Utopian Entrepreneur (Mediaworks Pamphlets)

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Life can be tough for those who care about the world around them. Just ask Brenda Laurel, whose efforts to infuse social responsibility into her software company led to Purple Moon's spectacular failure on the cusp of the dot-com boom. Her slim memoir, Utopian Entrepreneur, explores her work in girls' games, virtual reality, and the intersection between art and tech.

The writing is fluid and ranges from childhood memories to boardroom battles; readers can't help but amass insight into the difficulties of maintaining one's soul in a heavily commercialized world. Though the book's design is too strongly reminiscent of the dense early-'90s typeface frenzy, this will only be a minor distraction for most readers. Laurel's narrative jumps and slides through new layouts and type sizes like a monkey and holds the attention firmly throughout. While Utopian Entrepreneur won't give any hints on making money, it will explain one human's vision for doing business right. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

A heady hybrid of critical thinking, personal narrative, and economic analysis, Utopian Entrepreneur is a field manual for those who want to do socially positive work in the context of business. One of the few Silicon Valley veterans who participated in all four of the major computer tech bubbles--games, multimedia, virtual reality, and dot-coms--Brenda Laurel is known for injecting humanistic values into computer-based media.

Laurel interweaves her ideas on how to conduct socially progressive business with the saga of her experiences with the Interval Research Corporation and as the founder of the pioneering girls' software company Purple Moon.

Customer Reviews:

Fast and easy, but intectually stimulating read.......2004-09-27

Quite an interesting read. Laurel presents her experiences into the technological world in an easy to understand, stream-of-consciousness way. She details her journey into starting a company that focuses on girl-based computer games, Purple Moon's success and eventual demise due to "outside-the-box" thinking.

Utopian Entrepreneur is both intectually and visually stimulating reading. The M.I.T. Press has paired up an author with a designer, in this case Brenda Laurel and Denise Gonzales Crisp, to create what they like to call a pamphlet. This is the first in the Mediawork Pamphlet series, which will focus on differenct aspects of our society and how technology is effecting them. Two more have been published since this one in 2001.

Looking Homeward.......2001-12-28

I don't work in the tech industry but a friend of mine referred this book to me. Laurel's message is significant to anyone interested in the betterment of planet earth. In a scant 100 pages she speaks volumes to those up against the wall that divides commercialism and art.

Great Quick Read from an Important Game / Media Designer.......2001-11-06

Note -- i tried to change this to 5 stars, because 2 years later, i still draw quite a bit from this book. the system doesn't seem to want me to change it though.

At its heart, Utopian Entrepreneur is a Purple Moon post-mortem -- what can be learned from the life and death of Rockett Movado, the spunky heroine of the Purple Moon games. Born from concerns about the technological gender gap, Purple Moon sought to build a suite of games based on solid research. Why didn't more girls play games? What are the differences in how girls and boys approach digital media? How might designers create interactive digital entertainment that would appeal to girls? Purple Moon spent months on these questions, interviewing and surveying thousands of girls. Educators, game designers, media theorists, gender scholars, or anyone looking for a good cocktail party quote will find some of these facts fascinating. Girls don't mind violence as much as a lack of good stories and characters; girls are more likely to blame themselves for computer failure than boys are. Good, useful stuff.

(...)this little gem is a bargain. As the initial book in MIT's new Mediawork pamplet series - "zines for grownups", Utopian Enterpreneur offers concise prose, compact design, and short segments that make it perfect reading for between meetings or waiting at the airport. The unique layout helps break up the text and enrich the reading experience. Pulling off such a personal book is not easy, and the graphic design definitely contributes to the book's success. At times though, the interplay among images, space, and type feels superfluous failing to add nuance or underscore the meaning of the text.

Checking it at just around 100 pages, Utopian Entrepreneur is so readable and engaging, that I only wished Laurel had more space to share more of her experiences at Purple Moon and lessons learned from the past twenty years in software design. Whether it's expanding this book, starting a new company, or helping invent a new digital industry, I, for one, am eager to see what she does next.

Well worth reading.......2001-09-29

Like Nathan, I also know Brenda well, so my endorsement has a bias--but so does everything I say. This is one of the most enjoyable *business* books I've ever read. Not because it's short. Not because it's extremely well-written. But because it's honest, it's real and it's heartfelt. Brenda's not the type to populate her pages with catchy slogans and new paradigm models. Instead, she shares what it feels like to be an entrepreneur trying to do the right thing and make money at it. Her voice is humble, her perspective is fresh and funny, and her message is well worth considering.

