omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Institution of Incorporated Engineers. The Institution of Incorporated Engineers (IIE) was a multidisciplinary engineering institution in the United Kingdom. In 2006 it merged with the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) to form the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Before the merger the IIE had approximately 40,000 members. The IET is now the second largest engineering society in the world next to the IEEE. The IET has the authority to establish professional registration of engineers (Chartered Engineer or Incorporated Engineer) through the Engineering Council. The IEEE does not have the authority to replicate the registration process in its complementary environment.

History 

The IIE traces its heritage to the Vulcanic Society that was founded in 1884. The Vulcanic Society was formed by a group of apprentices from the works of Maudslay, Son & Field Ltd, in Lambeth, London. This society went through three name changes before it became the Junior Institution of Engineers in 1902, which became the Institution of General Technician Engineers in 1970 and the Institute of Mechanical and General Technician Engineers (IMGTechE) in 1976. In 1982 the IMGTechE and Institution of Technician Engineers in Mechanical Engineering (ITEME) merged to form the Institution of Mechanical Incorporated Engineers (IMechIE).

The Institution of Electrical and Electronic Incorporated Engineers (IEEIE) and the Society of Electronic and Radio Technicians (SERT) merged in 1990 to form the Institution of Electronics and Electrical Incorporated Engineers (IEEIE).

The IIE was formed in April 1998 by the merger of the IMechIE, the IEEIE and The Institute of Engineers and Technicians (IET). In 1999, the Institution of Incorporated Executive Engineers (IIExE) merged with the IIE.

In October 2001, IIE received a Royal Charter in recognition of the significant contribution of its members to the UK economy and society.

In 2005, the Society of Engineers also merged with the IIE.

Formation of the IET

Discussions started in 2004 between the IEE and the IIE about the formation of a new institution, the Institution of Engineering and Technology.  Following members voting in favour of the merger, the IET became operational on 31 March 2006.

References

External links 
Institution of Engineering and Technology
Institution of Incorporated Engineers Sri Lanka

Defunct professional associations based in the United Kingdom
1998 establishments in the United Kingdom
Organizations established in 1998
Engineering societies based in the United Kingdom
Institution of Engineering and Technology
Chasman–Green lattice. The Chasman–Green lattice, also known as a double bend achromat lattice (DBA lattice), is a special periodic arrangement of magnets designed by Renate Chasman and George Kenneth Green of Brookhaven National Laboratory in the mid-1970s for synchrotrons. This lattice provides optimized bending and focusing of electrons in storage rings designed for synchrotron light sources. An electron storage ring constructed with a Chasman–Green lattice has the important property that the circulating electron beams have very low emittance, which results in the emission of synchrotron light of exceptional brightness. For this reason it is the lattice of choice for most of the premier synchrotron light source facilities worldwide.

Each period of the Chasman–Green lattice contains a focusing quadrupole magnet symmetrically located between a pair of identical dipole magnets, which transports incident electrons through a bending arc to an exit path that is independent of the electron energy.

References

Accelerator physics
Roboraptor. Roboraptor is a robotic toy invented by Mark Tilden and Michael Bellantoni in 2004, and then distributed by WowWee Toys International. It is the successor to the RoboSapien robot and uses motion technology based on realistic biomechanics that give it fluid and natural movements. It has a multi-function remote control that uses infrared technology to talk to it. Unlike the original RoboSapien, the Roboraptor is capable of autonomous movement, using 3 realistic gaits.

Sensors 

Roboraptor comes with several sensors that allow it to monitor and interact with its environment. It features infrared, stereo sound, and touch sensors on its head, chin, tail, and mouth, enabling more enjoyable and participatory play.

Autonomous behaviors 

It has four different modes of behavior or moods: hunting, cautious, playful, and free-roam. In hunting mode, it will react to sharp sounds and progressively focus its attention more intensely on repeated sounds coming from the same direction. In cautious mode, it will react oppositely and move away from sounds it hears. In playful mode, it will react to sounds in a more whimsical fashion but neither approaching nor avoiding them. In free-roam mode, it will explore its own environment, avoiding obstacles and stopping occasionally to listen for loud sounds to investigate. The Roboraptor does not walk well on carpets and cannot be programmed.

Flexible behaviors 

When one touches one of Roboraptor's touch sensors, its reaction will vary depending on its mood. Touching its face when it is hunting will make it react angrily and most likely attempt to "attack" the person touching it. But if it is feeling playful, it will nuzzle the person's hand and then "attack", using its jaws.

Laser targeting 
Early versions of the Roboraptor could also follow a laser-like target pointed on the ground. This could be used this to lead it around a room under direct control. However, this feature was removed from later units.

