Naval Innovation for the 21st Century: The Office of Naval Research Since the End of the Cold War
Author: Robert Buderi File Type: pdf The Office of Naval Research, known widely as ONR, was formed in 1946 largely to support the pursuit of basic science to help ensure future U.S. naval dominance--and as such, it set the model for the subsequently created National Science Foundation. But everything changed after the Cold War. The U.S. entered a period of greater fiscal constraints and the concept of warfare shifted from conventional land and sea battles and super-power conflicts to an era of asymmetric warfare, where the country might be engaged in many smaller fights in unconventional arenas. Naval Innovation in the 21st Century is a narrative account of ONRs efforts to respond to this transformation amidst increasing pressure to focus on programs directly relevant to the Navy, but without sacrificing the seed corn of fundamental science the organization helped pioneer. Told through the eyes of the admirals leading ONR and the department heads who oversee key programs, the book follows the organization as it responds to the fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These events are inspiring an array of innovations, for land and sea. Consider unmanned undersea vehicles that can patrol strategic coastlines for months on end, novel types of landing craft that can travel up to 2,500 nautical miles without refueling, and precision shipborne rail guns whose GPS-guided shells can hit targets from hundreds of miles off. Other efforts include advanced electronics designed to swap out scores of antennas on ships for two solid-state apertures, greatly increasing speed and stealth and speed virtual training methods that spare the environment by avoid the need to fire tons of live shells, and new ways to protect Marines from improvised explosive devices. All these programs, some pursued in conventional manner and some set up as skunk works designed to spur out-of-the-box thinking, are part of an ongoing evolution that seeks to connect scientific investment more directly to the warfighter without forsaking the Navys longer-term future. Naval Innovation in the 21st Century is a narrative history, and a story of organizational change, centered around the struggles of management and key personnel to adapt to shifting priorities while holding on to their historic core mission of supporting longer-term research. As such, it holds great lessons and insights for how the U.S. government should fund and maintain military R&D in a new era of small ball conflicts--and how the country must prepare for the future of warfare.**
Author: Toriko Takarabe
File Type: pdf
div id=iframeContent dir=autoTakarabe Torikos autobiographical novel Heaven and Hell is a beautiful, chilling account of her childhood in Manchukuo, the puppet state established by the Japanese in northeast China in 1932. As seen through the eyes of a precocious young girl named Masuko, the frontier town of Jiamusi and its inhabitants are by turns enchanting, bemusing, and horrifying. Takarabe skillfully captures Masukos voice with language that savors Manchukuos lush forests and vast terrain, but violence and murder are ever present, as much a part of the scenery as the grand Sungari River.Masuko recounts the Heaven of her early life in Jiamusi, a place so cold in winter her joints freeze as she walks to school. She accepts this world, with its gentle ways and terrible brutality, because it is the only home she has known. Masuko feels at ease wandering among the street vendors hawking their hot and sticky steamed cakes or watching the cook slaughter ducks for dinner, and takes pleasure in following the routines of her Chinese, Russian, and Japanese neighbors. Her world is shattered in 1945, when she and her family must flee their adopted home and struggle, along with other Japanese settlers, to return to Japan. This second half of the book, the Hell of refugee life, is heartbreaking and disturbing, yet described with ferocious honesty.
Author: Leslie Tomory
File Type: pdf
In Progressive Enlightenment, Leslie Tomory examines the origins of the gaslight industry, from invention to consolidation as a large integrated urban network. Tomory argues that gas was the first integrated large-scale technological network, a designation usually given to the railways. He shows how the first gas network was constructed and stabilized through the introduction of new management structures, the use of technical controls, and the application of means to constrain the behavior of the users of gas lighting. Tomory begins by describing the contributions of pneumatic chemistry and industrial distillation to the development of gas lighting, then explores the bifurcation between the Continental and British traditions in distillation technology. He examines the establishment and consolidation of the new industry by the Birmingham firm Boulton & Watt, and describes the deployment of the network strategy by the entrepreneur Frederick Winsor. Tomory argues that the gas industry represented a new wave of technological innovation in industry because of its dependence on formal scientific research, its need for large amounts of capital, and its reliance on business organization beyond small firms and partnerships -- all of which signaled a departure from the artisanal nature and limited deployment of inventions earlier in the Industrial Revolution. Gas lighting was the first important realization of the Enlightenment dream of science in the service of industry.