Great thoughts on living and working in the tech industry.......2001-09-18

First off, I'll cop to knowing Brenda Laurel, but I don't feel obligated to review this book because of it. I read the manuscript many months ago and was moved by Brenda's ablity to describe her personal experiences in a way for everyone to both enjoy and learn from. It's not a long book and it will definately leave you wanting more--not because there's not enough there but because what is there is so nice to read.

I think most of us in the tech industries--especially designers--often have conflicts about what kind of work we do vs. what kind we WISH we could do. Brenda's book is optimistic, funny, touching, and enraging at times because she describes her experiences navigating these conflicting forces. What happened to Purple Moon was a travesty and anyone who envisions building a company with any social goals in addition to making money should treat this as an important piece of research.

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Brenda Laurel. Utopian Entrepreneur. (book review): An article from: Utopian Studies
Calvin Redekop
Manufacturer: Society for Utopian Studies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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ASIN: B0008FFGBK
Release Date: 2005-07-30

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This digital document is an article from Utopian Studies, published by Society for Utopian Studies on January 1, 2002. The length of the article is 939 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Brenda Laurel. Utopian Entrepreneur. (book review)
Author: Calvin Redekop
Publication: Utopian Studies (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2002
Publisher: Society for Utopian Studies
Volume: 13 Issue: 1 Page: 214(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Utopian Entrepreneur (Mediaworks Pamphlets)

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Utopian Entrepreneur (Mediaworks Pamphlets)
Brenda Laurel
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQGZHC

Book Description

The field of knowledge management focuses on how organizations can most effectively store, manage, retrieve, and enlarge their intellectual properties. The repository view of knowledge management emphasizes the gathering, providing, and filtering of explicit knowledge. The information in a repository has the advantage of being easily transferable and reusable. But it is not easy to use decontextualized information, and users often need access to human experts.

This book describes a more recent approach to knowledge management, which the authors call "expertise sharing." Expertise sharing emphasizes the human aspects--cognitive, social, cultural, and organizational--of knowledge management, in addition to information storage and retrieval. Rather than focusing on the management level of an organization, expertise sharing focuses on the self-organized activities of the organization’s members. The book addresses the concerns of both researchers and practitioners, describing current literature and research as well as offering information on implementing systems. It consists of three parts: an introduction to knowledge sharing in large organizations; empirical studies of expertise sharing in different types of settings; and detailed descriptions of computer systems that can route queries, assemble people and work, and augment naturally occurring social networks within organizations.

Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management

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Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management
Mark Ackerman
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQ4XBM

Book Description

This new volume examines the relationship between pesticides and carcinogenicity, presenting some of the current thinking behind the decisions that are made with respect to their use. Progressing from theoretical to practical considerations, this book addresses: mechanisms of carcinogenesis; dietary inhibition of carcinogenesis; biological issues of extrapolation, and pesticide regulatory issues. Of special interest is a chapter by Bruce Ames, originator of the Ames Test for carcinogenicity, on ranking of possible carcinogenic hazards.

Book Description

The conquest of aging is now within our grasp. It hasn't arrived yet, writes Michael R. Rose, but a scientific juggernaut has started rolling and is picking up speed. A long tomorrow is coming. In The Long Tomorrow, Rose offers us a delightfully written account of the modern science of aging, spiced with intriguing stories of his own career and leavened with the author's engaging sense of humor and rare ability to make contemporary research understandable to nonscientists. The book ranges from Rose's first experiments while a graduate student--counting a million fruit fly eggs, which took 3,000 hours over the course of a year--to some of his key scientific discoveries. We see how some of his earliest experiments helped demonstrate that "the force of natural selection" was key to understanding the aging process--a major breakthrough. Rose describes how he created the well-known Methuselah Flies, fruit flies that live far longer than average. Equally important, Rose surveys the entire field, offering colorful portraits of many leading scientists and shedding light on research findings from around the world. We learn that rodents given fifteen to forty percent fewer calories live about that much longer, and that volunteers in Biosphere II, who lived on reduced caloric intake for two years, all had improved vital signs. Perhaps most interesting, we discover that aging hits a plateau and stops. Popular accounts of Rose's work have appeared in The New Yorker, Time magazine, and Scientific American, but The Long Tomorrow is the first full account of this exciting new science written for the general reader. "Among his peers, Rose is considered a brilliantly innovative scientist, who has almost single-handedly brought the evolutionary theory of aging from an abstract notion to one of the most exciting topics in science."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

