omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Unorthodox Engineers. The Unorthodox Engineers were the subject of a series of science fiction short stories by Colin Kapp. They were a misfit bunch of engineers who solved problems of alien technology/weird planets in the future. The stories had a great deal of grain-of-salt-type humor.

They were commanded by maverick engineer Fritz van Noon and included, amongst others, a convicted bank robber as quartermaster (on the entirely-sound grounds that he was likely to be the most capable person for the job).

The Unorthodox Engineers originally appeared in various British SF magazines and anthologies:
 "The Railways Up on Cannis" (New Worlds October, 1959)
 "The Subways of Tazoo" (New Writings in SF 3)
 "The Pen and the Dark" (New Writings in SF 8)
 "Getaway from Getawehi" (New Writings in SF 16)
 "The Black Hole of Negrav" (New Writings in SF 25).

Dobson Books published a collection of the stories as The Unorthodox Engineers  in November 1979. A 2013 Kindle reprint is available from Gateway, .

The short story "The Pen and the Dark" was adapted into a text-based computer adventure game by Keith Campbell, with text by Colin Kapp. It was published in 1984 by Mosaic Publishing with the packaging for the game including a book copy of the original story.

References 
 

1979 short story collections
Science fiction short story collections
Fictional engineers
SMALL. Small Machine Algol Like Language (SMALL), is a computer programming language developed by Nevil Brownlee of the University of Auckland.

History
The aim of the language was to enable writing ALGOL-like code that ran on a small machine. It also included the string data type for easier text manipulation.

SMALL was used extensively from about 1980 to 1985 at Auckland University as a programming teaching aid, and for some internal projects. Originally, it was written in Fortran IV, to run on a Burroughs Corporation B6700 mainframe computer. Subsequently, it was rewritten in SMALL, and ported to a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 mainframe (on the operating system TOPS-10) and an IBM S360 mainframe (on the operating system VM Conversational Monitor System (VM/CMS)).

About 1985, SMALL had some object-oriented programming features added to handle structures (that were missing from the early language), and to formalise file manipulation operations.

See also
Lua (programming language)
Squirrel (programming language)

References

External links
Nevil Brownlee staff page, Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis
Nevil Brownlee personal page, Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis

Algol programming language family
Systems programming languages
Procedural programming languages
Object-oriented programming languages
Programming languages created in 1980
Pensonic Group. Pensonic Holdings Berhad (stylized as PENSONIC) () is a Malaysian company that sells electrical appliances. It was founded by Chew Weng Khak in 1965 as a shop in Penang selling electrical appliances trading under the name of Keat Radio Co. with Chew as a sole proprietor. In 1982, Chew started the Pensonic brand name to produce locally manufactured electrical appliances.

Dispute over name 
In some markets, Panasonic has accused Pensonic of being a knockoff of former's through the similar brand name and affecting their market share, leading to lawsuits. Pensonic says that its the name was created by combining Penang and Sonic to mean the "sound of Penang".

In 2008, Panasonic won an injunction against Pensonic in Singapore. In Sri Lanka, Pensonic successfully won a judgement to register its trademark in January 2009 against opposition by Panasonic. The judgment observed that Pensonic was previously registered in Malaysia, Japan, and many other countries without the objection of Panasonic.

References

External links
 Official website

1965 establishments in Malaysia
Electronics companies of Malaysia
Retail companies of Malaysia
Electronics companies established in 1965
Retail companies established in 1965
Malaysian companies established in 1965
Companies based in Penang
Companies listed on Bursa Malaysia
Malaysian brands
Radio manufacturers
Engineers Without Borders – USA. Engineers Without Borders – USA (EWB–USA) is a non-profit humanitarian organization. It represents the United States within the larger international Engineers Without Borders in the U.S. It involves the implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while involving and training engineers and engineering students.

History

Engineers Without Borders – USA (EWB-USA) was born from a chance meeting of Bernard Amadei (a professor of civil engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder), and Angel Tzec (a representative of the Belize Ministry of Agriculture). Tzec's village in Belize was in a difficult situation because it had no running water or sanitation. Tzec invited Dr. Amadei to visit his village in Belize, where he saw how laborious a task it was for the villagers to gather water. "I came across little girls who had to carry water back and forth to the village all day, so they couldn't go to school", Amadei says. "I knew that as a civil engineer, there had to be something I could do."

