omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Stillage. A stillage is like a pallet or skid, but with a cage or sides, or some form of support specifically tailored to the material it is intended to carry. Some are designed to be stackable.

Stillages are mainly used to transport goods, raise products off the ground, and can help to separate goods in transit without the need to load and unload the product being carried, which saves time and decreases the chance of damage. An example is the use of stillages in glass manufacturing, where they are shaped like an upright "A"; the plate glass leans inward and is strapped to the stillage ready for transport. 

Stillages are usually manufactured using steel, and are a popular storage and logistic solution in the following fields: engineering, automotive, warehousing, and logistics.  For return logistics, demounted stillages, or "post pallets" as they are also often referred to, help to occupy minimal vehicle space, helping to reduce transportation costs.

Beverage and alcohol field
 A stillage is any device on which a cask of ale is placed for service.

Unlike kegs, which can be simply stood upright on the floor, casks are used lying on their sides. This allows the beer to run from the tap under gravity, with room in the "belly" of the cask below the outlet for the finings to collect. The shive with the spile will then be the highest point on the cask. As the beer clears (see finings), the inside of the cask becomes coated with sediment. It is important that the stillage holds the cask absolutely still with no rocking or shaking; otherwise, the sediment will be shaken into suspension and the beer will be cloudy.

A stillage need not be complicatedanything that will support a cask (preferably on three points to avoid any wobbling) will do. At temporary events, sturdy tables or frames made of scaffolding and planks might be used, with the casks placed on wooden wedges (two at the front, one at the back). By contrast, many pub cellars use specially-made steel racking, often with two rows of casks, one above the other. Some pubs have brick or stone stillages, sometimes quite ancient, built into the wall of the cellar.

As the cask empties, it needs to be gently tilted to obtain the last of the beer. With wooden wedges, moving the rear wedge forward will achieve this; purpose-built metal units often have springs incorporated that automatically tilt the cask as it becomes lighter. This requires less effort from bar staff, and also helps beer qualitythe lift is so smooth and gradual that there is no danger of stirring up the lees and making the beer cloudy.

References

Beer vessels and serving
Freight transport
Treadwheel. A treadwheel, or treadmill, is a form of engine typically powered by humans. It may resemble a water wheel in appearance, and can be worked either by a human treading paddles set into its circumference (treadmill), or by a human or animal standing inside it (treadwheel). These devices are no longer used for power or punishment, and the term "treadmill" has come to mean an exercise machine for running, walking or other exercises in place.

History
Uses of treadwheels included raising water, to power cranes, or grind grain. They were used extensively in the Greek and Roman world, such as in the reverse overshot water-wheel used for dewatering purposes. They were widely used in the Middle Ages to lift the stones in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. There is a literary reference to one in 1225, and one treadwheel crane survives at Chesterfield, Derbyshire and is housed in the Museum. It has been dated to the early 14th century and was housed in the top of the church tower until its removal in 1947. They were used extensively in the Renaissance famously by Brunelleschi during the construction of Florence cathedral.

Penal treadmills were used in prisons during the early Victorian period in the UK as a form of punishment. According to The Times in 1827, and reprinted in William Hone's Table-Book in 1838, the amount prisoners walked per day on average varied, from the equivalent of 6,600 vertical feet at Lewes to as much as 17,000 vertical feet in ten hours during the summertime at Warwick gaol. In 1902, the British government banned the use of the treadwheel as a form of punishment.

See also 
 Chain pump
 The Experiment, a horse-powered boat
 Horse mill
 List of historical harbour cranes
 Treadwheel crane

References

Further reading 

 Animal-powered Machines, J. Kenneth Major. Shire Album 128. Shire Publications, 1985. 

Animal engines
Grinding mills
Animal engine. An animal engine is a machine powered by an animal. Horses, donkeys, oxen, dogs, and humans have all been used in this way. An unusual  example of an animal engine was recorded at Portland, Victoria in 1866. A kangaroo had been tamed and trained to work a treadmill which drove various items of machinery.

See also
Experiment (horse powered boat)
Gin gang
Horse mill
Horse engine
Persian well
Treadwheel
Turnspit dog

Books 
 Animal Powered Machines, J. Kenneth Major. Shire Album 128 - Shire Publications 1985.

References 

Grinding mills
Machinery
Carl Sontheimer. Carl G. Sontheimer (1914 – 23 March 1998) was an American inventor and engineer best known for creating the original Cuisinart food processor.

