Author: SeniorWomenWeb

High-tech, High-skilled and High-paying Careers: Selling Manufacturing to a New Generation
By Pamela M. Prah, Stateline Staff Writer
Georgia-Pacific 2014 N.E.W. Manufacturing Alliance ALLSTAR

Manufacturers across the United States are targeting schools and colleges to let young people know there is more to manufacturing than pulling levers on an assembly line.

“People still have the idea that manufacturing is a dirty dungeon place,” said Andy Bushmaker of KI Furniture, a maker of school desks and cafeteria tables in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The goal, Bushmaker said, is to get people to see manufacturing jobs as the high-tech, high-skilled and high-paying careers they can be in the second decade of the 21st century.

Today’s manufacturers, whether they are making cars, airplanes, or iPhone parts, are looking for engineers, designers, machinists and computer programmers. Manufacturing has moved from manual mills and lathes to computerized numerical control equipment and 3-D printers. Hand-held welders are being replaced with robotic welders. Industrial maintenance mechanics no longer need to know how to use a wrench, but have to be able to operate a ‘programmable logic control,’ or a digital computer, to fix the machines.

Many of the jobs pay well — the average manufacturing worker in the United States earned $77,505 in 2012, including pay and benefits — but they can be hard to fill.

Nationwide, US employers reported last year that skilled trades positions were the most difficult to fill, the fourth consecutive year this job has topped the list, according to the 2013 Manpower Group talent shortage survey. A 2011 industry report estimated that as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs were vacant that year because employers couldn’t find the skilled workers to fill them, including machinists, distributors, technicians and industrial engineers.

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In Wisconsin, manufacturers figure they will have to fill 700,000 vacancies over the next eight years because of retirements. Employers like KI Furniture are using an array of programs to attract people to fill the pipeline, including youth and adult apprenticeships, job training, even YouTube videos. KI’s own video includes an automation specialist who describes his work as, “the CSI of the automation world.”

Wisconsin is one of many states where employers, schools and chambers of commerce are working together — often with the help of state or federal grant money — to prepare students and the unemployed for hard-to-fill manufacturing jobs.

Elsewhere:
- Teams of high school students in northeast Ohio get to design and build their own working robots with help from manufacturing companies as part of a “RoboBots” competition sponsored by Alliance for Working Together, a coalition of manufacturing companies. It has partnered with Lakeland Community College to develop a degree program working with an area high school to introduce an apprenticeship program starting in ninth grade.
- In Massachusetts, Siemens, the global industrial giant, announced [in April] it would donate nearly $660 million in software to a dozen technical schools and colleges in Massachusetts to help train a new generation of workers in advanced manufacturing.
- In Pittsburgh, the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board teamed up with Carnegie Mellon, local community colleges, unions and apprenticeship programs to develop a ‘virtual hiring hall’ for advanced manufacturing under a $3 million federal ‘innovation’ grant.
Industry leaders in Kansas, Georgia, Rhode Island and Delaware this month joined the Dream It. Do It campaign started by the Manufacturing Institute, an affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers. The goal of the program, which now has participants in 29 states, is to recruit students into manufacturing by educating parents, teachers and counselors about employment opportunities.
June 3, 2014
First Ovarian Cancer Study to Use a Combination of Drugs Taken Orally
Significant improvement with the use of a combination drug therapy for recurrent ovarian cancer was reported at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. This is the first ovarian cancer study to use a combination of drugs that could be taken orally. The drugs were tested in a phase I combination study followed by a randomized phase 2 trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

The trial compared the activity of a combination of the drug olaparib (which blocks DNA repair) and the blood vessel inhibitor drug cediranib, vs. olaparib alone. Trial results showed a near doubling of progression-free survival benefit (the length of time during and after treatment that the cancer did not get worse) for the combination therapy over use of the single drug alone.

