Design goals defeated by patriarchal packaging assumptions
346903
Although I'd like to commend BIC for throwing off its patriarchal baggage in manufacturing these pens, sadly, the male dominated design preconceptions still infect the packaging. Clearly, the harsh right angles and inorganic fold/seam lines on the retail pack still were designed with a male user in mind, defeating the purpose as my wife still must ask me for assistance in opening the packaging.
1412341
Obvious evidence for a Designer behind the design!  Any truly thinking person, engineer of any type, would see that it can't be by chance that these things came about.  A challenge to all to rethink their origins, and rediscover their own intense value to the One who purposed them!
2917549
As the recent Google echo chamber brouhaha illustrated, the question of women in the tech world remains controversial. For over 50 years, since second wave feminism emerged in the 1960s, girls who love math and programming have grown into STEM-educated women who too often realize that the work world isn't quite prepared to love them back.

I was vaguely aware of Ellen Paos 2015 lawsuit, and some of her story paralleled my own, so when her book was published, I jumped on it. In the prologue she comments that people say that my case was a matter of right issues, wrong plaintiff I recalled having heard that phrase in 2015, so I was eager to hear her side.

What I got was a mixed bag. The beginning describes Ellens charmed pre-Kleiner life, one in which shes accepted to every college she applies, graduates from Harvard Law, decides after a few years of practicing law that she wants to work in tech in Silicon Valley, but instead of getting a tech job, heads back to Harvard for an MBA. Post-MBA she hops from tech job to tech job for a few years, not apparently suffering from anti-female discrimination until Kleiner pops into the picture.

Big red flags appear before she even applies, and its kind of surprising that Pao ignores her gut reaction and takes the job offered by John Doerr (in all fairness, it would be hard for most MBAs to turn down that opportunity).

In terms of numbers, shes successful at Kleiner, but on the interpersonal side, shes irritating her co-workers, not to mention exercising really poor judgment by getting involved with a married male colleague. I know, not well, some of her former Kleiner colleagues and was stunned to read her disparaging descriptions of them  focused not on their professional shortcomings but on their personalities. According to contemporary news accounts I read (after finishing the book), as an employee she was asked, time and again, to work on her soft skills. Yet nowhere in her account does she accept responsibility for this failure, or really for anything else. Her colleagues ultimately decide to give her the heave-ho and she, believing she deserved a promotion, sues.

Before addressing the trial, the book detours through her time at reddit, where she suffers immense unpopularity just trying to do the right thing, mostly by hiring people who aren't white males, and attributing all missteps to others. That section, which includes lavish and borderline bizarre descriptions of some of her friends, feels as though it was written by someone else.

The trial is unsurprisingly a miserable experience, exacerbated by the fact that Kleiner could afford a first-rate team and that Pao somehow managed to turn over 700,000 of her emails to opposing counsel without reviewing them first. (Im thinking: really, this woman graduated from Harvard Law?) Although she doesnt explain, apparently those emails served to nail her. The fact that other Kleiner women testify in support of the firm also does not endear the jury to her cause.

Then theres the day that her young daughter is rushed to the hospital. Consumed with maintaining her own image, Pao stays in court, apparently telling no one of the medical emergency, not jumping into a cab until the trial is adjourned for the day, urging the driver to go fast. And she wonders that shes described as cold?

