omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Command Data Buffer. Command Data Buffer (CDB) was a system used by the United States Air Force's Minuteman ICBM force.  CDB was a method to transfer targeting information from a Minuteman Launch Control Center to an individual missile by communications lines.  Prior to CDB, new missile guidance would have to be physically loaded at the launch facility; the process usually took hours.

History
The surviving remnant of the Minuteman Command Control System (MICCS), CDB permitted the rapid, remote, retargeting of the Minuteman III fleet. CDB was operational at all Minuteman III wings by 15 Aug 1977. Minuteman II wings had a similar install, designated Improved Launch Control System, providing the older system the potential for remote retargeting.

Phaseout
CDB was replaced in the late 1990s by the Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting system, currently in use by United States ICBM forces.

See also
 LGM-30 Minuteman
 Launch control center (ICBM)
 Improved Launch Control System - Minuteman II upgrade similar to CDB
 Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting System (REACT)

References

United States nuclear command and control
Cold War weapons of the United States
Nuclear weapons of the United States
Computer memory
Synchronization
Thomas Jakobsen. Thomas Jakobsen is a mathematician, cryptographer, and computer programmer, formerly an
assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and head of research and
development at IO Interactive. His notable work includes designing the physics engine and 3-D pathfinder algorithms for Hitman: Codename 47, and the cryptanalysis of a number of block ciphers.

Jakobsen earned an M.Sc. in engineering and Ph.D. in mathematics, both from DTU.

External links
 

Living people
Modern cryptographers
Danish mathematicians
Video game programmers
Danish computer scientists
Year of birth missing (living people)
Place of birth missing (living people)
Walter Rautenstrauch. Walter Rautenstrauch (1880–1951) was an American mechanical and consulting engineer, and Professor at Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering in the 1930s. He coined the term break-even point, and developing the break-even chart together with Charles Edward Knoeppel.

Rautenstrauch was instrumental in the creation of Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering, which is said to be the first such department in the United States. One of his most important students and colleagues was Seymour Melman, who went on to be a professor in this department.

Rautenstrauch, together with Howard Scott, formed the Committee on Technocracy in 1932, which advocated a more rational and productive society headed by technical experts. However, Rautenstrauch and Scott soon found they held very different views. Scott advocated for complete control of society and the government by Engineers. Rautenstrauch was more moderate, wishing for Engineers to only be in charge of industrial and economic decisions and the government to maintain some level of democracy. Rautenstrauch also stressed the need for human and moral values. In 1933 the Committee disbanded, largely because of different views held by the two men.

Partially due to his involvement in Technocracy (despite his break up with the increasingly erratic Scott) and partially due to his other political views, Rautenstrauch gained animosity from more conservative staff members at Columbia up to his retirement in 1943. Despite this, he was remembered by most students as a "caring and insightful teacher".

Rautenstrauch remained active even after his retirement. He helped raise funds for refugees during World War II. He actively defended Edward Condon after the Condon was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Rautenstrauch also worked for the Progressive Party in the 1948 Presidential Election. He contributed to scientific journals and authored books on engineering up until his death. He died at the Lenox Hill Hospital on January 3, 1951. He was 70 years old.

References

External links 
 
 Walter Rautenstrauch papers at columbia.edu.

1880 births
1951 deaths
American mechanical engineers
American business theorists
Columbia University faculty
Technocracy movement
People from Sedalia, Missouri
Clinker (waste). Clinker is a generic name given to waste from industrial processes, particularly those that involve smelting metals, welding, burning fossil fuels and use of a blacksmith's forge, which commonly causes a large buildup of clinker around the tuyere. Clinker often forms a loose, dark deposit consisting of waste materials such as coke, coal, slag, charcoal, and grit.  Clinker often has a glassy look to it, usually because of the formation of molten silica compounds during processing. Clinker generally is much denser than coke, and, unlike coke, generally contains too little carbon to be of any value as fuel.  It is also applied to the byproduct of combustion and heating by those who use anthracite or lignite coal-fired boilers.  

Clinkers can occur naturally, for example in underground deposits of coal that have been altered by heat from nearby molten magma; volcanic clinkers are jagged pieces of lava that look similar to industrial clinker.

Etymology

"Clinker" is from Dutch, and was originally used in English to describe clinker bricks. The term was later applied to hard residue, due to its similar appearance.

Uses

Clinker often is reused as a cheap material for paving footpaths. It is laid and rolled, and forms a hard path with a rough surface that presents less risk of slipping than most loose materials. In sufficient thickness such a layer drains well and is valuable for controlling muddiness. However, if laid without sufficient adhesive, it needs frequent rolling and addition of more clinker to maintain the path in good condition if it is subject to heavy foot traffic.  