Sontheimer was born in New York City but raised in France.  He returned to the U.S. to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received an engineering degree. Before developing the food processor in the early 1970s, he had a career that included work at RCA and Maguire Industries. He invented a number of other devices, including a microwave-based direction finder used during NASA's moon program. He founded and sold two electronics companies, one became Trak Electronics. Sontheimer sold his stake in Trak and started Anzac Electronics to develop and manufacture microwave systems. He sold Anzac by 1966, but continued as a consultant for three years.

His food processor was based on a commercial one produced by a major  French restaurant supplier, the Robot-Coupe invented by Pierre Verdon. Sontheimer refined and improved it to create the Cusinart which debuted in 1973. He and his wife sold the Cuisinart company to an investment group in 1987 for $42 million. The company is now owned by Conair.

Sontheimer died on 26 March 1998 in a hospital near his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

References

 Biography from an MIT "inventor of the week" site

1914 births
1998 deaths
Engineers from New York City
20th-century American engineers
20th-century American inventors
American expatriates in France
Beta scission. Beta scission is an important reaction in the chemistry of thermal cracking of hydrocarbons and the formation of free radicals. Free radicals are formed upon splitting the carbon-carbon bond.  Free radicals are extremely reactive and short-lived. When a free radical in a polymer chain undergoes a beta scission, the free radical breaks two carbons away from the charged carbon producing an olefin (ethylene) and a primary free radical, which has two fewer carbon atoms.

In organic synthesis, beta scission can be used to direct multistep radical transformations. For example, beta-scission of a weak C-S bond was used to favor one of two equilibrating radicals in metal free conversion of phenols to aromatic esters and acids via C-O transposition.

References

Reaction mechanisms
André Danthine. André Danthine (14 May 1932 – 18 January 2024) was a Belgian computer scientist. He was a professor of computer science at the University of Liège from 1967 to 1997; and later a professor emeritus there. He specialised in computer networks and created the university's Research Unit in Networking in 1972.

In 2000, Danthine won the SIGCOMM Award "for basic contributions to protocol design & modelling and for leadership in the development of computer networking in Europe".

Danthine died on 18 January 2024, at the age 91.

References

1932 births
2024 deaths
Belgian computer scientists
Academic staff of the University of Liège
Walloon people
Place of birth missing
Dr. D.Y. Patil College of Engineering, Pune. Dr. D. Y. Patil Institute of Technology, Pimpri, Pune is a co-educational engineering college in Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune. The college is affiliated with Savitribai Phule Pune University. It was ranked 172nd in the engineering category by the National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIRF) in 2021.

The college is named after D. Y. Patil, former governor of Bihar in India.

Academics 
Undergraduate
 Civil engineering
 Mechanical engineering
 Electronics and Telecommunication engineering
 Instrumentation and control engineering
 Computer engineering
 Electrical engineering
 Information Technology
 Artificial intelligence and data science (since 2020)
 Automation and Robotics

Postgraduate
 Computer engineering  (computer science engineering)
 Machine design (mechanical engineering)
 Heat and power (mechanical engineering)
 Environmental engineering (civil engineering)
 Management (civil engineering)
 Manufacturing engineering and automation (production engineering)
 Communication networks (electronics and telecommunication engineering)

External links 
 

Colleges affiliated to Savitribai Phule Pune University
Engineering colleges in Pune
Universities and colleges in Pune
Dnotify. dnotify is a file system event monitor for the Linux kernel, one of the subfeatures of the fcntl call. It was introduced in the 2.4 kernel series. It has been obsoleted by inotify, but will be retained for compatibility reasons.

Its function is essentially an extension to filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. Instead of application checking for changes to filesystem, application can register to be notified by kernel when changes to filesystem occur. Application can select directories to monitor and types of changes to be notified for.

One major use is in desktop search utilities like Beagle, where its functionality permits reindexing of changed files without scanning the filesystem for changes every few minutes, which would be very inefficient. By being told that a file has changed directly by the kernel, rather than actively looking, Beagle and such utilities can achieve change-to-reindexing times of only about a second, with very small performance hits (dnotify therefore enables the use of such programs in a sensible manner; daemons are generally not accepted by distributors if they drain system performance noticeably to provide userland functionality).

Limitations 
 dnotify can only watch directories.
 dnotify requires maintaining an open file descriptor to the directory that the user wants to watch. First, the directory is open, hence disallowing the device on which it resides from being unmounted. Second, watchlist is limited by open file limit of the process.

See also 
 Linux kernel API
 File alteration monitor
 inotify, a dnotify replacement.
 The Documentation/filesystems/dnotify.txt file in the kernel source tree

Footnotes 

Linux kernel features
Scandium oxide. Scandium(III) oxide or scandia is a inorganic compound with formula Sc2O3.  It is one of several oxides of rare earth elements with a high melting point. It is used in the preparation of other scandium compounds as well as in high-temperature systems (for its resistance to heat and thermal shock), electronic ceramics, and glass composition (as a helper material).