In 2002, Amadei returned with eight University of Colorado Boulder students and a local civil engineer, also from Boulder. With the help of the local community, they installed a clean water system powered by a waterfall in the area for less than $15,000. It was from this experience that Dr. Amadei came to see that he could utilize professional and student engineers to improve the quality of life in other development projects around the world.

Awards
In 2010, EWB–USA received the Henry C. Turner Prize for Innovation in Construction Technology from the National Building Museum. In a statement from the prize jury, by Art Gensler said, "This organization gives locals hope and talented engineering professionals the opportunity to share their knowledge with countries that can so greatly benefit from their efforts."

References

External links

 

USA
Non-profit organizations based in Colorado
Organizations established in 2000
American Society of Civil Engineers
Development charities based in the United States
Nitroguanidine. Nitroguanidine - sometimes abbreviated NGu - is a colorless, crystalline solid that melts at 257 °C and decomposes at 254 °C. Nitroguanidine is an extremely insensitive but powerful high explosive. Wetting it with > 20 wt.-% water effects desensitization from HD 1.1 down to HD 4.1 (flammable solid).
Nitroguanidine is used as an energetic material, i.e., propellant or high explosive, precursor for insecticides, and for other purposes.

Manufacture
Nitroguanidine is produced worldwide on a large scale starting with the reaction of dicyandiamide (DCD) with ammonium nitrate to afford the salt guanidinium nitrate, which is then nitrated by treatment with concentrated sulfuric acid at low temperature.

The guanidinium nitrate intermediate may also be produced via the Boatright–Mackay–Roberts (BMR) process, in which molten urea is reacted with molten ammonium nitrate in the presence of silica gel. This process had been commercialized because of its attractive economic features.

Uses

Explosives
Nitroguanidine has been in use since the 1930s as an ingredient in triple-base gun propellants in which it reduces flame temperature, muzzle flash, and erosion of the gun barrel but preserves chamber pressure due to high nitrogen content. Its extreme insensitivity combined with low cost has made it a popular ingredient in insensitive high explosive formulations (e.g AFX-453, AFX-760, IMX-101, AL-IMX-101, IMX-103,  etc.).

The first triple-base propellant, featuring 20-25% of nitroguanidine and 30-45% nitroglycerine, was developed at the Dynami Nobel factory at Avigliana and patented by its director Dr. Modesto Abelli (1859-1911) in 1905.

Nitroguanidine's explosive decomposition is given by the following equation:
H4N4CO2 (s) → 2 H2O (g) + 2 N2 (g) + C (s)

Pesticides
Nitroguanidine derivatives are used as insecticides, having a comparable effect to nicotine.  Derivatives include clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam.

Biochemistry
The nitrosoylated derivative, nitrosoguanidine, is often used to mutagenize bacterial cells for biochemical studies.

Structure
Following several decades of debate, it could be confirmed by NMR spectroscopy, and both x-ray and neutron diffraction that nitroguanidine exclusively exists as the nitroimine tautomer both in solid state and solution.

References 

Explosive chemicals
Propellants
Bombardier (aircrew). A bombardier or bomb aimer is the crew member of a bomber aircraft responsible for the targeting of aerial bombs. "Bomb aimer" was the preferred term in the military forces of the Commonwealth, while "bombardier" (from the French word for "bomb thrower" and similar in meaning to "grenadier") was the equivalent position in the United States Armed Forces.

In many planes, the bombardier took control of the airplane during the bombing run, using a device such as the Norden bombsight which was connected to the autopilot of the plane. Often stationed in the extreme front of the aircraft, on the way to the target and after releasing the bombs, he could also serve as the front gunner in aircraft that had a front turret.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the title of bombardier fell into disuse, due largely to changes in technology, emanating from the replacement of this manual function with the development of computerized technology and smart bombs, that has given rise to terms like weapon systems officer or combat systems officer to describe the modern role. The equivalent in the US Navy and US Marine Corps is the naval flight officer.