Customer Reviews:

Good book to read, great with evolution .......2006-03-06

This book was amazing and awesome. You will learn a lot about aging from fruit flies. When I finished this book, I was surprised that a new author's first book was really good. I think biologist and scientist will enjoy this book.

Summary of What Causes us to Grow Old.......2006-01-22

Evolutionary biology attempts to explain how we age by looking at genes within our DNA that either allow or force our bodies to age. Unfortunately in nature's desire to populate the planet, it doesn't select for these genes as dominate. Nature makes us want to have offspring young. Just look at the teenage pregnancy rate.

Artificially we have learned that selective breeding in race horses, show dogs, prize winning cattle, and other animals have produced new animals with desirable traits. Dr. Rose's research used fruit flies to produce new generations that lived longer.

Could similar selective breeding in humans produced a longer lived race. Probably, but it would take centuries. Can we extend longevity through diet, drugs and medicine - yes, we already have, and are continuing to do so. Combining all of this, Dr. Rose has written a book that summarized the current state of knowlege in the field.

The science fiction readers of Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long books reflect a similar story, the hero is the result of centuries of such breeding.

What we can learn about aging from fruit flies.......2005-11-11

This is mostly a memoir about Professor Rose's career as an evolutionary biologist who studies aging in fruit flies and extrapolates that knowledge to humans. The "Long Tomorrow" in the title refers to his belief that "it is still reasonable to hope that eventually the great mass of people will be able to control their aging through pharmaceuticals and medicine." (p. 134)

Rose sees senescence as being the inadvertent product of the evolutionary process. There is no single gene that controls aging. Instead hundreds of genes are involved so that the prospect of a single elixir or technique being developed that would magically postpone aging and death is highly unlikely. Almost as an aside and incidentally, Rose explains why we age and eventually die. His is the standard view that the evolutionary process becomes less and less in force as we get further and further from the onset of our reproductive age until "the force" (as he calls it) is not in effect at all.

This is a very tricky and subtle argument that takes a bit of reflection to fully understand. I know when I first encountered it some years ago I found it hard to follow. It is still very difficult to express. But let me give it a try.

Rose uses the analogy of Ford's Model T automobile. As the story goes Henry Ford wanted to know which parts of his cars almost never wore out. He found out what they were and directed his production staff to make them cheaper so that they would wear out at about the same time as the rest of the car, thereby making his cars cheaper to produce while increasing his profits without decreasing the longevity of his cars. Rose says that nature follows a similar parsimonious production with its organisms. For example, genes coded to allow a body part to last a thousand years would not be selected (or unselected for that matter). Indeed any gene or genes that code for processes lasting past reproductive age would exist in the genome only in a random fashion (if at all). Such genes would randomly appear and randomly die out.

What this means is that after the onset of reproduction everything begins to break down in a more or less random fashion. The environment acts upon us in a multitude of ways. Little insults pile up. Some cells go wildly reproductive and cancers develop. Other cells die due to something we ingested or because of accidents. Microorganisms use our tissues for their reproduction or subsistence (e.g., viral and bacterial infections). Toxicity kills off cells or changes their metabolism so that the cells no longer function properly. Arteries become clogged and blood fails to flow to some tissues which die of starvation...etc. Like Ford's Model T, first one thing goes wrong and then another until finally something stops us from running altogether.

Now, if we can fix one thing and then another and then another, our death can be postponed. If we become very, very good at fixing, death can be postponed for a long time. Such is the argument. The problem is that we are not really good at fixing things that go wrong with our bodies. Most of the fixing that takes place is through the body's own devices. Tissues are repaired, assaults to the skin patched up, bone tissues fused (after being set properly--that we can do). But we can't stop the growth of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the body without killing parts of the body itself. We can't repair a brain that has been deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes. We can't regrow cartilage that has worn away. And so on.

So the "long tomorrow" will be gradual in coming and the length of that day will grow by small increments.