In sewage treatment works, the foul water is first screened to remove floating debris. Then it is sedimented to remove insoluble particles.  After this, it is sprayed over a filter bed of clinker. Aerobic microbes soon grow in hollows in the clinker, where they kill harmful anaerobic bacteria in the water and remove much of the offensive organic waste.

Historically, clinker from coal-burning steamships simply was discarded overboard, leaving detectable trails on the seabed of some prominent steamship routes. As such, the deposits have proven to be of biological, historical and archaeological interest.

Naturally occurring clinkers exist.  For example, in the Powder River Basin is covered by clinkers from coal-seam fires, i.e., "baked, welded and molded rocks formed by the natural burning of coal beds."

See also
Construction
Dross
Industrial furnace
Metallurgy
Recycling

References

Waste
Metallurgical processes
Moving floor. A moving floor is a hydraulically-driven moving-floor conveyance system for moving bulk material or palletized products, which can be used in a warehouse, loading dock or semi-trailer. It automates and facilitates loading and unloading of palletized goods by eliminating the need for a forklift to enter the trailer. In a truck-based application, the system can quickly unload loose material without having to tip the trailer or tilt the floor as with other dumping systems.  In a bulk material application such as a waste facility, these systems can reduce double handling by allowing any vehicle to deliver material to the conveying floor and move heavy bulk materials to subsequent stages of a process.  For bagged waste, the system can also be combined with bag openers.

How it works
The moving floor is divided into three sets of narrow floor slats, with every third slat connected together, hydraulically powered to move forward and backward either in unison, or alternately. When all three sets move in unison, the load is moved upon them in the direction the operator wishes. Slat retraction (during which the load does not move) is accomplished by moving only one set of slats at a time. (The friction of the load on the two stationary sets of slats keeps the load from moving while a single set of slats alternately slides past.)

Use in a trailer

Optionally, the semi-trailer may include a movable front wall with a rubber flap at the bottom extending onto the floor, or simply a movable flap or tarp at the front of the trailer bed on which the material is loaded. During unloading of loose material, either of these will ensure that nothing is left behind, almost or eliminating having to sweep the floor.

It takes about 5 to 15 minutes to unload a full  trailer, taking less manpower, equipment and time than without the system. The operator can enter a narrow low gate and dump the load inside a building. With a conventional tipper (or dump truck) as well as a dump trailer, that is often not possible. It is also possible to handle a full-width or full-length pallets, without opening the sides of the trailer.

Conveying pallets
A similar system is designed specifically for moving pallets. It uses only two (rather than three) sets of slats; where one set raises the load just enough for the second set to retract. After the load-raiser lowers and retracts, then both sets move together to actually move the load. Load capacity is  and floor speed is up to .

See also 
 Live bottom trailer
 Moving walkway

References

External links

Vehicle technology
Ken Kennedy (computer scientist). Ken Kennedy (August 12, 1945 – February 7, 2007) was an American computer scientist and professor at Rice University. He was the founding chairman of Rice's Computer Science Department.

Kennedy directed the construction of several substantial software systems for programming parallel computers, including an automatic vectorizer for Fortran 77, an integrated scientific programming environment, compilers for Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran, and a compilation system for domain languages based on the numerical computing environment MATLAB.

He wrote over 200 articles and book chapters, plus numerous conference addresses. Kennedy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1990. He was named a Fellow of the AAAS in 1994 and of the ACM and IEEE in 1995. In recognition of his achievements in compilation for high performance computer systems, he was honored as the recipient of the 1995 W. W. McDowell Award, the highest research award of the IEEE Computer Society. From 1997 to 1999, he served as co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). In 1999, he was named recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, the third time this award was given. In 2005, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kennedy died of pancreatic cancer in Houston at the age of 61. At the time of his death he was the John and Ann Doerr University Professor in the department of Computer Science at Rice and the Director of the Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft).  As of November 20, 2006, he had directed the PhD dissertations of 38 graduate students and masters theses for 8 students.

Kennedy's last publication was The rise and fall of High Performance Fortran: an historical object lesson, in which Kennedy discussed the general failure of the High Performance Fortran language which he had championed.

On November 18, 2009, the ACM and 
IEEE
awarded the first Ken Kennedy CS Award
to Francine Berman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The award was given at the ACM IEEE Supercomputing (or, "SC") '09 conference.

Bibliography 
Allen, Randy; Kennedy, Ken (2002). Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures: A Dependence-based Approach.  San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. .

References

External links
Ken Kennedy's homepage – at Rice University's Computer Science Department

List of McDowell Award recipients

1945 births
2007 deaths
American computer scientists
1995 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Fellows of the IEEE
New York University alumni
Deaths from pancreatic cancer in Texas
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Rice University faculty
Rice University alumni
Researchers in distributed computing
Yisrael Galili (inventor). Yisrael Galili (, born Yisrael Balashnikov; 23 October 1923 – 9 March 1995) was an Israeli weapons designer, best known for designing the Galil assault rifle. He also helped to create the Uzi submachine gun. He was known in the military by the nickname 'Father of the Rifle'.