Structure and physical properties
Scandium(III) oxide adopts a cubic crystal structure (point group: tetrahedral (Th), space group: Ia) containing 6-coordinate metal centres. Powder diffraction analysis shows Sc−O bond distances of 2.159–2.071 Å.

Scandium oxide is an insulator with a band gap of 6.0 eV.

Production
Scandium oxide is the primary form of refined scandium produced by the mining industry. Scandium-rich ores, such as thortveitite (Sc,Y)2(Si2O7) and kolbeckite ScPO4·2H2O are rare, however trace amounts of scandium are present in many other minerals. Scandium oxide is therefore predominantly produced as a by-product from the extraction of other elements.

Reactions
Scandium oxide is the primary form of refined scandium produced by the mining industry, making it the start point for all scandium chemistry.

Scandium oxide reacts with most acids upon heating, to produce the expected hydrated product. For example, heating in excess aqueous HCl produces hydrated ScCl3·nH2O. This can be rendered anhydrous by evaporation to dryness in the presence of NH4Cl, with the mixture then being purified by removal of NH4Cl by sublimation at 300-500 °C. The presence of NH4Cl is required, as the hydrated ScCl3·nH2O would otherwise form a mixed oxychloride upon drying.
 
Sc2O3 + 6 HCl + x H2O → 2 ScCl3·nH2O + 3 H2O
ScCl3·nH2O + n NH4Cl → ScCl3 + n H2O + n NH4Cl

Likewise, it is converted into hydrated scandium(III) triflate (Sc(OTf)3·nH2O) by a reaction with triflic acid.

Metallic scandium is produced industrially by the reduction of scandium oxide; this proceeds via conversion to scandium fluoride followed by a reduction with metallic calcium. This process is in some ways similar to the Kroll process for the production of metallic titanium.

Scandium oxide forms scandate salts with alkalis, unlike its higher homologues yttrium oxide and lanthanum oxide (but like lutetium oxide), for example forming K3Sc(OH)6 with KOH. In this, scandium oxide shows more similarity with aluminium oxide.

Natural occurrence
Natural scandia, although impure, occurs as mineral kangite.

References

Scandium compounds
Sesquioxides
Transition metal oxides
Crystals in space group 206
Lüders band. Lüders bands are a type of plastic bands, slip band or stretcher-strain mark which are formed due to localized bands of plastic deformation in metals experiencing tensile stresses, common to low-carbon steels and certain Al-Mg alloys. First reported by Guillaume Piobert, and later by W. Lüders, the mechanism that stimulates their appearance is known as dynamic strain aging, or the inhibition of dislocation motion by interstitial atoms (in steels, typically carbon and nitrogen), around which "atmospheres" or "zones" naturally congregate.

As internal stresses tend to be highest at the shoulders of tensile test specimens, band formation is favored in those areas. However, the formation of Lüders bands depends primarily on the microscopic (i.e. average grain size and crystal structure, if applicable) and macroscopic geometries of the material. For example, a tensile-tested steel bar with a square cross-section tends to develop comparatively more bands than would a bar of identical composition having a circular cross-section.

The formation of a Lüders band is preceded by a yield point and a drop in the flow stress. Then the band appears as a localized event of a single band between plastically deformed and undeformed material that moves with the constant cross head velocity. The Lüders Band usually starts at one end of the specimen and propagates toward the other end. The visible front on the material usually makes a well-defined angle typically 50–55° from the specimen axis as it moves down the sample. During the propagation of the band the nominal stress–strain curve is flat. After the band has passed through the material the deformation proceeds uniformly with positive strain hardening. Sometimes Lüders band transition into the Portevin–Le Chatelier effect while changing the temperature or strain rate, this implies these are related phenomena  Lüders bands are known as a strain softening instability.

If a sample is stretched beyond the range of the Lüder strain once, no Lüder strain occurs any more when the sample is deformed again, since the dislocations have already torn themselves away from the interstitial atoms. For this reason, deep drawing sheets are often cold rolled in advance to prevent the formation of stretcher-strain marks during the actual deep drawing process. The formation of Lüder bands can occur again with a deformation over time, since the interstitial atoms accumulate by diffusing processes called precipitation hardening (or aging).

See also
 Portevin–Le Chatelier effect
 Adiabatic shear band
 Persistent slip bands

References

Further reading
 Richard W. Hertzberg, Deformation and Fracture Mechanics of Engineering Materials, 4th Edition, pp. 29–30 
 W. Mason, "The Lüders' Lines on Mild Steel", 1910 Proc. Phys. Soc. London 23 305

Materials degradation
Mechanical failure
Persistent programming language. Programming languages that natively and seamlessly allow objects to continue existing after the program has been closed down are called persistent programming languages. JADE is one such language.

