Deploying Technological Innovation in “Real Time”

Vulcan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-110
Author(s):  
Seymour E. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Scale Development ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
First Year ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
War Effort

The Industrial Revolution provided the environment and opportunities for the large-scale development and deployment of military technological innovation in “real time,” that is, in time to influence the conduct and outcomes of a major conflict while that conflict was in progress. The case of the Union and Confederate strategies and their implementations during the American Civil War is particularly exemplary because both sides looked to ironclad warships in opposing ways. For the first year of the war each side pursued real-time ironclad warship deployment efforts to influence three different strategic races on a continental scale. Confederate success could have had enormous impacts on the course and outcomes of the war, but by August 1862 the Union had won all three races. Each was won in a different way, each portended how the conduct of the war on water continued, and each provided lessons for both navies to learn. Both sides went forward with revised strategies and renewed vigor to try to build and deploy more than one hundred ironclad warships between them. Over the next three years, the extensive Confederate ironclad program failed in multiple and costly ways to deliver much to the Confederate war effort. The even more extensive Union ironclad program did better primarily by securing what had been won the first year and neutralizing the continuing Confederate ironclad threat, although it failed in other important ways.

The First Industrial Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Factory Production

This chapter concerns the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution involved the transformation of organic economies by means of a complex of changes which gave birth to the modern world. In Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere those economies were agricultural. Thus the chapter discusses the replacement of an economy 80 per cent of the output of which might have been agricultural by another in which manufacturing became the dominant sector. This involved a transition in the scale of manufacturing from artisanal to large-scale workshop and then factory production. In Britain, that entailed technological innovation, but it would not have been possible in the first place without prior sustained changes in the rest of the economy and society.

The Impact of War on Resource Allocation: “Creative Destruction,” Patenting, and the American Civil War

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Zorina Khan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Opportunity Cost ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Aggregate Demand ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Exogenous Shock ◽  
High Opportunity Cost ◽  
The Impact

The large exogenous shock to labor and capital markets, aggregate demand, the distribution of expenditures, and the rate and direction of technological innovation that war often causes can lead to substantial changes in the allocation of resources. Empirical evidence reveals a significant misallocation of resources during the American Civil War, as a result of reduced geographical mobility, greater incentives for individuals with high opportunity cost to switch into the market for military technologies, and decreased financial returns to inventors. However, the rapid economic recovery that ensued after the end of the war suggests that the misallocation was only temporary, not long inhibiting the capacity for future technological progress.

Combat at the Keys: Women and Battle Pieces for the Piano during the American Civil War

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Reception History ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
War Effort ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Composer ◽  
Battle Of Gettysburg

During the American Civil War, women in the parlor imagined life at the front through music, playing pieces and singing songs on topics related to the conflict. Among the genres that they performed were battle pieces for the piano, episodic works that depict incidents of battle and their outcome in victory. These pieces constituted a genre that had long been a favorite of female amateur performers, their lineage beginning with Frantisek Kotzwara's 1788 Battle of Prague, which remained steadily popular throughout the nineteenth century. This article examines Civil War battle pieces by tracing their roots to Kotzwara's famous piece. By constructing a reception history of that work as it appears in nineteenth-century literary sources, the article retrieves some alternatives to the abundant satirical readings of the Battle of Prague in period fiction. It suggests that Civil War battle music played several important roles in the lives of its players. The music invited women to imagine and embody the conflicts on the battlefield, to challenge society's expectations of women as both pianists and as contributors to the war effort in public capacities, and to reflect on the costs of the war. The article goes on to examine a battle piece by a female composer and to consider amateur women's performances of battle repertoire during the war years. Finally, drawing inspiration from the accounts in fiction of Kotzwara's Battle of Prague, it concludes by imagining a woman's performance of a battle piece on the heels of the Battle of Gettysburg.

scholarly journals An Adaptive and Extensible System for Satellite-Based, Large Scale Burnt Area Monitoring in Near-Real Time

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 2162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nolde ◽  
Simon Plank ◽  
Torsten Riedlinger
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Near Infrared ◽  
Vegetation Type ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
Burnt Area ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
High Detection ◽  
Burnt Areas