Early life
Born in Mandatory Palestine on October 26, 1923, he volunteered to work with the Haganah in weapons manufacture.

Galil rifle
During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis captured many AK-47 assault rifles from the Egyptian soldiers which proved more reliable and useful in the arid conditions against the FN FAL. Inspired by the AK-47, the IDF assessed it thoroughly and began the process of designing a new automatic rifle. The task was assigned to two groups: one led by Uziel Gal, the designer of the Uzi submachine gun, and the other led by Galili. The latter, together with Yakov Lior, invented the Galil assault rifle, named after its inventor. Tests were conducted from the end of the 1960s to the early 1970s led to Galili's rifle emerging as the winner, as a result Galil was adopted by the military. The Galil assault rifle heavily derives most of the features from Kalashnikov AK-47. In 1973, he received the Israel Defense Prize for this achievement.

Death
Yisrael Galili died of a heart attack on March 9, 1995.

See also
R4 assault rifle

References 

20th-century Israeli inventors
1923 births
1995 deaths
Firearm designers
Israel Defense Prize recipients
Burials at Yarkon Cemetery
British Army personnel of World War II
Spongin. Spongin, a modified type of collagen protein, forms the fibrous skeleton of most organisms among the phylum Porifera, the sponges. It is secreted by sponge cells known as spongocytes.

Spongin gives a sponge its flexibility. True spongin is found only in members of the class Demospongiae.

Research directions

Use in the removal of phenolic compounds from wastewater 
Researchers have found spongin to be useful in the photocatalytic degradation and removal of  bisphenols (such as BPA) in wastewater. A heterogeneous catalyst consisting of a spongin scaffold for iron phthalocyanine (SFe) in conjunction with peroxide and UV radiation has been shown to remove phenolic wastes more quickly and efficiently than conventional methods. Other research using spongin scaffolds for the immobilization of Trametes versicolor Laccase has shown similar results in phenol degradation.

References

Marine biology
Collagens
Diagnostic board. In electronic systems a diagnostic board is a specialized device with diagnostic circuitry on a printed circuit board that connects to a computer or other electronic equipment replacing an existing module, or plugging into an expansion card slot.

A multi-board electronic system such as a computer comprises multiple printed circuit boards or cards connected via connectors. When a fault occurs in the system, it is sometimes possible to isolate or identify the fault by replacing one of the boards with a diagnostic board. A diagnostic board can range from extremely simple to extremely sophisticated.

Simple standard diagnostic plug-in boards for computers are available that display numeric codes to assist in identifying issues detected during the power-on self-test executed automatically during system startup.

Dummy board
A dummy board provides a minimal interface. This type of diagnostic board in intended to confirm that the interface is correctly implemented. For example, a PC motherboard manufacturer can test PCI functionality of a PC motherboard by connecting a dummy PCI board into each PCI slot on the motherboard

Extender board
An extender board (or board extender, card extender, extender card) is a simple circuit board that interposes between a card cage backplane and the circuit board of interest to physically 'extend' the circuit board of interest out from the card cage allowing access to both sides of the circuit board to connect diagnostic equipment such as an oscilloscope or systems analyzer. For example, a PCI extender board can be plugged into a PCI slot on a computer motherboard, and then a PCI card connected to the extender board to 'extend' the board into free space for access. This approach was common in the 1970s and 1980s particularly on S-100 bus systems. 

The concept can become unworkable when signal timing is affected by the length of the signal paths on the diagnostic board, as well as introducing Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) into the circuit under test because of a lack of adequate shielding.

The use of extender boards is declining because of the wider use of multilayer flexible circuit boards and overall cheaper components, particularly in the consumer end of the electronics market.

Sources
Vector Electronics & Technology in North Hollywood Calif. is one of the few companies still making these legacy boards.

Electronic engineering
David A. McAllester. David A. McAllester (born May 30, 1956) is an American computer scientist who is Professor and former chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, 1979 and 1987 respectively. His PhD was supervised by Gerald Sussman. He was on the faculty of Cornell University for the academic year 1987–1988 and on the faculty of MIT from 1988 to 1995. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research from 1995 to 2002. He has been a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence since 1997. He has written over 100 refereed publications.

McAllester's research areas include machine learning theory, the theory of programming languages, automated reasoning, AI planning, computer game playing (computer chess) and computational linguistics. A 1991 paper on AI planning proved to be one of the most influential papers of the decade in that area. A 1993 paper on computer game algorithms influenced the design of the algorithms used in the Deep Blue chess system that defeated Garry Kasparov. A 1998 paper on machine learning theory introduced PAC-Bayesian theorems which combine Bayesian and non-Bayesian methods.