A persistent programming language is a programming language extended with constructs to handle persistent data. It is distinguished from embedded SQL in at least two ways: 

In a persistent programming language:

 The query language is fully integrated with the host language and both share the same type system.
 Any format changes required between the host language and the database are carried out transparently. 

In Embedded SQL:

 Where the host language and data manipulation language have different type systems, code conversion operates outside of the OO type system, and hence has a higher chance of having undetected errors. 
 Format conversion must be handled explicitly and takes a substantial amount of code.

Using Embedded SQL, a programmer is responsible for writing explicit code to fetch data into memory or store data back to the database. 
In a persistent programming language, a programmer can manipulate persistent data without having to write such code explicitly. 

The drawbacks of persistent programming languages include:

 While they are powerful, it is easy to make programming errors that damage the database.
 It is harder to do automatic high-level optimization.
 They do not support declarative querying well.

Examples

 MUMPS
 JADE
 Caché ObjectScript

See also
 Object-relational mapping
 Object-oriented database management systems
 Object prevalence
 Phantom OS - persistent OS project

References

Programming language classification
Persistent programming languages
Cool Amphibious Manufacturers International. Cool Amphibious Manufacturers International (CAMI) is an amphibious vehicle manufacturer based in Bluffton, South Carolina, in the United States. They have many different types of amphibious vehicles, including the Hydra Terra, an amphibious bus filled with foam. CAMI claims that the bus is "unsinkable and safer" than the DUKW (World War II amphibious assault vehicles), LARCs (Vietnam War era assault vehicles), and the British FV620 Stalwart amphibious load carrier. The Hydra Terra vehicle is currently used by major cities around the world in what are termed Splash, or Duck Tours. Some of the international cities offering these tours include Boston, Dublin and Belfast.

Models
 Amphibious Responder - an amphibious first-responding search and rescue vehicle
 H20EX – a modified, amphibious Ford Explorer.
 Hydra Spyder – an amphibious convertible sports car.
 Hydra Terra – a modern amphibious tour bus.
 Terra Max – an amphibious SUV.
 Terra Wind – a luxury amphibious Coach/houseboat hybrid motor home.
 Biotrike – the company's first non-amphibious vehicle. The biotrike is a plug-in hybrid 3-wheeler.

References

External links
 Official website

American boat builders
Tread plate. Tread plate, also known as checker plate and diamond plate, is a type of metal stock with a regular pattern or lines on one side as a decoration. These products are often mistakenly used as slip resistant products. In most conditions they offer little to no slip resistance. The most common alloy used for aluminium tread plate is 6061, although 5086-H34 and 3003-H231 are also used. Diamond plate is usually steel, stainless steel or aluminium. Steel types are normally made by hot rolling, although modern manufacturers also make a raised and pressed diamond design.

The added texture does not effectively reduce the risk of slipping, making diamond plate a poor solution for stairs, catwalks, walkways, and ramps in industrial settings. Its lack of non-skid properties mean that diamond plate should not be used on the interior of ambulances and on the footplates of firetrucks. Additional ineffective applications include truck beds and trailer floors.

Tread plate should only be used decoratively, particularly highly polished aluminium variants. Manufactured in plastic, diamond plate is marketed as an interlocking tile system to be installed on garage floors, trailers, and exercise rooms.

See also
 Structural steel
 Embossing (manufacturing)

References

Safety equipment
Steels
Occupational safety and health
Automotive_accessories
Preference elicitation. Preference elicitation refers to the problem of developing a decision support system capable of generating recommendations to a user, thus assisting in decision making. It is important for such a system to model user's preferences accurately, find hidden preferences and avoid redundancy. This problem is sometimes studied as a computational learning theory problem. Another approach for formulating this problem is a partially observable Markov decision process. The formulation of this problem is also dependent upon the context of the area in which it is studied.

Overview
With the explosion of on-line information new opportunities for finding and using electronic data have been generated, these changes have also brought the task of eliciting useful information to the forefront. Researchers as well as major online catalog companies have come up with algorithms and prototypes of systems that can aid a user to be able to navigate through a complex and huge information space using some information from the user in the form of answers to certain queries or ratings to certain items etc. depending upon the domain of the information space.

See also
Active learning (machine learning)
Cold start
Collaborative filtering
Collective intelligence
Long tail
Personalized marketing 
Product finders
Revealed preference

External links
 Special Issue on Preferences. AI Magazine Vol 29, No 4: Winter 2008

Decision support systems
Information systems