Advanced Manufacturing
Advanced Manufacturing

Author: William B. Bonvillian

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-01-12

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0262037033

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How to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector by encouraging advanced manufacturing, bringing innovative technologies into the production process. The United States lost almost one-third of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. As higher-paying manufacturing jobs are replaced by lower-paying service jobs, income inequality has been approaching third world levels. In particular, between 1990 and 2013, the median income of men without high school diplomas fell by an astonishing 20% between 1990 and 2013, and that of men with high school diplomas or some college fell by a painful 13%. Innovation has been left largely to software and IT startups, and increasingly U.S. firms operate on a system of “innovate here/produce there,” leaving the manufacturing sector behind. In this book, William Bonvillian and Peter Singer explore how to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector. They argue that advanced manufacturing, which employs such innovative technologies as 3-D printing, advanced material, photonics, and robotics in the production process, is the key. Bonvillian and Singer discuss transformative new production paradigms that could drive up efficiency and drive down costs, describe the new processes and business models that must accompany them, and explore alternative funding methods for startups that must manufacture. They examine the varied attitudes of mainstream economics toward manufacturing, the post-Great Recession policy focus on advanced manufacturing, and lessons from the new advanced manufacturing institutes. They consider the problem of “startup scaleup,” possible new models for training workers, and the role of manufacturing in addressing “secular stagnation” in innovation, growth, the middle classes, productivity rates, and related investment. As recent political turmoil shows, the stakes could not be higher.

American Advance
American Advance

Author: Rock Dilisio

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2008-09

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 0595524869

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The French and Indian War is said to be the first true world war, where world powers, Britain and France, collided over the tempting prosperity of North America. Much of the war was fought over the control of an extremely sought after, strategic piece of ground, known as the Forks, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the mighty Ohio. Now the City of Pittsburgh, this location was the portal to the west, and control of it would garner possibilities and riches beyond imagination. No other piece of ground on American soil has ever been so coveted. Britain was the ultimate victor, and with it came the opportunities for their American colonists to move westward, and establish communities. Virginia colonists were the first to take advantage. The westward movement began with the construction of a settlers fort, named Fort Vance, which was established ten miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, in what is today Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. This is where the west began.

Advance and Destroy
Advance and Destroy

Author: John Rickard

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 0813134552

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In the winter of 1944–1945, Hitler sought to divide Allied forces in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Luxembourg and Belgium. He deployed more than 400,000 troops in one of the last major German offensives of the war, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge, in a desperate attempt to regain the strategic initiative in the West. Hitler’s effort failed for a variety of reasons, but many historians assert that Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army was ultimately responsible for securing Allied victory. Although Patton has assumed a larger-than-life reputation for his leadership in the years since World War II, scholars have paid little attention to his generalship in the Ardennes following the relief of Bastogne. In Advance and Destroy, Captain John Nelson Rickard explores the commander’s operational performance during the entire Ardennes campaign, through his “estimate of the situation,” the U.S. Army’s doctrinal approach to problem-solving. Patton’s day-by-day situational understanding of the Battle of the Bulge, as revealed through ULTRA intelligence and the influence of the other Allied generals on his decision-making, gives readers an in-depth, critical analysis of Patton’s overall effectiveness, measured in terms of mission accomplishment, his ability to gain and hold ground, and a cost-benefit analysis of his operations relative to the lives of his soldiers. The work not only debunks myths about one of America’s most controversial generals but provides new insights into his renowned military skill and colorful personality.

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Author: William Boone Bonvillian

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2020-01-09

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1783747943

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The authors have done a masterful job of charting the important story of DARPA, one of the key catalysts of technological innovation in US recent history. By plotting the development, achievements and structure of the leading world agency of this kind, this book stimulates new thinking in the field of technological innovation with bearing on how to respond to climate change, pandemics, cyber security and other global problems of our time. The DARPA Model provides a useful guide for governmental agency and policy leaders, and for anybody interested in the role of governments in technological innovation. —Dr. Kent Hughes, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars This volume contains a remarkable collection of extremely insightful articles on the world’s most successful advanced technology agency. Drafted by the leading US experts on DARPA, it provides a variety of perspectives that in turn benefit from being presented together in a comprehensive volume. It reviews DARPA’s unique role in the U.S. innovation system, as well as the challenges DARPA and its clones face today. As the American model is being considered for adoption by a number of countries worldwide, this book makes a welcome and timely contribution to the policy dialogue on the role played by governments in stimulating technological innovation. — Prof. Charles Wessner, Georgetown University The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’? This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.

Irresistible Empire
Irresistible Empire

Author: Victoria De Grazia

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13: 9780674031180

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The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America
Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America

Author: Frank Joseph

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2009-12-21

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1591439817

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The examination of four great civilizations that existed before Columbus’s arrival in North America offers evidence of sustained contact between the Old and New Worlds • Describes the cultural splendor, political might, and incredibly advanced technology of these precursors to our modern age • Shows that North America’s first civilization, the Adena, was sparked by ancient Kelts from Western Europe and explores links between Hopewell Mound Builders and prehistoric Japanese seafarers Before Rome ruled the Classical World, gleaming stone pyramids stood amid smoking iron foundries from North America’s Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River. On its east bank, across from today’s St. Louis, Missouri, flourished a walled city more populous than London was one thousand years ago, with a pyramid larger--at its base--than Egypt’s Great Pyramid. During the 12th century, hydraulic engineers laid out a massive irrigation network spanning the American Southwest that, if laid end to end, would stretch from Phoenix, Arizona, to the Canadian border. On a scale to match, they built a five-mile-wide dam from ten million cubic yards of rock. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, a metropolis of weirdly shaped, multistory superstructures, precisely aligned to the sun and moon, sprawled across the New Mexico Desert. Who was responsible for such colossal achievements? Where did their mysterious builders come from, and what became of them? These are some of the questions investigated by Frank Joseph in his examination of ancient influences at work on our continent. He reveals that modern civilization is not the first to arise in North America but was preceded instead by four high cultures that rose and fell over the past three thousand years: the Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, and Anasazi-Hohokam. How they achieved greatness and why they vanished so completely are the intriguing enigmas explored by this unconventional prehistory of our country, Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America.

To Advance Knowledge
To Advance Knowledge

Author: Roger L. Geiger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 1351471813

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American research universities are part of the foundation for the supremacy of American science. Although they emerged as universities in the late nineteenth century, the incorporation of research as a distinct part of their mission largely occurred after 1900. To Advance Knowledge relates how these institutions, by 1940, advanced from provincial outposts in the world of knowledge to leaders in critical areas of science. This study is the first to systematically examine the preconditions for the development of a university research role. These include the formation of academic disciplines--communities that sponsored associations and journals, which defined and advanced fields of knowledge. Only a few universities were able to engage in these activities. Indeed, universities before World War I struggled to find the means to support their own research through endowments, research funds, and faculty time. To Advance Knowledge shows how these institutions developed the size and wealth to harbor a learned faculty. The book illustrates how arrangements for research changed markedly in the 1920s when the great foundations established from the Rockefeller and Carnegie fortunes embraced the advancement of knowledge as a goal. Universities emerged in this decade as the best-suited vessels to carry this mission. Foundation resources made possible the development of an American social science. In the natural sciences, this patronage allowed the United States to gain parity with Europe on scientific frontiers, of which the most important was undoubtedly nuclear physics. The research role of universities cannot be isolated from the institutions themselves. To Advance Knowledge focuses on sixteen universities that were significantly engaged with research during this era. It analyzes all facets of these institutions--collegiate life, sources of funding, treatment of faculty--since all were relevant to shaping the research role.