“The findings of this study are exciting because they support the idea that combining these two targeted oral therapies results in significant activity in ovarian cancer, more so than olaparib alone,” said Joyce Liu, M.D., M.P.H., the lead investigator and medical oncologist at the Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute , Boston. “We are looking forward to further exploring this combination in ovarian cancer and potentially increasing effective treatment options for our patients with this cancer.” *

Over 22,000 cases of ovarian cancer are diagnosed annually in the United States. Seventy-five percent of the cancers are classified as high-grade serous type, the women have more advanced disease at diagnosis, and their tumors are more aggressive. Of this high-grade type, about three-quarters of patients respond to initial treatment but nearly all will recur and need follow-up treatment. That treatment will be based on how the cancers have responded to previous therapies and are broken down into two categories based on patients’ responses to chemotherapy regimens that include platinum:
- Platinum-Sensitive – these are patients most likely to benefit from Poly ADP-Ribose Polymerase (PARP) inhibition. PARP inhibitors, such as olaparib, are targeted drugs that block an enzyme involved in many functions in the cell, including the repair of DNA damage.
- Platinum-Resistant – these are patients whose disease recurred within six months of completion of conventional chemotherapy (using the drugs cisplatin or carboplatin) and are generally less responsive to subsequent treatments and have not responded as well to PARP inhibitors. They are currently treated with non-platinum chemotherapy, single-agents, with or without addition of the blood vessel inhibitor drug called bevacizumab.
An anti-angiogenic agent, or blood vessel inhibitor called cediranib (which inhibits a protein known as VEGFR) and olaparib, a PARP inhibitor, are each clinically active in recurrent ovarian cancer. Preclinical laboratory studies suggest these agents add to and enhance the activity of each other, and an early phase 1 study showed that the combination of cediranib and olaparib was well-tolerated with minimal side effects.

For this reason, 90 patients from nine centers were randomly assigned to one of two study arms for the phase II clinical trial: the first taking capsules of olaparib (400 milligrams [mg] twice daily) and the other taking a combination of the two drugs (200 mg olaparib in capsule form twice daily and 30 mg of cediranib by tablets once daily). The study arms were stratified by BRCA gene mutation status and receipt of prior anti-angiogenic therapy. The BRCA gene is one of the most commonly mutated genes in breast cancer.

Patients, whose median age was 58, were enrolled from October 2011 to June 2013. As of March 2014, median progression-free survival was 9.2 months for olaparib and 17.7 months for the combination therapy, which is a significant advantage. The overall rate of toxicity was higher for patients on the combination therapy. Fatigue, diarrhea, and hypertension were the most common toxic effects, all of which were manageable.

“Of particular note is the fact that both drugs used in this trial are in pill form and could offer an alternative to intravenous chemotherapy,” said Percy Ivy, M.D., associate chief of NCI’s Investigational Drug Branch. “Therefore, this combination therapy could be used anywhere in the world where patients can be safely monitored for the side-effects of olaparib and cediranib, such as diarrhea and hypertension.”

Based on these results, two phase 3 trials are being planned for platinum-sensitive and platinum-resistant ovarian cancer patients by one of NCI’s new National Cancer Trial Network Groups, the NRG Oncology Group (formerly 3 cooperative groups: the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP), the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), and the Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG).

This trial was funded by NCI and received supplementary funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) leads the National Cancer Program and the NIH effort to dramatically reduce the prevalence of cancer and improve the lives of cancer patients and their families, through research into prevention and cancer biology, the development of new interventions, and the training and mentoring of new researchers. For more information about cancer, please visit the NCI website at http://www.cancer.gov or call NCI’s Cancer Information Service at 1-800-4-CANCER (1-800-422-6237).

Reference

Liu, JF, et al. A randomized phase 2 trial comparing efficacy of the combination of the PARP inhibitor olaparib and the anti-angiogenic cediranib against olaparib alone in recurrent platinum-sensitive ovarian cancer. NCT 01116648. ASCO late breaking abstract #5500. http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/search/view?cdrid=673213&version=HealthProfessional

*Editor’s Note: The following paragraph was taken from Medscape Medical News; Saturday at ASCO: CLL and Lung, Thyroid, Ovarian Cancer News

“Neither of the drugs is approved yet for ovarian or any other cancer, but the combination showed significant activity, which suggests that ‘this could potentially be an effective alternative to standard chemotherapy,’ said lead study author Joyce Liu, MD, MPH, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. However, further studies are needed, she added.”
June 2, 2014
To Travel in a Boat Together: A Canadian Museum’s Wolf In A Copper Canoe; The Empress Of Ireland Exhibit

