omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Bull polishing. Bulling, Bull polishing, spit polishing, mirror shining or spit shining refers to a method for polishing leather products, usually leather dress shoes or boots, to give an extremely high shine effect. The finished effect should leave the surface of the leather highly reflective, similar to a patent leather finish. In addition to aesthetics, the wax coating can protect the leather from moisture and scuffs.

The term spit shining comes from the traditional use of saliva instead of water to wet the cloth. However, the presence of mucus in spit causes a duller shine. 

The first step for a bull polish is to layer the polish with a brush, hand, or cotton cloth onto the boot or shoe. After applying a few layers of polish, use a clean, slightly damp polishing cloth to apply multiple thinner layers of shoe wax. This is accomplished by adding small dabs of polish and a few drops of water to build up the layers rather than removing them. Finally, place the boot or shoe under a running cold water tap while giving them a gentle final bull with a cloth to remove any micro scratches.

Due to the brittle nature of the shoe wax, a spit shine has to be refreshed regularly and is usually only applied on the parts of a shoe that will not bend with the walking movement of the foot, i.e. the toe caps and heels. Because of this, combined with the significant time commitment that is needed to maintain a proper mirror shine, shoe polish manufacturers have been selling parade gloss and similar products which promise similar effects with significantly less effort.

Preparing parade shoes might involve the additional step of hardening the whole shoe with melted beeswax before applying shoe wax. This serves as a fortifying base coat which keeps the mirror shine from cracking easily, but also makes the shoe unsuitable for everyday wear.

Use in the Military 

The technique of bull polishing has been commonly used in the military as a traditional method of presenting leather boots for inspection during the so-called black boot era. Immaculately polished shoes represent an image of exemplary turn out, dedication and cleanliness. It is not unusual for soldiers to maintain a separate and unique pair of boots intended only for use for inspection or special ceremonial occasions. 

Nowadays, combat boots that are used by the armed forces are typically made of materials that don't need to be polished. Therefore, the spit shine might be considered a lost art. The slow disappearance of shined combat boots may also have had to do with security issues. In the 1980s, the polished black combat boots, which had been common since the 1950s, were abolished in the USA on the instructions of the Pentagon. The reason was that the highly reflective leather could easily be detected by enemies even from a great distance with the help of infrared lenses.

References

External links
 

Military uniforms
Military boots
Leathermaking
Maximus Air. Maximus Air is a cargo airline based at Abu Dhabi International Airport in the United Arab Emirates.

History
The airline was established in 2004 as Experts Air Cargo and was renamed in 2006.

In 2011, it announced the purchase of three Airbus A300-600 previously operated by Japan Airlines for freighter conversion by EADS EFW in Dresden, Germany. However, the entire fleet of then overall five Airbus A300 freighters was subsequently grounded in 2015 stating an insufficient cost basis to keep them operating.

Destinations
Maximus Air operates cargo services across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia. The airline formerly ran regular scheduled cargo services on behalf of Etihad Cargo.

It also has been appointed as an air relief support partner of the Red Crescent of the UAE. In 2017, the airline additionally signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense of the United Arab Emirates.

Fleet

As of March 2024, Maximus Air fleet consists of the following aircraft:

References

External links

Official website

Cargo airlines of the United Arab Emirates
Airlines established in 2005
Emirati companies established in 2005
Andy Bond (businessman). Andrew James Bond (born 16 March 1965) is a former chief executive officer of Asda having resigned in April 2010.

Early life
Bond's father was a plumber and his mother a nurse. He was born in Grantham, and attended The King's School, Grantham and gained four A levels. He received a first-class BEng Hons in Gas Engineering from the University of Salford in 1987 as part of a British Gas plc scholarship spending a year on the job in the gas industry.

Career
He started his career as a graduate trainee engineer with British Gas. In 1988, he worked for Manchester-based Hopkinsons Group, one of British Gas's suppliers, as a marketing manager. In 1992–1993, he studied for an MBA at Cranfield School of Management.

