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The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity
Winner, 1995, category of Computer Science, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Despite enormous investments in computers over the last twenty years, productivity in the very service industries at which they were aimed virtually stagnated everywhere in the world. If computers are not making businesses, organizations, or countries more productive, then why are we spending so much time and money on them? Cutting through a raft of technical data, Thomas Landauer explains and illustrates why computers are in trouble and why massive outlays for computing since 1973 have not resulted in comparable productivity payoffs. Citing some of his own successful research programs, as well as many others, Landauer offers solutions to the problems he describes. While acknowledging that mismanagement, organizational barriers, learning curves, and hardware and software incompatibilities can play a part in the productivity paradox, Landauer targets individual utility and usability as the main culprits. He marshals overwhelming evidence that computers rarely improve the efficiency of the information work they are designed for because they are too hard to use and do too little that is sufficiently useful. Their many features, designed to make them more marketable, merely increase cost and complexity. Landauer proposes that emerging techniques for user-centered development can turn the situation around. Through task analysis, iterative design, trial use, and evaluation, computer systems can be made into powerful tools for the service economy. Landauer estimates that the application of these methods would make computers have the same enormous impact on productivity and standard of living that were the historical results of technological advances in energy use (the steam engine, electric motors), automation in textiles and other manufacture, and in agriculture. He presents solid evidence for this claim, and for a huge benefit-to-cost ratio for user-centered design activities backed by descriptions of how to do these necessary things, of promising applications for better computer software designs in business, and of the relation of user-centered design to business process reengineering, quality, and management..
Price: $10.98
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Inquiry Into the Origin of Honor and the Usefulness of Christianity in War
1732. Mandeville takes it for granted that a Christian is not bound to believe anything to have been of divine institution, that has not been declared to be such in Holy Writ. Great offense was taken at an essay, in the first part of the author's Fable of the Bees, called An Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, notwithstanding the great caution it was written with. Since then, it is though criminal to surmise that even heathen virtue was of human invention and the reader, in the following dialogues, will find him to persist in the opinion that it was. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read. Written in Old English text..
Price: $16.98
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The Selected Papers of Jane Addams: Vol. 2: Venturing into Usefulness
Venturing into Usefulness, the second volume of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, documents the experience of this major American historical figure, intellectual, social activist, and author between June 1881, when at twenty-one she had just graduated from Rockford Female Seminary, and early 1889, when she was on the verge of founding the Hull-House settlement with Ellen Gates Starr. During these years she evolved from a high-minded but inexperienced graduate of a women's seminary into an educated woman and seasoned traveler well-exposed to elite culture and circles of philanthropy. Themes inaugurated in the previous volume are expanded here, including dilemmas of family relations and gender roles; the history of education; the dynamics of female friendship; religious belief and ethical development; changes in opportunities for women; and the evolution of philanthropy, social welfare, and reform ideas. .
Price: $47.25
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A tribute to the principles, virtues, habits and public usefulness of the Irish and Scotch early settlers of Pennsylvania. By a descendant.
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