What I don't understand is this: why isn't the reproductive age of organisms itself indefinite? Or, to put the question another way, why should the young and inexperienced have a reproductive advantage over the old and experienced?

The answer appears to be almost circular in that because older organisms have bodies that are already beginning to break down, they are at a disadvantage to younger organisms whose bodies are in peak form. This is why members of the opposite sex (especially males) choose the young for mates. Or to be more precise, this is why the young are attracted to the young; indeed why all are attracted sexually to those at the peak of their reproductive lives. The young have a longer future and so will be better able to provide for their offspring. The fact that the opposite sex is biased in its choice further accentuates the reproductive advantage of the young.

For a more detailed explanation of why we age, expressed in a different way, see my review of The Biology of Death: Origins of Mortality (2004) by Andre Klarsfeld and Frederic Revah. The point is there is no one-sentence explanation of why we age. It's like trying to explain a complex process in a single phrase. It can't be done.

Those interested in Rose's career (and its ups and downs) and the nature of his work with fruit flies will find this interesting. But for the general reader this book is not the best for understanding why we age and die. There are a number of better books (none of them completely satisfying, by the way). In addition to the opus cited above, here are three others: Austad, Steven N. Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey Through Life (1997); Clark, William R. A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death (1999); and Hayflick, Leonard How and Why We Age (1994).

Human Senescence: Evolutionary and Biocultural Perspectives (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology)

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Human Senescence: Evolutionary and Biocultural Perspectives (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology)
Douglas E. Crews
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521571731

Book Description

Combining anthropological, gerontological and biocultural evidence, this study explores how humans came to grow old as slowly as they do, and what impacts this has had on their health and lives. It is only comparatively recent that humans have developed late-life survival, but much of the research on senescence is based on isolated cells, worms, and fruit flies, which may be only of peripheral relevance to human aging.

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Much current research on the biology of senescence is on cell-lines, nematodes or fruit flies, which may be only of peripheral relevance to the problems encountered in human senescence. Human Senescence reviews the evolutionary biology of human senescence and life span, and the evolutionarily recent development of late-life survival. In examining how human patterns of and varibility in growth and development have altered later life survival probabilities and competencies, how survival during mid-life contributes to senescent dysfunction and alteration, and the possibilities of further extending human life span, it gives a better understanding of how humans came to senesce as slowly as we do. Bringing together gerontological, anthropological and biocultural research, it explores human variation in chronic disease, senescence and life span as outcomes of early life adaptation and the success of humankind's sociocultural evolution. It will be a benchmark publication for all interested in how and why we age.

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Superb book on the fundamental nature of aging

Evolutionary Biology of Aging
Michael R. Rose
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging

Accessories:

ASIN: 0195095308

Book Description

This unique book looks at the biology of aging from a fundamentally new perspective, one based on evolutionary theory rather than traditional concepts which emphasize molecular and cellular processes. The basis for this approach lies in the fact that natural selection, as a powerful determining force, tends to decline in importance with age. Many of the characteristics we associate with aging, the author argues, are more the result of this decline than any mechanical imperative contained within organic structures. This theory in turn yields the most fruitful avenues for seeking answers to the problem of aging, and should be recognized as the intellectual core of gerontology and the foundation for future research. The author ably surveys the vast literature on aging, presenting mathematical, experimental, and comparative findings to illustrate and support the central thesis. The result is the first complete synthesis of this vital field. Evolutionary biologists, gerontologists, and all those concerned with the science of aging will find it a stimulating, strongly argued account.

Customer Reviews:

Superb book on the fundamental nature of aging.......2001-09-21

This book does an excellent job of describing, in both general and mathematical terms, why aging occurs. The discussions of antagonistic pleiotropy, decreasing selective pressure after reproduction, the possible molecular mechanisms of aging, and more, provide an excellent foundation for further thinking and studying in the field of aging.

Why we age.(The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging by Michael R. Rose)(Book Review) : An article from: American Scientist

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Why we age.(The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging by Michael R. Rose)(Book Review) : An article from: American Scientist
Kimberly Hughes
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY OF AGING
Michael R. Rose
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKDIS2

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Evolutionary Biology of Aging
Michael R. Rose
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OK818O

The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging

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The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging
Michael R. Rose
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKLMFI

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