In the case of ongoing wildfire events, timely information on current fire parameters is crucial for informed decision making. Satellite imagery can provide valuable information in this regard, since thermal sensors can detect the exact location and intensity of an active fire at the moment the satellite passes over. This information can be derived and distributed in near-real time, allowing for a picture of current fire activity. However, the derivation of the size and shape of an already affected area is more complex and therefore most often not available within a short time frame. For urgent decision making though, it would be desirable to have this information available in near-real time, and on a large scale. The approach presented here works fully automatic and provides perimeters of burnt areas within two hours after the satellite scene acquisition. It uses the red and near-infrared bands of mid-resolution imagery to facilitate continental-scale monitoring of recently occurred burnt areas. To allow for a high detection capacity independent of the affected vegetation type, segmentation thresholds are derived dynamically from contextual information. This is done by using a Morphological Active Contour approach for perimeter determination. The results are validated against semi-automatically derived burnt areas for five wildfire incidents in Europe. Furthermore, these results are compared with three widely used burnt area datasets on a country-wide scale. It is shown that a high detection quality can be reached in near real-time. The large-scale inter-comparison shows that the results coincide with 63% to 76% of the burnt area in the reference datasets. While these established datasets are only available with a time lag of several months or are created by using manual interaction, the presented approach produces results in near-real time fully automatically. This work is therefore supposed to represent a valuable improvement in wildfire related rapid damage assessment.

Urban Destruction during the Civil War

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Kate Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Urban Center ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Southern City

During the American Civil War, Union and Confederate commanders made the capture and destruction of enemy cities a central feature of their military campaigns. They did so for two reasons. First, most mid-19th-century cities had factories, foundries, and warehouses within their borders, churning out and storing war materiel; military officials believed that if they interrupted or incapacitated the enemy’s ability to arm or clothe themselves, the war would end. Second, it was believed that the widespread destruction of property—especially in major or capital cities—would also damage civilians’ morale, undermining their political convictions and decreasing their support for the war effort. Both Union and Confederate armies bombarded and burned cities with these goals in mind. Sometimes they fought battles on city streets but more often, Union troops initiated long-term sieges in order to capture Confederate cities and demoralize their inhabitants. Soldiers on both sides were motivated by vengeance when they set fire to city businesses and homes; these acts were controversial, as was defensive burning—the deliberate destruction of one’s own urban center in order to keep its war materiel out of the hands of the enemy. Urban destruction, particularly long-term sieges, took a psychological toll on (mostly southern) city residents. Many were wounded, lost property, or were forced to become refugees. Because of this, the destruction of cities during the American Civil War provoked widespread discussions about the nature of “civilized warfare” and the role that civilians played in military strategy. Both soldiers and civilians tried to make sense of the destruction of cities in writing, and also in illustrations and photographs; images in particular shaped both northern and southern memories of the war and its costs.

scholarly journals Hired Hands: Casualised Technology and Labour in the Teaching of Cultural Studies

1970 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kieryn McKay ◽  
Kylie Brass
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Current System ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
First Year ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Academic Employment ◽  
The University

This article examines the uptake and application of podcasting in a particular higher education context, drawing on the the authors' experience in late 2008 when both were employed as casual tutors on large-scale first-year communications and cultural studies courses at the University of Western Sydney. The article maps out the limits of technological innovation within the teaching of cultural studies, as well as its limits in promoting the radical potential of a cultural studies approach. It also charts some of the effects and affects of an over-reliance on casualised labour, which we argue can have a profoundly destabilising and atomising impact on academic practice and student engagement. We argue there is a parallel between the appropriation of popular media technologies into the university and the current system of casual academic employment in Australia, in that both the podcast and the casual academic represent ‘new’ interfaces of outsourced academic labour. Stipulated from our positions as casual teachers in cultural studies, this article is written from an embedded perspective which conceptualises both the podcast and the casual academic in line with the most prevalent mode of their employment in the academy: as ‘hired hands’, appendages to traditional models of pedagogy.

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