In the United States, the position of bombardier was originally held by a sergeant, but they were commissioned as officers in 1941. In the Commonwealth, a bomb aimer could be an officer or (more frequently) a senior non-commissioned officer (sergeant or flight sergeant) or warrant officer; like wireless operators, air engineers and air gunners, all officer bomb aimers were commissioned from the ranks after non-commissioned aircrew service, unlike pilots and navigators who could also join directly as commissioned officers.

During World War II, US Army Air Forces bombardiers were recognized with the award of the Bombardier Badge. They were selected during training for their sense of timing and manual dexterity. With the establishment of an independent US Air Force in 1947, USAF bombardiers were awarded the wings known as the Navigator badge, now known as the Combat Systems Officer badge. Commonwealth bomb aimers wore a single-wing aircrew brevet with the letter "B".

The aircraft of the United Kingdom's V bomber force carried two navigators, one of whom acted as bomb aimer, although having the official title of "navigator radar".

Notes

Combat occupations of the late modern period
Military aviation occupations
Obsolete occupations
Space Studies Institute. Space Studies Institute is a not-for-profit organization that was founded in 1977 by  Princeton University Professor Gerard K. O'Neill. 

In 2009 SSI moved its operations from its long-term base in Princeton, New Jersey, to Mojave, California. SSI is involved in several initiatives, including a solar sail project that it is developing with Carnegie Mellon University and an effort to find asteroids that could be mined for valuable materials.  The use of extraterrestrial resources in space settlement has received increasing attention in recent years.

The Institute has sponsored research studies on several transport systems for the development of space. Their first program was in the development of prototype mass driver systems. They are also studying the use of an Orbital Transfer Vehicle as a component of space manufacturing. Other areas of research include a search for Earth-Sun Trojan asteroids, a design study of a Lunar Polar Probe to search for water and useful volatiles at the poles of the Moon, and studies of reuse of the Space Shuttle external tank. O'Neill performed a study of a large space habitat named Island Three that could house 10,000,000 people.

See also
 Space advocacy
 Space manufacturing
 Associated Universities, Inc.
 Space Science Institute

References

External links
 Space Studies Institute
 permanent.com article
 Encyclopedia of Science entry
 Science Central
 Mech dir listing
 Smithsonian/NASA
 Freeman Dyson's bio of Gerard K. O'Neill
 A Space Roadmap by Lee Valentine
 Video archive of the conferences

Space organizations
Non-profit organizations based in California
Organizations established in 1977
Freeman Dyson
Space advocacy organizations
Space manufacturing
Magna Doodle. Magna Doodle is a magnetic drawing toy, consisting of a drawing board, a magnetic stylus, and a few magnet shapes. Invented in 1974 by Pilot Corporation, over forty million units have been sold to date worldwide, under several brands, product names and variations, including Tyco and Mattel/Fisher Price.

How it works

The key element of the toy is the magnetophoretic display panel, filled with a thick, opaque white liquid containing tiny dark magnetic particles. These particles can be drawn to the drawing surface by a magnet-tipped stylus or optionally-provided shapes, or removed to the hidden back side by a sliding eraser bar. The middle layer is divided into a honeycomb of cells, keeping the liquid static and the particles evenly distributed across the panel. The liquid is formulated so that the floating particles can be pulled through it in response to the magnetic forces, but not due to gravity.

Brand
The toy was originally invented at Pilot Corporation, which registered "Magna Doodle" as a trademark in the U.S. in 1986, and has owned the underlying rights to the brand ever since.

Magna Doodle toys were produced under license by Tyco, using panels produced by Pilot, until 1997, when Tyco was purchased by Mattel. Mattel then sold the toy under its Fisher-Price brand. Following a dispute over the price of the panels, Mattel ended the licence agreement in 2003, but then began selling a new product called the Doodle Pro which used third-party panels and similar packaging. This led to Pilot suing Mattel unsuccessfully in 2004 for infringement of its trademark and trade dress, while relicensing the brand to the Ohio Art Company. Ohio Art, in turn, eventually dropped the license as well, later producing the similar Doodle Sketch until 2016 when it sold that brand along with Etch A Sketch to Spin Master.

The current licensee of the Magna Doodle brand is Cra-Z-Art.

