Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading Edge Engineering From the 1998 NAE Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering (1999) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Dinner Speech
Dinner Speech
Pages 111-122
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 113... ...
" Earlier this year our local newspaper reported on the economic factors underlying this staggering rise in house prices. During the four years I was gone, Santa Clara County added more than 100,000 new jobs.
|
From page 114... ...
There we were fighting against a foe equipped with Soviet weapons but in about equal numbers to the allied forces. American forces were equipped with the new weapons systems developed during the 1970s, which used information technologies to locate enemy targets on the battlefield, embedded computers to guide weapons precisely to those targets, and stealth technology to evade enemy weapons.
|
From page 115... ...
Indeed, all of these different users are being tied together today by the World Wide Web in a way few could have predicted a decade ago. Commercial applications of computers are leading military applications, and for computer companies commercial revenues dwarf DOD revenues.
|
From page 116... ...
But the integrated circuit was not invented by a British engineer named Dummer; it was invented by two American engineers named Noyce and Kilby. At a similar technical seminar held a few years after the integrated circuit was announced, Dummer presented another paper in which he mused about the reasons he and other European engineers came in second.
|
From page 117... ...
Many industry leaders in the United States agreed with this assessment and became increasingly alarmed as Japanese companies gained an increasingly larger share of the market for memory chips. Today the situation looks very different indeed, it appears that Japanese companies "bet on the wrong horses." Memory chips have become a commodity product, with increasingly lower margins prevailing after Korea and the other "Tigers" entered the competitive fray.
|
From page 118... ...
For more than four decades DOD provided the majority of funding for America's technology base, which was underlying all of the remarkable technical products developed during that period. With the end of the Cold War, the DOD budget has decreased, in real terms, by 40 percent; and the funding for the technology base has decreased proportionately.
|
From page 119... ...
In his book Science and Government, he wrote: "One of the most bizarre features of any advanced industrial society in our time is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men who cannot have a first-hand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be.... When I say the 'cardinal choices,' I mean those which determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die." As Secretary of Defense I was faced every day with cardinal choiceschoices that determined whether our soldiers would live or die.
|
From page 120... ...
A half dozen of the most significant variables were assigned probability distributions that reflected the best information available about them, including the uncertainty about these data. Then a variety of attack scenarios were planned and run thousands of times on the computer, using Monte Carlo techniques to reflect the probability distributions.
|
From page 121... ...
This extensive set of calculations was an important factor in the final decision namely, not to depend on the deployment of an ABM system to defend the country but instead to negotiate an arms control treaty that limited the deployment of both missiles and ABMs. This is an example of how a complex operational analysis was used to influence a major decision on a real-life security problem.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.