He began at ASDA as a marketing manager for Archie Norman, when aged 29 in April 1994, having been top of his course at Cranfield. He was noted for his determination and eye for detail. At ASDA, he worked under Allan Leighton and with Justin King. In 1998, he became corporate marketing director, then in 1999, he became European own-label director. In November 2000, he headed the George clothing brand of ASDA (worth about £1bn a year on its own in the UK, and based near Lutterworth), working with designer Kate Bostock, after the potentially-damaging departure of George Davies. He became chief operating officer of ASDA in September 2004, then CEO in March 2005, resigning this position in April 2010.

Personal life
He married Susan Stringfellow in April 1997 in North Yorkshire. They live in Harrogate with their son (born 1998) and daughter (born 1999), having formerly lived in Bitteswell. He is keen on personal fitness.

References

External links
 Opening the new Salford Business School in May 2007
 May 2007 Guardian article - Bond, licensed to sell
 November 2006 Telegraph article on employing 1,800 people to belatedly improve ASDA's internet presence
 February 2006 Independent article - A day in the life of Andy Bond
 January 2006 Independent article - Me and My MBA
 Becoming ASDA boss in March 2005
 November 2002 Times article on his GEORGE empire

Video clips
 April 2007 interview on BBC Breakfast

1965 births
Living people
People from Grantham
Alumni of the University of Salford
English chief executives
English businesspeople in retailing
Walmart people
People educated at The King's School, Grantham
British corporate directors
British chief operating officers
Asda people
Sleeve (construction). In construction, a sleeve is used both by the electrical and mechanical trades to create a penetration in a solid wall, ceilling or floor.

Purpose
 For cables we provide wall/deck penetration sleeve to avoid any damage to cable from material shifting on deck.
 Deck penetrations on offshore platform provided to avoid water/chemical dripping to lower deck in case of spillage.
 Acts as toe guard.
 For wall penetrations it can be a type of strengthening.
 Together with packing it helps to protect from fire spread from one room to other.

Materials
Sleeves can be made of:
 sections of steel pipe.
 plastic.
 sheet metal.
 proprietary devices that are listed firestop components.

Requirements
 Sleeves must be sized such as to adequately allow the passage of the intended penetrant(s) plus enough room to permit the practical installation and mounting of the penetrants as well as adequate room for firestops. A general practice is to size the sleeve two NPS (pipe sizes) up from the diameter of the penetrant. For example, a 4" pipe, with 1" of thermal insulation makes a 6" penetrant (1" pipe covering on each side of the pipe), plus two pipe sizes = an 8" sleeve, creating a 1" annulus.
 In case of insulated piping, the size of the insulation must be taken into account for the intended firestop certification listing.

Hazards
 Metallic sleeves are heatsinks in the firestop that follows the mounting of the penetrants. Maximum and minimum tolerances for wall thicknesses must be taken into account prior to casting. Heatsinks can affect T-ratings. Organic sealants used for topcaulking in firestops may let go of the sleeve if it has conducted too much heat through to the unexposed side (as in the case of the fire test article, this picture).
Plastic sleeves are usually removed after the concrete forms are stripped, as they contribute fuel to an accidental fire.

See also
 Piping
 Firestop
 Packing (firestopping)
 Penetration (firestop)
 Penetrant (mechanical, electrical, or structural)
 Annulus (firestop)
 Fire-resistance rating
 Fire test
 Heat sink

External links
 CAL State University Section 15050 Spec, including Sleeves
 UVA Virginia Hospital Section 15050 Specification, including Sleeves

Piping
Passive fire protection
Millennium Tower (Tokyo). Millennium Tower was a 180-floor skyscraper that was envisioned by architect Sir Norman Foster in 1989. He intended for it to be built in Tokyo Bay, 2 km offshore from Tokyo, Japan.

Design
The design calls for a cone-shaped pyramid 840 meters high, with a base about as big as the Tokyo Olympic Stadium and glass sides for natural lighting. It is intended to be constructed on water, with boat and bridge access. Since the tower was planned for an area with frequent earthquakes and hurricane-strength winds, the shape is aerodynamic to reduce wind stress, and helical bands are wrapped around the tower for structural support. Steel tanks at the top of the tower are filled with water, and can be rotated as a counterweight against wind.