I don't think Im spoiling anything by noting that Kao did not get the big payday she had hoped, nor did she, in any meaningful way, advance the cause of women in tech. (Her suit may have had the opposite effect, at least in the VC world.) Still, if the book reignites the discussion, its a useful addition to the literature.
3025582
This book was written a little over 10 years ago by a female lawyer who could easily have realized the feminists' dream career and life, but chose the real happiness of raising her own children and living in peace and harmony with her law-professor husband.  The author exposes the ugly roots of feminism and its inroads into our society. For example, one commonly hears today of women who routinely go to work, leaving others to feed their babies with milk they have pumped.  Graglia points out that a poor substitute bottle feeding breast milk is for sitting in a rocking chair and nursing one's own baby: "But contemporary feminism, like totalitarian collectivism, champions as 'progressive' a return  to the communal, impersonal care of a wet nurse era. And feminists warn mothers that in order to avoid the attachment to their babies that encourages women to sacrifice careers for children, mothers must not assume any more child-rearing responsibilities than their husbands do. These feminist teachings seem a reversal of the civilizing process with a loss in the humaneness of which that process has made us more capable.
  "Jennifer Roback Morse has wisely asked, 'When we harden our hearts to place a six week old baby into the care of strangers, who will moderate us?' Some mothers cannot so harden their hearts. I would have felt like the wire monkey mother in Harlow's famous experiment, if I had pumped out breast milk at my office for another to feed my baby. What can possibly moderate a society that encourages its mothers so to harden their hearts and denigrates those who refuse to do so? The 'grief, the listlessness, the obvious and heart-rending despair' of the infant monkeys deprived of maternal care in Harlow's experiment evoked this reaction: 'Thank God we only have to do it once to prove the point." The success of contemporary feminism in hardening women's hearts, however, indicates that the monkeys suffered in vain" (p. 185, footnotes omitted).

Graglia states the fallacies in the feminist view of normal marriage--their devaluation of sex as a personal, individual act of commitment between one man and one woman, their denial of the link between procreation and sex and their glorification of sterile sex, in which men use women as they would use other men (p. 347). I was amazed to read in her book that Norman Mailer was aware of this disparity and wrote in "The Prisoner of Sex" of homosexual sex: "the result can be no more than a transaction--pleasurable, even all-encompassing, but a transaction--when no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived" (p. 347; p. 172,173 in Mailer).

She also describes how no-fault divorce laws fit the feminist agenda, as easy divorce destabilizes marriages. And she reveals how the feminist insistence that women's worth is determined by their ability to compete with and mimic male behavior in the marketplace is harmful to individuals, families, and society.

Men and women who see through the feminist propaganda and myths will find much to support their choices and to help them contribute to a rejection of feminist cant. Having come to marriage and childbearing in the 1970s, I often thought of the hollowness of the feminist slogan "Sisterhood is powerful."  No,  love is powerful;  love  is stronger than death and hell--to paraphrase the Song of Songs--not the whining, bullying, hate-filled, life- destroying bonds of "sisterhood."

Young women who have doubts about the feminist take on life would find this book very enlightening. I remember too well the misery and aggressiveness of feminists. Like Graglia, I'm glad after 40 years of marriage to one man that I didn't take that road.
3607741
This book says that women need three things: to be romanced, to have an irreplaceable role in a grand adventure, and to have their beauty unveiled.  And, according to this book, men need three things: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.  Let me rephrase those a bit more honestly.  Women "need" to be the passive receiver to a man's initiative, to play a role in a man's adventure, and to be told we are beautiful by a man, whereas men "need" to be the active initiator (the one who makes decisions), to live an adventure of their own direction, and to have a woman to control and objectify.  This is the premise of every so-called "chick-flick."  This is the reason women look to men to give them worth and purpose.

I would offer the three longings of every human being's heart: to feel loved by others, to love oneself, and to love others.  (kinda like Matthew 22:37-39)  You aren't going to get any of those things by playing roles and mimicking the dominant (and secular, I might add) culture.  You're far more likely to get them by treating all human beings the same way -- as equals, without boundaries imposed by stereotypes.

According to this book, women were created to be submissive and if they take care of themselves rather than looking to a male person to make all their major decisions, they are being "emasculating." This is an example of how some people choose to believe that traditions of the dominant culture are somehow natural and approved of by God, rather than checking with the Bible to see how Jesus/God behaved toward women.  "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." How then is it appropriate to tell people that they when they marry someone they are supposed to have an unequal relationship where one person makes the decisions and the other obeys without any thought or responsibility?  Being "one" does not mean one person thinks and the other does not. It means both people think and work hard until they come to agreement.

