Archive of ‘Annotated Bibliographies’ category

Annotated Bib #10: City of Atlanta, GA

Atlanta_2

http://www.atlantaga.gov

The official website for the city of Atlanta was constructed by a number of individuals. This website was constructed to offer information about the city and promote it’s business reputation. This claim can be supported by the “visitor” tab, “doing business” tab, and the home page. The website offers a number of different links to further your knowledge of the city. The intended audience of this website would be for contractors and business men and women.

This source is useful to incoming residents and tourists. The website offers a significant amount of pages that are associated with the website. The website is also update-to-date, which is also useful to a researcher. This helps the researcher to decide how credible the information may be. A weakness for this source is that the contributors are unidentified, but fortunate for the researcher the website is a government official website. This means that all things on the website must be true. The website is also very easy to navigate and this feature is a great benefit to any researcher.

Annotated Bib #9: “Women in tech: Scarcity, Sexism, and Solutions”

Jen Heilemann. “Women in Tech:Scarcity, Sexism, and Solutions.” The storyexchange. N.p., 9 Apr. 2013. Web.

rosie-techJen Heilemann is a Developer at The Nerdery, which is a company for custom software design and development. Helieman feels “female participation in Computer Science and particularly programming conferences is pitiful” and she offers a link to a number of statistics that support her idea. These links lead to credible sources. She states that “in 1987, 42% of software developers in the US were women, while today, that number hovers around 28%.” “Today” is reference to the year 2013, the reader could question whether these numbers are still active.

The author then talks about how the number of female participants in the industry varies and leads to the “Steve Rule”, blatantly stating there would be greater number of men named “Steve” than female participants. It is said that culture has a lot to do with this, because according to society men and women are suppose to assume a certain role. In the end the author offers incidents to support the claim of sex-based discrimination and she offers some solutions.

This source is useful. It offers good detail and the author offers links in order to support her claims. The article was published in 2013, so some of the information may have updated. I feel this article is very useful looking to discover the effects of gender on digital designs.

Annotated Bib #8: “Old People are just slower”: how ageism has taken over the tech world”

Jana Krige. “‘Old People Are Just Slower’:how Ageism Has Taken over the Tech Industry.” Memeburn. N.p., 9 Dec. 2015. Web.

Jana Krige, a copywriter for company called Lima Bean, that specializes in digital strategy, content marketing, web design, and web development and branding. She constructed this article based on a claim that states “rampant ageism has become the norm in digital and computing companies across the globe” (pp.1). To support this claim the author offers a link to Ted Rall’s Silicon Valley ageism report. The article does not offer information worth crediting, because it does not state where the information was lured from. She then makes a claim on how ageism is a form of discrimination, according to the Employment Equity Act and how this has happened around the time in which factories are short of skill. This is seen as terrible consequence for the national economy. The author offers another link to source that is credible. It offers stats on the shortage of skilled workers and how it affects the economy.

The author then talks about the assumptions that are made about older people and technology. The author then says that these are only excuses for discrimination and just like any other form of prejudice in the workplace, this gets overlooked and covered up.

This source is somewhat credible to the research, because of where the writer works. Her place of work makes her writing seem as if she knows what she’s talking about. This article was published only a year, which makes the information worth noting because it’s up-to-date. The author not giving a number of credible sources to support her claims, weakens her argument. The lack of evidence makes the article seem more subjective than objective. I believe that this is a good start for someone who is researching how age plays a role in web design and if modern designs have a better effect on an environment. Also, it is good to note that the website itself may be credible because it focuses on everything digital in the emerging markets sphere. http://Memeburn.com

Annotated Bib #7: “Sillicon Valley’s Dark Secret: IT’S ALL ABOUT AGE”

Vivek Wadhwa. Silicon Valley’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age. N.p., 28 Aug. 2010. Web.

gossipVivek Wadhwa is a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, who constructed an article claiming “the harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers”(pp.2). In order to support his claim the author states how hiring younger people offers a lower opportunity cost than hiring older people. “The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”(pp.3). The author offers the previous statement, but he doesn’t offer a link, another credible source, or knowledge through personal experience. This makes the reader question whether the information is credible or not.

He then cites a book written by Clair Brown and Greg Liden that analyzes Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for semiconductor industry, which concluded that the salary of individuals age 40 and up decreased despite their level of education. He links this information to the details of software/industry worker, but doesn’t offer the numbers of these individuals. To conclude, the author tries to offer advice to older workers suggesting that they “move up the ladder” and “keep their skills current”.

This source is not useful at all. The author offers claims that have no evidence behind them. The title of the article is misleading for the reader, because it gives the name of a well-known company but the author doesn’t speak much about the company in his article. The author has no credibility. I was not able to find how the author could be link to the technology in any way. He is also apart of many research teams, but this article does not show that great research was done.