© Canadian Museum of Civilization, Photo: Ryan McCosham

The Canadian Museum of Civilization has introduced a sculpture of a life-size bronze wolf in a copper canoe which it commissioned from internationally acclaimed Namgis First Nation artist Mary Anne Barkhouse. Titled ’namaxsala, which means “to travel in a boat together” in the Kwakwala language, the permanent sculpture is located outside in the lower pond beside the Museum’s Grand Hall. The piece is inspired by a story that the artist learned from her grandfather, Fred Cook, who helped a wolf cross a treacherous stretch of water in a boat. ’namaxsala speaks to Barkhouse’s deep environmental concerns and the need for humankind’s respectful cooperation with the natural world.

A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Barkhouse is a descendant of a long line of internationally recognized Kwakwaka’wakw artists, including Ellen Neel, Mungo Martin and Charlie James. “I was fortunate to grow up in a family that had strong connections to land, literally from coast to coast. The adventures that my grandfather had while he was logging or fishing in the Pacific Northwest, though located at a very different point in history, have resonance today for the values that they speak to regarding survival, stewardship, unlikely alliances and independent thought,” said Mary Anne Barkhouse.”

“We are delighted to have this striking work by Mary Anne Barkhouse as a permanent feature transforming the Museum’s Waterfall Court,” said Mark O’Neill, President and CEO of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. “In addition to its inspiring symbolism, this remarkable work draws on the continuity of Kwakwaka’wakw artistic traditions and connects across the generations with the model totem pole inside in the Grand Hall, carved by the artist’s great-great grandfather, Charlie James.”

Barkhouse’s choice of copper, a material long used by Kwakwaka’wakw artists, also connects with her ancestral traditions, while the bronze of the wolf speaks to her contemporary artistic practice.

May 31, 2014
“Give Your Ideas Some Legs”: Study Finds Creative Output Increases When Walking

By May Wong

Photo: National Cancer Institute, Wikimedia Commons

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was known for his walking meetings. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has also been seen holding meetings on foot. And perhaps you’ve paced back and forth on occasion to drum up ideas. A new study by Stanford researchers provides an explanation for this.

Creative thinking improves while a person is walking and shortly thereafter, according to a study co-authored by Marily Oppezzo, a Stanford doctoral graduate in educational psychology, and Daniel Schwartz, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

The study found that walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.

“Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why,” Oppezzo and Schwartz wrote in the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

Walking vs. sitting

Other research has focused on how aerobic exercise generally protects long-term cognitive function, but until now, there did not appear to be a study that specifically examined the effect of non-aerobic walking on the simultaneous creative generation of new ideas and then compared it against sitting, Oppezzo said.

A person walking indoors – on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall — or walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person sitting down, one of the experiments found.

“I thought walking outside would blow everything out of the water, but walking on a treadmill in a small, boring room still had strong results, which surprised me,” Oppezzo said.

The study also found that creative juices continued to flow even when a person sat back down shortly after a walk.

Gauging creative thinking

The research comprised four experiments involving 176 college students and other adults who completed tasks commonly used by researchers to gauge creative thinking. Participants were placed in different conditions: walking indoors on a treadmill or sitting indoors — both facing a blank wall — and walking outdoors or sitting outdoors while being pushed in wheelchair – both along a pre-determined path on the Stanford campus. Researchers put seated participants in a wheelchair outside to present the same kind of visual movement as walking.

Different combinations, such as two consecutive seated sessions, or a walking session followed by a seated one, were also compared. The walking or sitting sessions used to measure creativity lasted anywhere from 5 to 16 minutes, depending on the tasks being tested.

Three of the experiments relied on a “divergent thinking” creativity test. Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. In these experiments, participants had to think of alternate uses for a given object. They were given several sets of three objects and had four minutes to come up with as many responses as possible for each set. A response was considered novel if no other participant in the group used it. Researchers also gauged whether a response was appropriate. For example, a “tire” could not be used as a pinkie ring.

The overwhelming majority of the participants in these three experiments were more creative while walking than sitting, the study found. In one of those experiments, participants were tested indoors — first while sitting, then while walking on a treadmill. The creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when the person was walking, according to the study.