If you choose to read this, I urge you to also read&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/What-Paul-Really-Said-About-Women-The-Apostle-s-Liberating-Views-on-Equality-in-Marriage-Leadership-and-Love/dp/0060610638/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">What Paul Really Said About Women: The Apostle's Liberating Views on Equality in Marriage, Leadership, and Love</a>.
1530564
A product's packaging is also a designed product. Wendy Jedlicka used this simple, but often overlooked idea and made packaging the focal point of an in-depth book about sustainable design.

This choice opened up my eyes and mind to the opportunities for positive environmental impact when designers consider the package early is the product design process.

I recommend this incredible resource for product and system designers, as well as business leaders in product or packaging design. The book explains the need for change and provides practical tools for implementing it.
3366100
This book was not purchased by me or for me. My husband purchased this book for himself because he is interested in different views of his favorite hobby.

He made it to page 11 before he gave up.

He asked me to read it.  I am a woman gamer. I am a girly-girl. However I am also intelligent and a professional. I am not greedy or a shopaholic. I am not interested in celebrity gossip.

I made it through the book, but was offended by the stereotypes more than once.

I was offended by the mocking and stereotyping of co-workers.

I was offended by the stereotype that all a woman needs to be happy (in game or out) is expensive designer accessories, manicures, and frilly drinks.

I was offended by the pink ink used throughout the book.

Another reviewer used the words vapid and vacuous and unfortunately, those are exactly the words I would use to describe the book's content and writing style.

There is obviously a niche for a book about gamer girls, but this book does not fill it.
23034
That the majority of larger system development projects fail to meet expectations is well known.  Further, the futility of redoubling efforts to elicit customer requirements is now being recognized.  What to do?

The more advanced system thinkers and a few simply lucky practitioners are discovering the value of capabiltiy cases as enablers of solution envisioning.

This book describes 36 aspects of system envisioning, including insights into the mysterious decision flow called system architecting.  It provides a repertoire of 15 example Capability Cases.  Further, it shows the reader how capability cases can be defined, thusly bootstrapping his/her repertoire.  Moreover, it shows how new capability cases can be shared and vetted thus leveraging the 'wisdom of crowds.'

Invest in this book.  Because it costs less than one wasted personhour of project effort your ROI can be very high.
4723594
In this single volume, women are provided with excellent advice on how to manage hard choices in their career, their home, and (in fact) their entire life. The title refers to the "self-destructive and exhausting ritual" to which so many women become hostage. For many of them, this shift seems endless. Bolton observes: "Rather than deriving joy from their choices as women -- to work, to stay at home, to help out in the community -- many women are half-crazed by the constant demands, options, and trade-offs." She organizes her material within three Parts:
The Identity Challenge: Who Are We?
The Task Challenge: What Do We Do?
The Balance Challenge: Who Comes First?
Bolton draws upon a wealth of research (hers and others') which guides and informs her observations, recommendations, and conclusions. In the Afterword, she suggests that "In many ways, women today live in a surreal world, floating back and forth between an outdated cultural mirror that prescribes certain genderized roles, and then careening suddenly toward the possibility of an entirely new image, with as-yet-unknown life scripts and patterns for its many actors and actresses." Although written for women, this book should also be be read by men who also have "hard choices" to make. If they make the correct choices, perhaps many of the decisions made by women will be less difficult.
2374912
managers are often reticent to go beyond common sense in product design, oftentimes a book like this one can show them the power of smarter decisions when it comes to ergonomic considerations (beyond common sense).
Also, the book enables industrial designers to begin acquire the right tools to communicate design-ergonomic decisions to the remainder of the design-management team.
93828
This book is wrong.

This book seems to try to blame the failure of more than 2 decades of gender equality policies to half assessed efforts instead of just the wrong policies probably the wrong ideas. The solution this book offers is of course, push the pedal to the metal, like if they some how live on a permanent cognitive dissonance unable to correlate their theories and policies to what is actually going on in the real world.