In popular culture
In the TV comedy Friends, a Magna Doodle is visible in Joey and Chandler's apartment, with various messages written on it throughout the series, referencing plot points, current events, inside crew jokes, or just random drawings.

A version of the Magna Doodle was used in the 1990s game show Nick Arcade during their "Video Challenge" games. Before the challenge would begin, a contestant would write on the drawing board how many of the team's points they would risk on their teammate being able to successfully complete the challenge. The wager was kept secret until after the challenge ended.

See also
Etch A Sketch, a somewhat similar toy using a different principle of operation

References

Art and craft toys
Magnetic devices
Ludwig Elsbett. Ludwig Elsbett was the inventor of the Elsbett engine.

Elsbett was one of nine children of the farmer Viktor Elsbett and his wife Maria. He grew up in agriculture and was originally trained as a fitter for agricultural machinery. Later, he attended technical schools in Bad Frankenhausen and Neustrelitz to study mechanical engineering and aircraft engines.

In 1937, he was appointed department manager at the Junkers Aircraft Works in Dessau and developed combustion engines. In 1940, he married his wife Lieselotte and had five children with her. He was a living legend of technology; he played a decisive role in the further development of diesel engine technology.

After the war, Elsbett set up an independent factory in Salzgitter for the production of a small two-stroke diesel engine.

In 1973, Elsbett gained international recognition for the first ever serial-produced direct-injection diesel engine for cars.

In 1977, Elsbett produced an engine fueled by vegetable oil called the Elsbett-motor.

In 1980, Elsbett made the first conversion of standard diesel cars with prechamber engines to vegetable oil.

In 1993, the Elsbett Mercedes won the first Eco Tour of Europe with the lowest consumption of fuel.

In 1997, Elsbett won the European Solar Prize.

In 2002, Elsbett converted the standard common-rail car engine and unit-injector truck engine to run on bio-diesel.

There is a Elsbett Museum in the city of Salz, Bavaria, Lower Franconia.

See also 
 Elsbett Engine
 Fuel injection

External links 
 www.elsbett.com
 Web site of Elsbett Museum (in German language)

1913 births
2003 deaths
People from Rhön-Grabfeld
People from the Kingdom of Bavaria
Engineers from Bavaria
20th-century German inventors
20th-century German designers
21st-century German designers

fr:Moteur Elsbett
it:Motore Elsbett
pl:Elsbett
Kurt Bollacker. Kurt Bollacker is an American computer scientist with a research background in the areas of machine learning, digital libraries, semantic networks, and electro-cardiographic modeling.

He received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Bollacker spent time as a biomedical research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center where worked on electro-cardiography. He is co-creator of the CiteSeer research tool which was produced while he was a visiting researcher at the NEC Research Institute.

During his tenure as Technical Director of the Internet Archive, Bollacker lead the work to create The Wayback Machine.  While Chief Scientist at Metaweb Technologies he was key contributor to the development of Freebase. After Metaweb, Bollacker worked at Applied Minds and as a consulting Data Scientist.

Bollacker is a dedicated activist who is involved with multiple non-profit organizations. He serves on the Advisory Board of The Common Crawl Foundation  For several years he has pursued research on long term digital archiving as the Digital Research Director at the non-profit Long Now Foundation.

References

External links
 U.T. Austin student page for Kurt Bollacker
 CiteSeer
 Bollacker's article in American Scientist "Avoiding a Digital Dark Age"

American computer scientists
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Transportation Manufacturing Corporation. Transportation Manufacturing Corporation (TMC) was a bus manufacturer based in Roswell, New Mexico.

The company was formed in 1974 by Greyhound Bus Lines to manufacture Motor Coach Industries vehicles. In 1987, General Motors decided to close its bus division and sold the manufacturing rights of the Rapid Transit Series (RTS) bus and the Classic to Greyhound subsidiary, Motor Coach Industries. RTS production would move to the TMC plant in Roswell, New Mexico, while the Classic bus production would remain in the former GM bus plant in Saint-Eustache, Quebec. Motor Coach Industries sold its Classic and RTS bus license to Nova Bus in 1993.
In 1990, TMC began development of an enclosed automobile-transport semitrailer. This trailer used small-diameter wheels to maximize interior space, and robotic arms to lift the automobiles and position them closely together in the trailer body. The trailer lacked the traditional ramps and racks: automobiles were fitted with pins strapped to the tires, which slotted into holders inside the trailer. These features maximized the capacity of the trailer.