Mini Roboraptor 
There is also a smaller version of Roboraptor available. However, it does not have a remote control or different modes of behavior. It is not an autonomous robot so much as it is a wind-up toy, though the smaller version does actually run on batteries. It is a smaller, cheaper, less functional Roboraptor. It walks at a single pace and it has a 'trigger' to make its mouth move, but it does not have any other sensors.

External links 
Official WowWee Roboraptor Site
Roboraptor Tech Specs

RoboCommunity - The official WowWee Robotics user community
Evolution of the Roboraptor

Toy brands
2000s toys
Entertainment robots
Robotic dinosaurs
WowWee
2005 robots
Pot boiler. In archaeology or anthropology, a pot boiler  or cooking stone is a heated stone used to heat water - typically by people who did not have access to pottery or metal vessels.

In Archaeology 
The term refers to a stone used to move heat from a fire to a vessel to raise the temperature of water in the vessel, including for cooking. The stone is heated in a fire or in embers. When hot enough, the stone is transferred into a vessel of water to heat the contents. The vessel may be metal (though this is uncommon, metal normally being tough enough to take direct heat from a fire) or pottery which is not of good enough quality to be directly exposed to the heat of the fire - or a wooden trough. In a pre-pottery context, the heating can be done by lining a pit with leather, leaves or clay, and then putting in the water followed by pot boilers directly into the vessel.

Such stones can be recognized because the repeated exposure to the heat of the fire followed typically by rapid chilling in water leads to great thermal stress on the stone's fabric due to the thermal expansion and contraction. This typically leads to partial glazing of the stone's surface and a fine network of cracks on the stone's surface (often described as "crazing"). Eventually the stone shatters. Individual fragments may be re-used until it becomes infeasible to manipulate the stone into and out of the fire, at which point the fragments are discarded and a new pot boiler (or many new ones) are acquired. Often the broken pot boilers are discarded into middens or domestic waste deposits, which on long-established sites can amount to many tonnes of material.

Reuse as building material is not impossible, but the typical small size of the fragments hinders this use.

Identification 
Surface "crazing" is not restricted to pot boilers - hearth stones and the surrounds of fireplaces may also show the same structure. However, since a pot boiler needs to be manipulated into and out of the fire (typically in anthropological observations, using sticks of green wood) at arm's length, they start off weighing up to several kilogrammes, and shrink by fragmentation ; hearth stones and chimney liners are typically larger.

See also
Boiler
Fulacht fiadh

References

Boilers (cookware)
Archaeological artifacts
Viktor Kaplan. Viktor Kaplan (27 November 1876 – 23 August 1934) was an Austrian engineer and the inventor of the Kaplan turbine.

Life
Kaplan was born in Mürzzuschlag, Styria, Austria into a railroad worker's family. He graduated from high school in Vienna in 1895, after which he attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied mechanical engineering and specialised in diesel engines. From 1900 to 1901 he was drafted into military service in Pula.

After working in Vienna with a specialisation in motors, he moved to the German Technical University in Brno to conduct research at the institute of civil engineering. He spent the next three decades of his life in Brno, and nearly all his inventions and research are connected with his professorship there. In 1913 he was appointed head of the institute for water turbines.

In 1912 he published his most notable work: the Kaplan turbine, a revolutionary water turbine that was especially fitted to produce electricity from large streams with only a moderate incline. From 1912 to 1913 he received four patents on these kinds of turbines.

In 1918 the first Kaplan turbine with 26 kW power and a diameter of 60 cm was built by the Storek construction company for a textile manufacturer in Lower Austria. This turbine was used until 1955 and today is exhibited at the Technisches Museum Wien. After the success of the first Kaplan turbines they started being used worldwide and remain one of the most widely used kinds of water turbines.

In 1926 and 1934 Kaplan received honorary doctorates. He died of a stroke in 1934 at Unterach am Attersee, Austria.

Kaplan was honored and featured on the 1000 Austrian schilling banknote in 1961.

References
Austria Forum (2009): Kaplan, Viktor; 2. January 2013

External links

  Austrian stamp, inventors series in 1936.
  Austrian stamp, birth centenary in 1976.

1876 births
1934 deaths
People from Mürzzuschlag
People from the Duchy of Styria
20th-century Austrian scientists
20th-century Austrian inventors
Fluid dynamicists
TU Wien alumni
Engineers from Austria-Hungary
Nicolas-Jacques Conté. Nicolas-Jacques Conté (; 4 August 1755 – 6 December 1805) was a French inventor of the modern pencil.

He was born at Saint-Céneri-près-Sées (now Aunou-sur-Orne) in Normandy and distinguished himself for his mechanical genius, which was of great avail to the French army in Egypt. Napoleon called him “a universal man with taste, understanding and genius capable of creating the arts of France in the middle of the Arabian Desert”.

Aeronautics
One of his early interests while still at Sées was in the newly developing science of aeronautics. He made at least one hot-air balloon, which he flew in the public square. He contributed to the improvement of the production of hydrogen gas, as well as the treatment of the gas bag of the balloon itself.

