Unit+4+Technology

=Technology: The practical foundation of Civilization =

 Power Library_SIRS link -- will only work on the PO network

POMS Card Catalog

=Sample Power point for Technology project=



50 Greatest Inventions of All Time
 Some questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts. Seven years ago, //The Atlantic// surveyed a group of historians to create a ranked list of the 100 people who had done the most to shape the character of modern America. The panelists agreed easily on the top few names—Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, in that order—but then differences came up in ways that reflected not simply their own values but also the differences in what values influence our country. Lewis and Clark, or Henry Ford? Thomas Edison, or Martin Luther King? The result was of course not scientific. But the exercise of asking, comparing, and choosing helped us understand more about what these historical figures had done and about the areas in which American society had proved most and least open to the changes brought on by talented, determined men and women.

Now we turn to **technology**. //The Atlantic// recently assembled a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape the nature of modern life. The main rule for this exercise was that the innovations should have come after widespread use of the wheel began, perhaps 6,000 years ago. That ruled out fire, which our ancestors began to use several hundred thousand years earlier.

We asked each panelist to make 25 selections and to rank them, despite the challenge of comparing, say, the atomic bomb and the plow. The discovery and application of ** [|nuclear fission] ,** which led to both the atomic bomb and nuclear-power plants, was No. 21 of the top 50, ahead of the [|**moldboard**] ** [|plow] ,** which greatly expanded the range of land that farmers could till, at No. 30. We also invited panelists to add explanations of their choices, and I followed up with several of them and with other experts in interviews.

===Any collection of 50 breakthroughs  must exclude 50,000 more. What about GPS systems, on which so many forms of movement now depend? What about the concept of the number zero, as suggested by Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco? In addition to coal, how can no one have mentioned paved roads? Or the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA? Landing on the moon? Or the mathematics of calculus, on which space flight and so much else depended? The more questions and discussions our ranking provokes, the more successful the endeavor will have been. ===

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