Opinions on artificial intelligence
McAllester has voiced concerns about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, writing in an article to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that it is inevitable that fully automated intelligent machines will be able to design and build smarter, better versions of themselves, an event known as the singularity. The singularity would enable machines to become infinitely intelligent, and would pose an "incredibly dangerous scenario". McAllester estimates a 10 percent probability of the Singularity occurring within 25 years, and a 90 percent probability of it occurring within 75 years. He appeared on the AAAI Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures in 2009:, and considers the dangers of superintelligent AI worth taking seriously:  He was later described as discussing the singularity at the panel in terms of two major milestones in artificial intelligence: 

McAllester has also written on friendly artificial intelligence on his blog. He says that before machines become capable of programming themselves (potentially leading to the singularity), there should be a period where they are moderately intelligent in which it should be possible to test out giving them a purpose or mission that should render them safe to humans:

References

External links
David McAllester's academic page at TTIC.
Machine Thoughts, David McAllester's personal blog.
David Allen McAllester at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

American artificial intelligence researchers
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago faculty
Living people
1956 births
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
American computer scientists
Abha International Airport. Abha International Airport (, ) is an airport in Abha, the capital of 'Asir Province in Saudi Arabia.

The airport has services to several domestic airports within the Kingdom. It also offers international flights to Aden and Sanaa in Yemen, Cairo in Egypt, Doha in Qatar, and nonstop flights to Dubai and Sharjah in the UAE.

The site was a new construction area between the cities of Khamis Mushait and Abha, and served both equally. Construction of the airport started in mid-1975 by Laing Wimpey Alireza. Earlier, domestic flights had been handled at the military airport near Khamis Mushait. The airport became operational in 1977. The construction was carried out by Bin Trif Airport ltd.

Facilities 
The airport resides at an elevation of  above mean sea level. It has one runway designated 13/31 with an asphalt surface measuring .

Airlines and destinations

The following airlines operate regular scheduled and charter flights:

Statistics

Houthi attacks
The airport has been frequently targeted in missile or drone attacks by Houthi forces during the Yemeni civil war.

It was initially attacked by the Yemeni Houthi movement on 12 June 2019, injuring 26 people.

On 23 June 2019, the Houthis launched another attack on the airport, leaving a Syrian national dead and 21 injured.

The airport was attacked again by missiles on 2 July 2019, leaving nine injured.

Another attack against the airport by Houthi forces occurred on 31 August 2020, when a bomb-laden drone was detected flying to it and intercepted, along with a remotely controlled boat off the Red Sea, which was also filled with explosives and ready for an attack.

On 10 February 2021, Houthis used four drones to carry out a drone strike on the airport, damaging a civilian aircraft (a Flyadeal Airbus A320) and starting a fire. A Houthi spokesman said the attack was in response to coalition airstrikes and other actions in Yemen.

On 31 August 2021, the airport was again attacked by Houthi drones, leaving 8 wounded.

See also 
 List of airports in Saudi Arabia
 Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz International Airport
 Amaala International Airport
 General Authority of Civil Aviation

References

External links
 
 
 

1977 establishments in Saudi Arabia
Airports established in 1977
Airports in Saudi Arabia
Abha
'Asir Province
Guideline tensioner. A guideline tensioner is a hydropneumatic device used on an offshore drilling rig that keeps a positive pulling force on the guidelines from the platform to a template on the seabed.

The guidelines act as a guidance for equipment and tools that must be lowered to the template. If there was no tensioner and the platform moved, the guidelines would become slack and could be broken. For this reason a number of guideline tensioners are mounted between the platform and riser. Each of these guideline tensioners consists of a hydraulic cylinder with sheaves at both sides. The cylinder is connected to one or more high pressure gas bottles via a medium separator. A wire rope is rigged in the cylinder; one end is connected to the fixed part of the tensioner, the other end to the template.

See also
Drill string compensator 
Riser tensioner
Hydraulic jigger

References

Petroleum production
Drilling technology
Copper silicide. Copper silicide can refer to either  or pentacopper silicide, .

Pentacopper silicide is a binary compound of silicon with copper. It is an intermetallic compound, meaning that it has properties intermediate between an ionic compound and an alloy. This solid crystalline material is a silvery solid that is insoluble in water.  It forms upon heating mixtures of copper and silicon.

Applications
Copper silicide thin film is used for passivation of copper interconnects, where it serves to suppress diffusion and electromigration and serves as a diffusion barrier.

Copper silicides are invoked in the Direct process, the industrial route to organosilicon compounds.  In this process, copper, in the form of its silicide, catalyses the addition of methyl chloride to silicon. An illustrative reaction affords the industrially useful dimethyldichlorosilane:
2 CH3Cl + Si → (CH3)2SiCl2

References

Copper compounds
Transition metal silicides