In Egypt, Conté was called on to exercise his expertise in ballooning and was asked to prepare an ascent for the celebration of the French New Year on 22 September 1798. He was not sufficiently prepared, so the event was postponed to 1 December. On that occasion his efforts met with a near disaster. The balloon caught fire, and the Egyptians received the impression that what had been demonstrated was a machine of war for setting fire to the enemy encampments. At a second attempt with a larger balloon, it is said that the ascent was witnessed in Esbekia Square by 100,000. It is probable that the use of the balloon in Egypt was limited to impressing the local population and was never found suitable for military purposes. Al-Jabarti, (‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti al-Misri) in his account of the ascent said: “Their claim that this apparatus is like a vessel in which people sit and travel to other countries in order to discover news and other falsifications did not appear to be true.”

Writing and drawing equipment
Conté invented the modern pencil lead at the request of Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot. The French Republic was at that time under economic blockade and unable to import graphite from Great Britain, the main source of the material. Carnot asked Conté to create a pencil that did not rely on foreign imports. After several days of research, Conté had the idea of mixing powdered graphite with clay and pressing the material between two half-cylinders of wood. Thus was formed the modern pencil. Conté received a patent for the invention in 1795 and formed la Société Conté to make them. He also invented the conté crayon named after him, a hard pastel stick used by artists.

At the 1798 Exposition des produits de l'industrie française Conté won an honorable distinction, the highest award, for his "crayons of various colours".

References

 

1755 births
1805 deaths
18th-century French painters
French male painters
19th-century French painters
Commission des Sciences et des Arts members
19th-century French male artists
18th-century French male artists
Eyepatch wearers
Korea General Machinery Trading Corporation. The Korea General Machinery Trading Corporation () is a North Korean machine company. It is headquartered in the Tongdaewon District near the capital, Pyongyang.

The company imports steel, chemical raw stock, and machine tools. It produces machine tools, metal parts, gears, electric motors, generators, hydroelectric generators, pumps, valves, mining equipment, rolling stock and other machinery.

Taean Heavy Machine Complex

The Taean Heavy Machine Complex in Tongdaewon produces hydroelectric generators and other thermal power generating equipment, including turbines, motors, transformers, etc. Taean manufactures different sizes classes of hydroelectric equipment in its Tongsuse Class, including a 50,000 kVA generator.

Huichon Machine Tool Factory

Huichon Machine Tool Factory in Huichon is North Korea's leading manufacturer of heavy-duty machine tools for domestic use and for export. The 50-year-old factory group is involved in machine tool production processes including steel-making, casting, processing, assembly, painting and packing. Product is produced on serial basis and small lot basis.

Its output of precision machine tools includes an assortment of spline-grinding machines and industrial lathes.

See also
Economy of North Korea

References

External links
Naenara, North Korea's Web Portal

Engineering companies of North Korea
Minerva (QDOS reimplementation). Minerva is a reimplementation of Sinclair QDOS, the built-in operating system of the Sinclair QL line of personal computers. Written by Laurence Reeves in England, Minerva incorporates many bug fixes and enhancements to both QDOS and the SuperBASIC programming language. Later versions also provide the ability to multi-task several instances of the SuperBASIC interpreter, something not supported by QDOS.

Minerva was distributed as a ROM chip on a daughterboard which replaces the QL's original ROM chips. A Minerva Mk. II daughterboard also incorporates an I²C interface and non-volatile real-time clock. As of version 1.89, the Minerva source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Other reimplementations of QDOS include SMS2 and SMSQ/E.

External links 

 Laurence Reeves' page, includes complete Minerva source code
 TF Services Minerva page

Discontinued operating systems
Free software operating systems
Sinclair Research
Nulka. Nulka is an Australian-designed and -developed active missile decoy built by an American/Australian collaboration. Used aboard warships of the United States Navy, Royal Australian Navy, United States Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Navy, Nulka is a rocket-propelled, disposable, offboard, active decoy designed to lure anti-ship missiles away from their targets. It has a unique design in that it hovers in mid-air while drawing the incoming anti-ship missile. The hovering rocket concept was initiated in Australia by the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), and the system was designed, developed and then manufactured by AWA Defence Industries) (now BAE Systems Australia). BAE refers to Nulka as a "soft-kill defence system". The word "Nulka" is of Australian Aboriginal origin and means "be quick".

The Nulka consists of the missile itself enclosed in a hermetically sealed canister. This canister is then contained in a dedicated launcher module, adjacent and used in tandem with the Mark 36 launcher (if fitted).

By July 2017, Nulka had been fitted to more than 150 Australian, Canadian, and United States warships, and over 1,400 decoys had been produced. , it was expected that the system would be fitted to U.S. Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carriers as well as Australia's future destroyers. This made the system Australia's most successful defence export.

