2019年3月7日 星期四

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA,, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World


The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA,, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World
Book by Sharon Weinberger
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The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years.Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the future.” ... Google Books
Originally publishedMarch 14, 2017


The Imagineers of WarThe Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing GroupMar 14, 2017 - History - 496 pages
The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years.

Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the future.” Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology. Sharon Weinberger gives us a riveting account of DARPA’s successes and failures, its remarkable innovations, and its wild-eyed schemes. We see how the threat of nuclear Armageddon sparked investment in computer networking, leading to the Internet, as well as to a proposal to power a missile-destroying particle beam by draining the Great Lakes. We learn how DARPA was responsible during the Vietnam War for both Agent Orange and the development of the world’s first armed drones, and how after 9/11 the agency sparked a national controversy over surveillance with its data-mining research. And we see how DARPA’s success with self-driving cars was followed by disappointing contributions to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Weinberger has interviewed more than one hundred former Pentagon officials and scientists involved in DARPA’s projects—many of whom have never spoken publicly about their work with the agency—and pored over countless declassified records from archives around the country, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and exclusive materials provided by sources. The Imagineers of War is a compelling and groundbreaking history in which science, technology, and politics collide.
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The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of Darpa, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World

User Review  - Publishers Weekly
Weinberger (Imaginary Weapons), national security editor at the Intercept, scours reams of archival material and interviews former officials of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, revealing ... Read full review

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Selected pages

Contents

Guns and Money
3
SERVANTS OF
237
Invisible War
239
Top Secret Flying Machines
257
Synthetic War
276
Vanilla World
294
Fantasy World
316
Return of Voldemort
342
EPILOGUE Glorious Failure Inglorious Success
363
Acknowledgments
373
Notes
377
Sources
429
Selected Bibliography
441
Index
453
Copyright

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2017
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About the author (2017)

SHARON WEINBERGER is Executive Editor at Foreign Policy and the author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has also held fellowships at MIT's Knight Science Journalism program, the International Reporting Program at Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She has written on military science and technology for Nature, BBC, Discover, Slate, Wired, and The Washington Post,among others.

Hanching Chung 書名翻譯太夢幻

Tuna的編排可能比較適合網路閱讀者。其實我的原稿也是分為較多小段,但是為了牽就書本的格式,先前的稿件才用較大的段落。
書本的長段落格式,每一段涵蓋的層面較廣,比較適合組織和論述。切成多個小段之後,如果沒有加上章節的標題的話,讀者自己要能跨越前後幾段去理解作者的意念,難度高了一點。
習慣於網路短句短文的讀者,在閱讀長篇長段落的類學術性文章的時候是否會有障礙?
我想一則是閱讀習慣的問題,要克服並不困難,但另一則是「為何而讀」的問題,恐怕要讀者自己去找到想讀長篇大論的原因。
這本耙梳DARPA歷史功過的書,對於關心軍事和科研的人來說,有相當的價值。回過頭來看台灣,也會有其參考價值。
台灣目前許多的問題是起於蕭牆之內,施政與政爭大多基於民粹與短視近利,我只能盼望各界有識之士能宏觀地重視國際情勢與重視「廣義的」國防與科研,為永續經營這塊土地與文化而努力。

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