It seems like now nature is partly to blame. As the completely natural leanings of one self to certain preferences should now be targeted to fix the gender equality paradox.

Feminism is dying and this book is proof of it.
2991082
I found this book interesting, but the biggest flaw is the title.  The authors imply that somehow, our DNA is programmed so that Beautiful People Will Have More Daughters, because it is evolutionarily more advantageous to be beautiful if you are a woman rather than a man.  However, there are scientific studies that show that caloric restriction leads to more females than males being born.

Imagine back on the veld:  if there was a shortage of food, the population would be more likely to survive & propogate if there were more females than males.  If there was an abundance of food, then the population could support more males than females, and only the best males would mate -- leading to better offspring.

Weight is often cited as an objective criterion of beauty.  Suppose all of the 'Beautiful Women' are dieting to stay thin & beautiful (think of all of the starlets starving themselves), thus leading to more Beautiful Daughters.

The authors never address this, thus throwing into question the scientific rigor of the book.

The book is also sexist because it talks mostly about what men want -- markers of physical attractiveness.  But in modern societies, in non-rape situations, women effectively get to choose which men have success mating.  The authors spend little time talking about the traits that women seek, other than material wealth.
3240702
This tribute to a founder of the Intelligent Design Movement remains, while justly challenging Darwinism, mired in a mistaken view of the conflict over whether organisms are subject only to blind natural forces or also to goal-directed ones.

As I tried to point out in other reviews here, and am treating thoroughly with other known puzzles in my own book, the conflict has wrongly focused on similarity between organisms and man-made devices because of structural functions, overlooking entirely the critical difference between the living and lifeless. This difference is that the living exhibit the sought-after goal-directedness in their very activities, directed toward preservation throughout, irrespective of findings as to whether their functional form was equally an aim, and which in fact is part of the preservational aim of every developing organism.

The considerable efforts of intelligent-design proponents to find support in mathematical probability, structural complexity and other biological particulars, are thus superfluous. The proverbial forest is not seen for the trees. The answer can be found in the large-scale phenomena noted, and depends on putting two and two together in the manner of logical deduction used in other areas.

It is interesting that toward the end of the book (page 308) an author speaks of Phillip Johnson, the man paid tribute to, "as the intellectual leader of a group of scholars that God had raised up to address the question of biological origins..." On the same pages the author speaks profusely of university settings, ones of these scholars. One can wonder if God indeed means to reveal himself in complex ways to privileged dwellers of universities, or rather simply to such as someone rising from the ashes of the Holocaust.
1330476
It's a pity to see this book lumbered with the "feminist" label, as the alternative economic analysis that's laid out doesn't merely pertain to the failure of classical economics to recognize women's unpaid work. At least half of the book concerns the need to account for environmental degradation in calculating the total wealth produced by a country - an idea that Redefining Progress borrowed from Marilyn in 1995, when they proposed replacing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as the official measurement.

As Marilyn outlines in her first chapter, she drew on her experience working for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in writing If Women Counted. She was shocked to learn that in many third world countries, women account for a major portion of the productive economy by providing the essentials of life (growing vegetable, making soap and candles, collecting firewood and water) that people in the first world typically purchase. Yet because no money changes hands, these activities are not formally counted as part of a nation's productive economy. Of course she also writes at length about the unpaid work first world woman do (child care, elder care, housework and food preparation).

To my knowledge she is also the first economist to point out the tragedy of counting the costs of war and environmental degradation as part of the productive economy (environmental degradation adds to the GDP because of the money spent to correct the damage) - because they actually lessen humanity's ability to supply our basic survival needs.

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE
2287347
The theme that Kampis examines in Self-Modifying Systems  is the self-generation of information by the nontrivial change (self-modification) of systems. Such a system is a network of many components, which have the property of being able to transform each other and organising themselves into larger components.  It is this feature that makes such component systems closed to efficient cause.  Component-systems, then, are not algorithmic, but this is not a reversible equation in that component-systems can, Kampis argues, give rise, in fact, to any particular algorithm.  Kampis describes the difference as that between known complexity, that is to say complexity-to-be-realised, and unknown complexity, or complexity-to-be-explained.  The first of these is relatively easy to realise, the second being impossible in that "a complex operation operating on components and bringing forth yet unknown and unidentified components cannot be described as an algorithm" (Kampis 1991:239).