In 2012, Lockheed Martin announced that it had successfully tested its new ExLS (Extensible Launching System) for Nulka. The tests were conducted at the RAAF Woomera Range Complex, Australia.

On 9 October 2016, the guided-missile destroyer  deployed its Nulka decoy when it and two other US warships,  and , came under fire by two missiles fired by Houthi rebels off the Yemeni coast around 7 PM local time.

See also
Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System
Electronic countermeasure
Electronic warfare
Naval Decoy IDS300
Sonar decoy
C-GEM

References

Further reading

Naval warfare
Weapons countermeasures
Defence Science and Technology Organisation
Naval weapons of Australia
Alberger process. The Alberger process is an industrial method of producing salt from rock salt.

Method
The Alberger process begins by heating brine under high pressure with a series of heaters. Impurities are removed using a tank filled with granite cubes called a graveler. When the pressure is released, salt crystals form in a steam-heated evaporation pan. This results in a three-dimensional pyramid-shaped flake salt, which has low bulk density, high solubility, and good adhesion. According to a scientific article from 1946, the process results in salt of high purity but "is the least economical method for the production of a given quantity of salt."

Production
Cargill operates a plant in St. Clair, Michigan that is the only place in the United States that manufactures such salt using the Alberger process. Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt is a brand of salt produced using the Alberger process.  Because of its shape, density and flavor characteristics, it is often a preferred choice by snack food manufacturers.

History
The method was patented by Charles L. Weil on June 8, 1915.

References

Industrial processes
Salt production
Wöhler process. The Wöhler process was one of the first routes for producing aluminium metal. It involves the reduction of anhydrous aluminium chloride with potassium, produced powdered aluminium: 
AlCl3  +  3 K   →   Al  +  3 KCl
With advent of more efficient means of electrolysis, e.g., Hall–Héroult process, the Wöhler process and related chemical-based routes became obsolete.

History
In 1827, Friedrich Wöhler refined a process discovered by Hans Christian Ørsted, a Danish chemist, who first produced impure aluminium in 1825. With the newly made Al metal, he established the specific gravity of aluminium in 1845.

References

External links
International Aluminum Institute
Wired

Industrial processes
Aluminium industry
Armored Box Launcher. The Mark 143 Armored Box Launcher (ABL) is a four-round protected launch container for the BGM-109 Tomahawk Cruise Missile.

Fitted to the  following their 1980s recommissioning upgrade, each ABL contains four ready-to-fire Tomahawks. The use of ABLs on these vessels rather than a non-armored solution was necessitated to enable the battleships to continue to exploit the capability provided by their heavy armor and reduce the vulnerability of the delicate missiles within. Eight ABLs were fitted to each of the four recommissioned battleships, providing 32 weapons to each ship. Some of the original dual 5 inch (127 mm) gun mounts were removed to fit the ABLs.

As well as being fitted on to the United States Navys Iowa-class battleships, this system was also fitted on the nuclear-powered cruisers, including the  and the  as well as some  destroyers (Comte de Grasse, Merrill, Conolly, John Rodgers, Leftwich, Deyo, and Ingersoll). The cruisers and destroyers were fitted with two ABLs each for a total of 8 missiles.

Since then the Armored Box Launcher missile system has been phased out in favor of the more flexible, larger capacity Vertical Launching System (VLS). 

The Armored Box Launcher shares one common handicap with the Vertical Launching System: It can not be reloaded at sea. The ship must return to port in order to receive and load her ABLs.

References 

Naval weapons of the United States
Missile launchers
Vehicle Information and Communication System. Vehicle Information and Communication System (VICS) is a technology used in Japan for delivering traffic and travel information to road vehicle drivers. It provides simple maps showing information about traffic jams, travel time, and road work - usually relevant to your location and usually incorporating infrared beacons.

It can be compared with the European TMC technology.

VICS is transmitted using:
 FM multiplex broadcasting (uses DARC). With this method, you have to manually select road conditions on-screen.
 Infrared beacons over Japan's highways and urban roads. With this method, road conditions automatically pop up.
 Microwaves in the ISM band.

It is an application of ITS.

The VICS information can be displayed on the car navigation unit at 3 levels:

 Level-1: Simple text data
 Level-2: In form of simple diagrams
 Level-3: Data superimposed on the map displayed on navigation unit (e.g., traffic congestion data)

Information transmitted generally includes traffic congestion data, data on availability of service areas (SA) and parking areas (PA), information on road works and traffic collisions.

Some advanced navigation units might utilize this data for route calculation (e.g., choosing a route to avoid congestion) or the driver might use his/her own discretion while using this information.

See also
G-Book
Internavi
CarWings

External links
 VICS official website

Information systems
Warning systems
Road transport in Japan
Intelligent transportation systems
Japanese inventions