The Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications


Book Description

"The only continuing source that helps users analyze, plan, design, evaluate, and manage integrated telecommunications networks, systems, and services, The Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications presents both basic and technologically advanced knowledge in the field. An ideal reference source for both newcomers as well as seasoned specialists, the Encyclopedia covers seven key areas--Terminals and Interfaces; Transmission; Switching, Routing, and Flow Control; Networks and Network Control; Communications Software and Protocols; Network and system Management; and Components and Processes."







A History of Control Engineering, 1930-1955


Book Description

A survey of advances in the field of control engineering from 1930 to 1955, which traces the development of servomechanisms and the electronic negative feedback amplifier, and describes organizations which were developed during World War II to deal with industrial applications.







The Engineering Design of Systems


Book Description

The Engineering Design of Systems Comprehensive resource covering methods to design, verify, and validate systems with a model-based approach, addressing engineering of current software-centric systems The newly revised and updated Fourth Edition of The Engineering Design of Systems includes content addressing model-based systems engineering, digital engineering, digital threads, AI, SysML 1.0 and 2.0, digital twins, and GENESYS software. The authors explore system and software-centric architecture, allocations, and logical and physical architecture development, including revised terminologies for a variety of subsections throughout. Composed of 15 chapters, this book includes important new sections on modeling approaches for middle-out engineering, reverse engineering, and agile systems engineering, with a separate section on emerging trends within systems engineering to explore the most update-to-date methods. The authors include comprehensive diagrams and a separate chapter on a complete exercise of the System Engineering process, ranging from the operational concept to integration and qualification. To aid in reader comprehension and retention of concepts, the text is embedded with problems at the end of each chapter, along with relevant case studies. Sample topics covered in The Engineering Design of Systems include: Structural system models to executable models, verification and validation on systems of systems, and external systems and context modeling Digital engineering, digital threads, artificial/augmented intelligence (AI), stakeholder requirements, and scientific foundations for systems engineering Quantifying a context and external systems’ model, including intended and unintended inputs, both deterministic and non-deterministic Functional architecture development, logical and physical architecture development, allocated architecture development, interface design, and decision analysis for design trades The Engineering Design of Systems is highly suitable as a main text for undergraduate and graduate students studying courses in system engineering design, systems architecture, and systems integration. The text is also valuable as a reference for practicing system architects, systems engineers, industrial engineers, engineering management professionals, and systems integrators.




National Military Establishments and the Advancement of Science and Technology


Book Description

To some philosophers, seeking to understand the human condition, technology is a necessary guide. But to think through the complex human phenomenon of technology we must tackle philosophy of science, philosophy of culture, moral issues, comparative civilizational studies, and the economics of specific industrial and military technologies in their historical contexts. The philoso pher wants to grasp the technological factor in this troubled world, even as we see it is only one factor, and that it does not speak openly for itself. Put directly, our human troubles to a considerable extent have been transformed, exaggerated, distorted, even degraded, perhaps transcended, by what engi neers and scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians, have wrought. But our problems are ancient, problems of dominations, struggles, survival, values in conflict, greed and insane sadisms. To get some conceptual light on the social reality which seems immediately to be so complicated, a philosopher will need to learn from the historians of technology. A few years ago, the philosopher Elisabeth Straker concluded that "a his torical philosophy of technology [is required] since history - and history alone - provides all those concepts that form part of the repertoire of the philosoph ical analysis of technology". And she added that this goes far beyond the triviality that like other cultural achievements technology has its historical development. Now historical comprehension is no substitute for a logical methodology in the analysis of technological problems.




Leonardo to the Internet


Book Description

Now updated — A comprehensive, 500-year history of technology in society. Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls "the question of technology." In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. Each chapter has been honed to relate to contemporary concerns. Globalization, Misa argues, looks differently considering today's virulent nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and trade wars. A new chapter focuses on the digital age from 1990 to 2016. The book also examines how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks, and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability and takes a look at the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of Wuhan, China's high-tech district. A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world.




How I Discovered World War II's Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code


Book Description

Spies, secret messages, and military intelligence have fascinated readers for centuries but never more than today, when terrorists threaten America and society depends so heavily on communications. Much of what was known about communications intelligence came first from David Kahn's pathbreaking book, The Codebreakers. Kahn, considered the dean of




Hellions of the Deep


Book Description

Ultimately, World War II was the first war won by technology, but within only a few weeks after the war began, the U.S. Navy realized its torpedo program was a dismal failure. Submarine skippers reported that most of their torpedoes were either missing the targets or failing to explode if they did hit. The United States had to work fast if it expected to compete with the Japanese Long Lance, the biggest and fastest torpedo in the world, and Germany's electric and sonar models. Hellions of the Deep tells the dramatic story of how Navy planners threw aside the careful procedures of peacetime science and initiated &"radical research&": gathering together the nation's best scientists and engineers in huge research centers and giving them freedom of experimentation to create sophisticated weaponry with a single goal&—winning the war. The largest center for torpedo work was a requisitioned gymnasium at Harvard University, where the most famous names in science worked with the best graduate students from all around the country at the business of war. They had to produce tangible weapons, to consider production and supply tactics, to take orders from the military, and, in many cases, also to teach the military how to use the weapons they developed. World War II grew into a chess match played by scientists and physicists, and it became the only war in history to be won by weapons invented during the conflict. For this book, Robert Gannon conducted numerous interviews over a twenty-year period with scientists, engineers, physicists, submarine skippers, and Navy bureaucrats, all involved in the development of the advanced weapons technology that won the war. While the search for new weapons was deadly serious, stretching imagination and resourcefulness to the limit each day, the need was obvious: American ships were being blown up daily just outside the Boston harbor. These oral histories reveal that, in retrospect, surprising even to those who went through it, the search for the &"hellions of the deep&" was, for many, the most exciting period of their lives.




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