In 1994, MCI sold the TMC plant to NovaBus, who closed it in 2003. The Roswell, New Mexico plant was reopened later under the name Millennium Transit Services LLC.

Products
 MCI coaches: Classic line originally designed by General Motors
 Rapid Transit Series (RTS) - licensed/purchased from General Motors 1987-1993
 CityCruiser/T-30 (a modified Orion I, licensed from Ontario Bus Industries)
 Orion I from Orion Bus Industries

References
 History of TMC

External links
 DieselBusParts.com a great resource for RTS & MCI bus repair, restoration and free manuals.

Defunct bus manufacturers of the United States
Roswell, New Mexico
Defunct manufacturing companies based in New Mexico
LonTalk. LonTalk is a networking protocol.  Originally developed by Echelon Corporation for networking devices over media such as twisted pair, powerlines, fiber optics, and RF. It is popular for the automation of various functions in industrial control, home automation, transportation, and buildings systems such as lighting and HVAC (such as in intelligent buildings), the protocol has now been adopted as an open international control networking standard in the ISO/IEC 14908 family of standards.  Published through ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6, this standard specifies a multi-purpose control network protocol stack optimized for smart grid, smart building, and smart city applications.

LonWorks
LonTalk is part of the technology platform called LonWorks.

Protocol
The protocol is defined by ISO/IEC 14908.1 and published by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6.  The LonTalk protocol has also been ratified by standards setting bodies in the following industries & regions:

 ANSI Standard ANSI/CEA 709.1 - Control networking (US)
 EN 14908 - Building controls (EU)
 GB/Z 20177.1-2006 - Control networking and building controls (China)
 IEEE 1473-L - Train controls (US)
 SEMI E54 - Semiconductor manufacturing equipment sensors & actuators (US)
 IFSF - International forecourt standard for EU petrol stations
 OSGP - A widely use protocol for smart grid devices built on ISO/IEC 14908.1

The protocol is only available from the official distribution organizations of each regional standards body or in the form of microprocessors manufactured by companies that have ported the standard to their respective chip designs.

Security

An April 2015 cryptanalysis paper claims to have found serious security flaws in the OMA Digest algorithm of the Open Smart Grid Protocol, which itself is built on the same EN 14908 foundations as LonTalk.  The authors speculate that "every other LonTalk-derived standard" is similarly vulnerable to the key-recovery attacks described.

See also
 BACnet -- A building automation and control protocol standardized by ASHRAE.
 List of automation protocols

References

External links
Echelon Corporation Homepage 
Global Engineering Documents (purchase the current EIA, non-ANSI, specification document for EIA/CEA 709.1
Adept Systems - wrote the C Reference Implementation of the LonTalk protocol

Building automation
Network protocols
Cryoscopic constant. In thermodynamics, the cryoscopic constant, , relates molality to freezing point depression (which is a colligative property). It is the ratio of the latter to the former:

  is the depression of freezing point, defined as the freezing point  of the pure solvent minus the freezing point  of the solution;
  is the van ‘t Hoff factor, the number of particles the solute splits into or forms when dissolved; 
  is the molality of the solution.

Through cryoscopy, a known constant can be used to calculate an unknown molar mass. The term "cryoscopy" means "freezing measurement" in Greek. Freezing point depression is a colligative property, so  depends only on the number of solute particles dissolved, not the nature of those particles. Cryoscopy is related to ebullioscopy, which determines the same value from the ebullioscopic constant (of boiling point elevation).

The value of , which depends on the nature of the solvent can be found out by the following equation:

  is the ideal gas constant.
  is the molar mass of the solvent.
  is the freezing point of the pure solvent in kelvin.
  is the molar enthalpy of fusion of the solvent.

The  for water is 1.853 K kg mol−1.

See also
 List of boiling and freezing information of solvents

References

Phase transitions
Thermodynamic properties