Author: Henri Lefebvre
File Type: pdf
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its authors wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smiths sensitive translation precisely captures. **
Author: Howard Zinn
File Type: pdf
Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the counter girls at the Detroit Woolworths during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelleys story of a movie theater musicians strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology. Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs, bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans. Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to close the divide between rich and poor remains the same. John Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO Provocative analysis of still relevant issues, as the passionate, sometimes violent demonstrations at international meetings of the global economy demonstrate. Mary Carroll, Booklist Highly readable, well-researched narratives of dramatic action Leon Fink, Chicago Tribune
Author: Karen Stollznow
File Type: pdf
Can a bump on the head cause someone to speak with a different accent? Can animals, aliens, and objects talk? Can we communicate with gods, demons, and the dead? From ancient curses carved on tablets to modern-day affirmations, supernatural language is used in an attempt to predict the future, diagnose and cure disease, attract good luck, repel bad luck, and to charm and curse. Language Myths, Mysteries and Magic explores a wide range of weird language-related phenomena, including blasphemy, Bigfoot language, hypnosis, handwriting analysis, chain letters, spells, spirit writing, and hidden satanic messages. We take a look at some bizarre real-life cases, including the story of a modern English woman who suddenly began speaking in an ancient Egyptian dialect. We hear about a song that is so depressing it is said to drive people to commit suicide, and the belief that if you fall asleep on a book you can absorb its contents without having to read it. This book is a curio shop full of colourful superstitions, folklore, and legends about language. **
Author: George Economou
File Type: epub
Few works have shaped a national literature as thoroughly as the Poem of the Cid has shaped the Spanish literary tradition. Tracing the life of the eleventh-century military commander Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called the Cid (from the Arabic Sayyidi, My Lord), this medieval epic describes a series of events surrounding his exile. The text of the poem survives in only one early thirteenth-century manuscript copied by a single scribe, yet centuries later the figure of the Cid still was celebrated in the Spanish popular ballad tradition. Today almost every theme that characterizes Spanish literature -- honor, justice, loyalty, treachery, and jealousy -- derives from the Poem of the Cid.Restored by poet and medievalist George Economou, this elegant and spirited translation by Paul Blackburn is judged by many the finest English translation of a great medieval poem.
Author: Fausta Ferraro
File Type: pdf
Ever since Analysis Terminable and Interminable, the termination of therapy has placed the clinical and metapsychological levels of psychoanalytic thought in a dialectical tension. The rereading proposed by the authors situates Freud and Ferenczi as two poles of a debate which is still ongoing psychoanalytic literature demonstrates the convergences, divergences and hybridizations which have come about through time, the various schools and the geography of analysis. The authors explore the development of the termination process, and within this, the termination event as a final moment, each with its own characteristics. The beginning of the termination process constitutes a critical moment in the analysis, one we may investigate through the conceptual lens of liminality, a sort of threshold or border that is useful for the reading of a wide range of phenomena related to termination. Every termination is nonetheless incomplete, and it is against this backdrop that the authors theoretical reflection and clinical experience interact, suggesting a typology of analytic termination. From this, a map of a little-explored terrain emerges, where we see a mixing of the boundaries between interior and exterior reality, individual and couple goals, and theoretical aims and concrete aspirations - all requiring a meticulous task of reconnaissance.**
Author: Heather Tilley
File Type: pdf
In this innovative and important study, Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how new writing technologies for blind people had transformative effects on literary culture. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used textual means to shape their own identities, the book argues that blindness was also a significant trope through which writers reflected on the act of crafting literary form. Supported by an illuminating range of archival material (including unpublished letters from Wordsworths circle, early ophthalmologic texts, embossed books, and autobiographies) this is a rich account of blind peoples experience, and reveals the close, and often surprising personal engagement that canonical writers had with visual impairment. Drawing on the insights of disability studies and cultural phenomenology, Tilley highlights the importance of attending to embodied experience in the production and consumption of texts. **