The tower is a self-contained arcology containing one million square meters of commercial development and housing for 60,000 people, split into sections. Offices and light or clean industries are in the lower levels, apartments above, and the top section houses communications systems and wind or solar generators. Restaurants and viewing platforms would be interspersed through all sections.

Horizontal and vertical high-speed metro lines provide long-distance travel, with cars designed to carry 160 people stopping at intermediate five-story 'sky centers' on every thirtieth floor. Each 'sky center' is decorated by gardens and mezzanines, and provides a particular service such as hotels or restaurants. Short-distance travel is by elevators or escalators.

History
The tower design was commissioned by the Obayashi Corporation as an arcology, intended to address land shortage and overpopulation in Tokyo. The design firm's web site states that "the project demonstrates that high-density or high-rise living does not mean overcrowding or hardship; it can lead to an improved quality of life, where housing, work and leisure facilities are all close at hand".

References

  (Foster & Partners)
 "Millenium Tower", Skyscraperpage
 
 

Skyscrapers in Tokyo
Proposed skyscrapers in Japan
Unbuilt buildings and structures in Japan
Unbuilt skyscrapers
Proposed arcologies
Altairnano. Altair Nanotechnologies Inc. is an American company specializing in the development and manufacturing of energy storage systems for efficient power and energy management. Altair Nantechnologies designs advanced lithium-ion energy systems and batteries.

Battery technology
Altairnano's best-known product are their lithium-ion batteries, produced by Altair's Power and Energy division. The batteries have an anode made of a lithium titanate oxide formed into a spinel structure. The titanate replaces the graphite anodes of typical lithium-ion batteries. The batteries are not the only batteries to use nanomaterials, but other batteries, like those from A123 Systems generally replace the cathode rather than the anode.

References

External links
 AltairNano

Battery manufacturers
Electric vehicle battery manufacturers
Armor (hydrology). In hydrology and geography, armor is the association of surface pebbles, rocks or boulders with stream beds or beaches. Most commonly hydrological armor occurs naturally; however, a man-made form is usually called riprap, when shorelines or stream banks are fortified for erosion protection with large boulders or sizable manufactured concrete objects.  When armor is associated with beaches in the form of pebbles to medium-sized stones grading from two to 200 millimeters across, the resulting landform is often termed a shingle beach.  Hydrological modeling indicates that stream armor typically persists in a flood stage environment.

Hjulstroms diagram  

Bed armor is most often transported through entrainment, and more specifically suspension and saltation. Both of these processes involve moving the sediment both near and around the bed of a river. When a sediment is entrained it is being moved downstream through the forces between the layers of water around it, and once it settles it begins to create a layer on the bed of the river. This layer of sediment changes the hydrology of the river around it, as once this layer on the bottom is formed it affects the hydraulics of the river. This layer of sediments on the bed of the river can act as barrier to the incoming flow, and depending on the size and distribution of the grains, can change the river.

The Hjulstroms diagram represents at what grain size and flow speed a particle is transported. The slope present at the top left of its graph is due to clay and silt cohesion.

Particle size 
The distribution and size of the sediments can sometimes help indicate the type of river, and the general flow direction. The grain distribution of the bed armor is essential to understanding the armor, and its function that is dependent on the size of the armor. For example, if there is a large piece of sediment that sits on the bed armor layer of the river it can change the threshold for critical flow. The change in critical flow at the bottom of the stream or river can change the turbidity of the flow, and create different types of river systems depending on the range of impact the change in flow has. This effect can create a positive loop, with the critical flow disrupting smaller sediments downstream which repeat the process.

Stream power 
Stream power expresses the amount of energy that a river is exerting on its bed. The equation is primarily used to understand the force in terms of the water doing work on the bed. Bed armor is directly involved with this equations, when the force on the stream increases the water acting on the sediments can also increase. This can lead to change and movement within the stream in reference to the sediments on the bottom layer.