 Component-systems, therefore, have a high degree of creativity, but they also have characteristics that avoid many of the problems that other forms of nonlinear models. Kampis argues that nothing that such a process gives rise to can be predicted before hand, and no identity can be traced back to an origin.  From this, Kampis states that the creation thesis emerges.  This thesis can be stated in the following way:

The organisation of the world is continually self-creating; this process is at any given stage incomplete.  Information about the future is not only inaccessible but does not exist in any form.  Creation is a basic and general phenomenon that cannot be explained logically. (Kampis 1991: 258).

Self-creation occurs in the form of self-modification.  A system that exhibits creativity, then, has to be continually redefined because, in the course of time, all variables and their interrelations will change in so far as each component is replaced by another. It is a system which will be defined (and constructed) by the very processes it undergoes. (Kampis 1991: 490).

The book unfolds, then, as a wonderfully sophisticated model to account for the very process of change and the important limitations of prediction the process of change implies. This book deserves to be one of the key texts of autopoiesis.
1182545
On Being a Jewish Feminist is an essential work for those readers in demand of an overall view of the challenges encountered by Jewish Feminism and the answers provided to those by it.
In an understandable way for those who are non-Jewish, the reader is supplied with the targets of Jewish Feminism: the roles, images,assumptions to be questioned or re-created;the forgotten aspects of Jewish women's history to be remembered and studied; the myths to be redefined. What is more, On Being a Jewish Feminist is not only a mere statement of objectives or a dispute of presupositions:  suggestions for change are furnished.  At the same time, the dilemma of being Jewish and a Feminist, of heretically developing an identity, is expounded and explored.
An imperative work for inquiring minds who long for answers.
1101329
This book presents three original projects. There is a Scratch-based project, a GPIO/Hardware project using Python, and a Python-GUI project.

Before reviewing the projects, I would like to comment on a trend found in most, if not all, books dedicated to the Raspberry Pi. It is my hope the future authors of the genre will see that there is no need to include what seems to be a mandatory chapter dedicated to setting up the Raspberry Pi or preparing the SD card with the latest Raspian distribution. A links to the most up-to-date Raspberry Pi Foundation "Quick Start Guide" web page [....]) does a good job at this and also serves as a good example on how to find information related to hacking away with the little computer that can. Readers would then be rewarded with books entirely focused on projects. To finish on this rant, I was glad that there was no 'Python 101' pre-introductory chapter that also plague several Raspberry Pi books.

Now that I've almost fallen into the trap I was criticizing, let's get down to the projects business. The first project is about programming an Angry Birds type of game. This one reviews the Scratch interface (good job at keeping it down to three pages) and the various components of making a video game. Those seeking a quick step-by-step recipe might be in for a disappointment as the instructions are focused on designing the functionalities of the game. This is a good base for learning how to design a program. I will most likely end up using some of this material to teach my own students.

I really liked the 'Testing Your Speed' project. This one will end up in my own lesson planning. This project exploits the Pi's GPIO pins by building a controller made out of office materials such as paper clips and fasteners and sticky tape. I liked that apart from obtaining male-to-female wire and/or a Pi Cobbler breakout board and a prototyping breadboard, there was no need to order other components. However, the chapter's layout would benefit from clear and obvious warnings regarding the dangers of shorting the wrong pins on the GPIO ports as it looks rather diluted within the bulk of the copy.

Finally, the last project is about making an interactive map using Python and its GUI modules. The project relies on using the Google Maps API to obtain mapping data. A list of widgets presented at the end of the chapter outlines valuable extension potential from this project.

While this book is not recommend for elementary school age kids, I definitely recommend it to teachers and parents seeking to support kids learning how to code.