No, it’s the correct english usage. Dwell has a technical meaning of ‘to pause the motion of a thing, such as a machine part’. so if you’re heating up a part with a torch, moving it around the whole piece, sometimes heating a specific area a little more, the torch would be described as ‘dwelling on the area needing more heat’ or perhaps “dwelling on a targeted area”. there’s a related meaning for cam shafts, for the time it can hold the follower riding it in a particular position, measured in degrees… a cam shaft is a rotating shaft, which has bits that are not circular, but eliptical or more complicated shape. These bits are ‘lobes’. cam shafts have a follower of some sort that rides the lob and translates the circular motion of the lobe into linear motion of something else (valves in an engine, for one common use). The time the valve is open is described as it’s dwell.
I am aware of the technical usage. It was not being used correctly in the English machine translation of the original Russian text.
(I can’t remember the exact phrasing now, but something something “… dwell it”, where “it” was the target. I shouldn’t have cleaned it up when paraphrasing.)
Just to double-check though, surely a “a slight regular pause in the motion of a machine” is not the correct usage when applied to virtual assistance so that a human operator can achieve better accuracy and precision in aiming at a target? The idea of a slight pause in regular motion seems wrong here, when the idea is to keep the aim over a target indefinitely until the operator aims elsewhere. To clarify, AFAIK, there is no mechanical motion assistance at work here, whether to move to point at the target or to pause movement. It’s virtual targeting assistance.
Software engineer working in military radar technology here 
The nouns “dwell”, “dwell-cycle” and “dwell-strategy” are all fairly common in the domain.
But I suppose that still doesn’t make you feel better.
Always good to learn new jargon, thanks.
I don’t know if it’s just defence but we are excellent at jargon or bastardising otherwise good words.
Can you describe how you might use “dwell” when talking about aiming assistance for greater accuracy and precision, or in any similar context? I might have to explain the use in this field to my colleague.
I don’t claim to be an expert, far from it, but maybe we are more used to the term “lock” for targeting terms???
I know that in archery, the more that you “dwell” on the target during the extension, the faster you will be able to aim truly and the less time you need to have the bow open fully before release (and if it isn’t a compound bow, that is when you are doing maximum effort - hence more likely to start “shaking” from muscle fatigue and losing precision). Obviously not transferrable in mechanical terms, but I guess it is transferrable in targeting terms?
With radar we are limited by where we can look in space, in frequency and so on. What we will therefore do is break down the search area into “dwells”, smaller areas where we’ll spend a little bit of time looking, maybe at a particular frequency. The “dwell strategy” will maybe prioritise certain dwells over others (e.g. look more often or look longer), which then informs the “dwell cycle”, the order in which we look at each “dwell”.
Hopefully that makes sense?
I appreciate that’s a little bit different than what you’re looking at with aiming/targeting.
I live a little bit rurally so I’m used to encountering wildlife on my commute. Usually it’s game birds and road-kill.
I just got held up in traffic by some very large cows having a run down the lane having escaped from their field.
FWIW, I used to work R&D at a small Canadian company that built optical research equipment. We had, at one point or another, sold stuff to every dictator, fascist, or generally evil regime on the planet aside from some of the very remote African ones. We had also supplied major arms manufacturers in Europe and America, and my stance on arms manufacturing is… let’s say hyper-simplistic? I’m never a fan. Oh, and we sold gear to the Israeli biological weapons research division.
So that was fun.
The boss (my father) had a simple credo: we build research equipment that can be used for whatever our customers want to use it for. It’s not our job to police who gets what, and we never violated any embargoes or restrictions. And the standard “if we don’t do it, somebody else will.”
My answer was always “Then let somebody else do it.”
If everyone takes that stance, then nobody will do it, and at the very least I can sleep easier at night. My father felt differently (still does) and argues that it is more important that we keep the company and the fifty or so employees having a job than it is to take a moral stance.
But, again, I acknowledge that I have a very, very simplistic view of morality. There absolutely is good, and there absolutely is evil, and one should never choose to do evil.
All this to say that I at least sympathize. I hate that people, good people, are put in positions where they have to willingly choose to do stuff that is bad. And voicing your position can make life much more complicated and difficult, which sucks.
I’m sorry you are in that position now. That’s really hard.
I feel the same, we’re closing a research partnership with the government defence laboratory. Our IT guy flat out refused to go through the security checks needed for the role. Fortunately our workplace hasn’t come back on that yet, which gives me the confidence to do the same if asked.
Some of the higher levels of vetting are particularly intrusive, I can understand why people wouldn’t want to go through that regardless of why that level of vetting is needed.
I had a US gov’t investigator show up at my office to ask questions about someone a few years ago. Someone I’d gone to high school with, and had seen exactly twice in the 25 years between high school and when the dude showed up. he wanted to talk to me privately, and I told him anything I’d tell him anyone in the office could hear, which he said wasn’t acceptable. I had to remind him I knew I had no obligation to talk to him, and if he didn’t like it, he could bugger off. (I was not that polite.) so I have no idea what he was going to ask. The guy he wanted to talk about was a colonel, who you’d have thought would have had some clearance and background checks done already…
Had a friend interview for a senior role in the home office. The question about what kind of pornography they enjoyed was very detailed.
Cheers, that’s brilliant
Years ago, we hired a trainee biomedical scientist and ended up firing her for incompetence. She then tried to sue the hospital for discrimination. While investigating (I was in HR), I discovered that her professional registration would have been issued when she was 8 and so dug deeper.
We discovered that her whole identity was fake and actually belonged to someone who had disappeared in Russia 15 years ago. Eventually, we had something like 4 different police jurisdictions involved, plus MI5, Interpol and I heard the FBI were due to get involved too - apparently we’d stumbled on a fake ID criminal scam that was truly international. Unfortunately, I had handed in my notice so ended up leaving before it got resolved so never found out what really happened.
Certainly livened up my job for a while.
My new graduate had his basic security clearance delayed for almost a year while he had to undergo additional interviews. All because he went on holiday to Russia while he was at University.
Another one of my colleagues caused a bit of a stir for not informing the company he had married a Russian national.
I am currently working for a place that let‘s me work on my private computer and considered making their software open source because it‘s the opposite.
And yet, when I left the building yesterday there was security there because just opposite there was a small number of „covid“ protestors aka Querdenker—I think it is funny how they seem to align with the American „Q“ types I think. Querdenker used to be a positive term for people thinking a outside the box „Quer“ translates to „cross“ but no more.
Do we actually have no current pbf going on?