See also

References

Erosion landforms
Geomorphology
Sediments
Brammallite. Brammallite is a sodium rich analogue of illite.  First described in 1943 for an occurrence in Llandybie, Wales, it was named for British geologist and mineralogist Alfred Brammall (1879–1954).

Believed to be a degradation product of paragonite through the process of Na leaching, though can also occur when muscovite, or other aluminous materials are altered. Just as illite it is a non-expanding, non-plastic, clay-sized, micaceous mineral. Brammallite is a phyllosilicate or layered silicate. Structurally, brammallite is quite similar to muscovite or sericite with slightly more silicon, magnesium, iron, and water and slightly less tetrahedral aluminium and interlayer potassium.

It occurs as aggregates of small monoclinic white crystals. Due to the small size, positive identification usually requires x-ray diffraction analysis.

Similar to illite, it can be used as a flux in high fire ceramic bodies due to its high insoluble sodium content, but unlike common Na containing fluxes (i.e. feldspar) it has the advantages of its extremely small clay-sized particles that necessitate the need for grinding yet has the unique feature of being a clay but not expanding or becoming plastic with water. All of which it shares with illite, with the difference being their contents of corresponding sodium or potassium amounts.

References

Phyllosilicates
Potassium minerals
Aluminium minerals
Magnesium minerals
Monoclinic minerals
Adolf Thiel. Adolf Karl Thiel (also spelled Adolph; February 12, 1915 – June 2, 2001 Los Angeles) was an Austrian-born German expert in guided missiles during World War II, and later worked for the United States Army and TRW.

Thiel had been an associate professor of engineering at the Institute of Technology in Darmstadt before joining Wernher von Braun's team at the Army Research Center Peenemünde, where he was involved in developing the V-2 rocket. By the end of the war, he was transferred to the United States by the US Army  (see Operation Paperclip and German rocket scientists in the US) where he resumed his work with von Braun's group in Fort Bliss, Texas. During the nine years Thiel worked for the U.S. Army, he held positions at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and at Huntsville, Alabama. He primarily supervised preliminary design of the Redstone missile and other short- and intermediate-range ballistic missile systems.

Thiel left the Army in 1955 to join Space Technology Laboratories, which later became TRW. During the late 1950s, he was program manager for the Thor ballistic missile, which became a first-stage launch for the Explorer spacecraft. He was director of space projects for TRW when it developed Explorer VI and Pioneer V, two of the earliest US craft to explore interplanetary space. He oversaw all of TRW's space programs during the 1970s.

After his retirement in 1980 as a senior vice president, Thiel served as an executive consultant to TRW and on NASA planning groups. He was named a fellow of the American Astronautical Society in 1968.

Family
He married Frances Thiel; they had two sons, Mike and Christopher.

References 

1915 births
2001 deaths
Engineers from Hesse
20th-century American engineers
Austrian military engineers
German rocket scientists
German people of World War II
Academic staff of Technische Universität Darmstadt
United States Army civilians
Austrian emigrants
Immigrants to Germany

Operation Paperclip
Hardness scales. Hardness scales may refer to:

Methods of measuring mineral hardness
 Scratch hardness
 The Mohs scale of mineral hardness
The Vickers hardness test
The Brinell scale
The Janka hardness test
The Rockwell scale
 The Durometer scale
 The Barcol scale
 The Leeb rebound hardness scale
 The Rosiwal scale
 The Meyer hardness test
 The Knoop hardness test

Other hardness scales 
Hardness scales may also refer to:
 Methods of measuring the deposit formation by hard water.
 The scale of Pencil hardness
Walter Söhne. Walter Söhne (7 October 1913 – 24 December 2011) was a pioneer in research on soil mechanics (terramechanics) and on improving the design of agricultural vehicles (tractors etc.), and was a very successful teacher as a professor from 1965 to 1982 at the Technical University of Munich. He wrote many articles in German on related topics, and his Über die Historie der Bodenbearbeitungs- und Erntetechnik (1992) surveys the history of techniques of agricultural cultivation and harvesting. In the 1970s he served as president of the International Society for Terrain Vehicle Systems.

