)
 Middlebox (Middlebox Communications or MIDCOM)
 Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
 NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP)
 Port Control Protocol (PCP)
 WebRTC

References

External links
 IETF Journal article on ICE
 MMUSIC working group
 BEHAVE working group
 PJNATH - Open Source ICE, STUN, and TURN Library 
 libnice: GLib ICE library
  libjuice: Open source UDP ICE library
 coturn: Open source implementation of TURN and STUN Server

Networking standards
Safflorite. Safflorite is a rare cobalt iron arsenide mineral with the chemical formula . Pure safflorite is , but iron is virtually always present. Safflorite is a member of the three-way substitution series of arsenides known as the loellingite group. More than fifty percent iron makes the mineral loellingite whereas more than fifty percent nickel and the mineral is rammelsbergite. A parallel series of antimonide minerals exist. 

Safflorite along with the other minerals crystallize in the orthorhombic system forming opaque gray to white massive to radiating forms, Clinosafflorite has a monoclinic symmetry. It has a mohs hardness of 4.5 and a specific gravity of 6.9 to 7.3. Twinning is common and star shaped twins are frequently found. 

It was first described in 1835 from the Schneeberg District, Ore Mountains, Germany. Safflorite occurs with other arsenide minerals as an accessory in silver mining districts. It alters to the arsenate erythrite in the secondary environment.

References

Minerals.net
Mineral galleries
 

Cobalt minerals
Iron minerals
Arsenide minerals
Orthorhombic minerals
Minerals in space group 58
Rammelsbergite. Rammelsbergite is a nickel arsenide mineral with formula NiAs2. It forms metallic silvery to tin white to reddish orthorhombic prismatic crystals, and is usually massive in form. It has a Mohs hardness of 5.5 and a specific gravity of 7.1.

It was first described in 1854 from its type locality in the Schneeberg District in Saxony, Germany. It was named after the German chemist and mineralogist, Karl Friedrich August Rammelsberg (1813–1899).

It occurs as a hydrothermal mineral in medium temperature veins association with skutterudite, safflorite, lollingite, nickeline, native bismuth, native silver, algodonite, domeykite and uraninite.

See also
 List of minerals named after people

References

Mineral Galleries
 

Nickel minerals
Arsenide minerals
Orthorhombic minerals
Minerals in space group 58
National Tidal and Sea Level Facility. Established in 2002, the National Tidal and Sea Level Facility is responsible for monitoring sea levels in the UK.

The NTSLF comprises the UK National Tide Gauge Network, geodetic networks, and gauges in the British dependent territories of the South Atlantic and Gibraltar. Data collected is used to create tidal predictions, monitor climate change and determine extreme sea levels for navigation and coastal engineering design.

The network is funded by the UK Environment Agency. Associated scientific research is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

External links
 National Tidal & Sea Level Facility Official Website
 Natural Environment Research Council Website

2002 establishments in the United Kingdom
Natural Environment Research Council
Oceanographic organizations
Organizations established in 2002
Research institutes in Merseyside
Sea level
University of Liverpool
Sanbornite. Sanbornite is a rare barium phyllosilicate mineral with formula BaSi2O5. Sanbornite is a colorless to white to pale green, platey orthorhombic mineral with Mohs hardness of 5 and a specific gravity of 3.74.

It was first described from Incline, Mariposa County, California in 1932 and named for mineralogist Frank B. Sanborn (1862–1936).

See also
List of minerals
List of minerals named after people

Footnotes

References
Mindat w/ locations
Webmineral w/ images
Mineral galleries

Barium minerals
Phyllosilicates
Orthorhombic minerals
Minerals in space group 62
Near net shape. Near-net-shape is an industrial manufacturing technique. As the name implies, the initial production of the item is very close to the final, or net, shape. This reduces the need for surface finishing. By minimizing the use of finishing methods like machining or grinding, near-net-shape production eliminates more than two-thirds of the production costs in some industries.

Processes
The following are various near-net-shape processes categorized by material.

Ceramics
Gelcasting
Ceramic injection molding
Spray forming
Structural ceramic production

Composites
Lanxide process

Plastics
Injection moulding
Rapid prototyping

Metals
Casting
Permanent mold casting
Powder metallurgy
Linear friction welding
Friction welding
Metal injection molding
Rapid prototyping
Spray forming
Superplastic forming
Cold forming
Semi-solid metal casting
Photochemical machining
Hot isostatic pressing

References

Metalworking terminology
Plastics industry