References

Notice of Walter Söhne's 95 birthday

1913 births
2011 deaths
German agronomists
Academic staff of the Technical University of Munich
Remote diagnostics. Remote diagnostics is the act of diagnosing a given symptom, issue or problem from a distance. Instead of the subject being co-located with the person or system done diagnostics, with remote diagnostics the subjects can be separated by physical distance (e.g., Earth-Moon). Important information is exchanged either through wire or wireless.

When limiting to systems, a general accepted definition is:
"To improve reliability of vital or capital-intensive installations and reduce the maintenance costs by avoiding unplanned maintenance, by monitoring the condition of the system remotely."

Process elements for remote diagnostics
 Remotely monitor selected vital system parameters
 Analysis of data to detect trends
 Comparison with known or expected behavior data
 After detected performance degradation, predict the failure moment by extrapolation
 Order parts and/or plan maintenance, to be executed when really necessary, but in time to prevent a failure or stop

Typical uses
 Medical use (see Remote guidance)
 Formula One racecars
 Space (Apollo project and others)
 Telephone systems like a PABX
 Connected Cars

Reasons for use
 Limit local personnel to a minimum (Gemini, Apollo capsules: too tight to fit all technicians)
 Limit workload of local personnel
 Limit risks (exposure to dangerous environments)
 Central expertise (locally solve small problems, remotely/centralized solve complex problems by experts)
 Efficiency: reduce travel time to get expert and system or subject together

Remote diagnostics and maintenance 

Remote diagnostics and maintenance refers to both diagnoses of the fault or faults and taking corrective (maintenance) actions, like changing settings to improve performance or prevent problems like breakdown, wear and tear. RDM can replace manpower at location by experts on a central location, in order to save manpower or prevent hazardous situations (space for instance). Increasing globalisation and more and more complicated machinery and software, also creates the wish to remote engineering, so travel over growing distances of experienced and expensive engineering personnel is limited.

See also 
 Real-time computing

Real-time technology

References

Motor vehicle maintenance
GSD microscopy. Ground state depletion microscopy (GSD microscopy) is an implementation of the RESOLFT concept. The method was proposed in 1995 and experimentally demonstrated in 2007. It is the second concept to overcome the diffraction barrier in far-field optical microscopy published by Stefan Hell. Using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds a resolution of up to 7.8 nm was achieved in 2009. This is far below the diffraction limit (~200 nm).

Principle

In GSD microscopy, fluorescent markers are used. In one condition, the marker can freely be excited from ground state and returns spontaneously via emission of a fluorescence photon. However, if light of appropriate wavelength is additionally applied the dye can be excited to a long-lived dark state, i.e. a state where no fluorescence occurs. As long as the molecule is in the long-lived dark state (e.g. a triplet state), it cannot be excited from the ground state. Switching between these two states (bright and dark) by applying light fulfills all preconditions for the RESOLFT concept and subwavelength scale imaging, and therefore images with very high resolution can be obtained. For successful implementation, GSD microscopy requires either special fluorophores with high triplet yield, or removal of oxygen by use of various mounting media such as Mowiol or Vectashield.

The implementation in a microscope is very similar to stimulated emission depletion microscopy, however it can operate with only one wavelength for excitation and depletion. Using an appropriate ring-like focal spot for the light that switches the molecules into the dark state, the fluorescence can be quenched at the outer part of the focal spot. Therefore, fluorescence only still takes place at the center of the microscope's focal spot and the spatial resolution is increased.

References

Microscopy
Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1989 and published by IOP Publishing. The journal covers all areas of condensed matter physics including soft matter and nanostructures. The editor-in-chief is Gianfranco Pacchioni (University of Milano-Bicocca).

The journal was formed by the merger of Journal of Physics C:  Solid State Physics and Journal of Physics F: Metal Physics in 1989.

Abstracting and indexing 
This journal is abstracted and indexed in:

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2023 impact factor of 2.3.

References

External links 
 

Physics journals
IOP Publishing academic journals
Weekly journals
English-language journals
Academic journals established in 1989