A fourth experiment evaluated creative output by measuring people’s abilities to generate complex analogies to prompt phrases. The most creative responses were those that captured the deep structure of the prompt. For example, for the prompt “a robbed safe,” a response of “a soldier suffering from PTSD” captures the sense of loss, violation and dysfunction. “An empty wallet” does not.

The result: 100 percent of those who walked outside were able to generate at least one high-quality, novel analogy compared to 50 percent of those seated inside.

No link to focused thinking

But not all thought processes are equal. While the study showed that walking benefited creative brainstorming, it did not have a positive effect on the kind of focused thinking required for single, correct answers.

“This isn’t to say that every task at work should be done while simultaneously walking, but those that require a fresh perspective or new ideas would benefit from it,” said Oppezzo, now an adjunct faculty member at Santa Clara University.

Researchers gave participants a word-association task, commonly used to measure insight and focused thinking. Given three words, participants had to generate the one word that could be used with all three to form compound words. For instance, given the words “cottage, Swiss and cake,” the correct answer is “cheese.”

In this test, those who responded while walking performed mildly worse than those who responded while sitting, according to the study.

Productive creativity involves a series of steps — from idea generation to execution — and the research, Oppezzo said, demonstrated that the benefits of walking applied to the “divergent” element of creative thinking, but not to the more “convergent” or focused thinking characteristic of insight.

“We’re not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo,” Oppezzo said. “But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity.”

The study’s strong findings will have legs, leading to further research on the neurological and physiological pathways, Schwartz predicts.

“There’s work to be done to find out the causal mechanisms,” Schwartz said. “And this is a very robust paradigm that will allow people to begin manipulations, so they can track down how the body is influencing the mind.”

One possible future research issue: Is it walking per se or do other forms of mild physical activity have similar elevating effects?

In the meantime, “we already know that physical activity is important and sitting too often is unhealthy. This study is another justification for integrating bouts of physical activity into the day, whether it’s recess at school or turning a meeting at work into a walking one,” Oppezzo said. “We’d be healthier, and maybe more innovative for it.”

May Wong is a freelance writer.

May 30, 2014
Senate Committee Holds Roundtable Discussion on Working Women, Bills to Improve Quality of Infant and Toddler Care & Preventive Heart Screenings
Bills Introduced:

Child Care

H.R. 4680—-Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA)/Education and the Workforce (5/20/14) — A bill to improve the quality of infant and toddler care.*

Health

H. Res. 586—-Del. Madeleine Bordallo (D-GU)/Energy and Commerce (5/19/14) — A resolution supporting the goals and ideals of National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

S. Res. 454—-Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)/Considered and agreed to (5/21/14) — A resolution recognizing that cardiovascular disease continues to be an overwhelming threat to women’s health and the importance of providing basic, preventive heart screenings to women wherever they seek primary care.

Human Trafficking

H.R. 4708—-Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)/Ways and Means, Judiciary (5/21/14) — A bill to provide for the establishment of an office within the Internal Revenue Service to focus on violations of the internal revenue laws by persons who are under investigation for conduct relating to the promotion of commercial sex acts and trafficking in persons crimes, and to increase the criminal monetary penalty limitations for the underpayment or overpayment of tax due to fraud.

H.R. 4703—-Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL)/Foreign Affairs (5/21/14) — A bill to amend the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 relating to determinations with respect to efforts of foreign countries to reduce demand for commercial sex acts under the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.

Military

S. 2358—-Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO)/Armed Services (5/20/14) — A bill to authorize additional leave for members of the armed forces in connection with the birth of a child.

H.R. 4730—-Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL)/Armed Services (5/22/14) — A bill to allow the return of personal property to victims of sexual assault incidents involving a member of the armed forces upon completion of proceedings related to the incident.

Veterans

H.R. 4741—-Rep. John Tierney (D-MA)/Veterans’ Affairs (5/22/14) — A bill to provide for an increase in the amount of monthly dependency and indemnity compensation payable to surviving spouses by the secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Senate

On May 21, the Senate approved, by unanimous consent, a resolution (S. Res. 454) recognizing the importance of providing preventative heart screenings to women through primary care.

Sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the resolution commits to “improving the heart health of all women, tearing down the barriers that prevent women from getting screened for heart disease, ensuring women are provided with personalized lifestyle modification recommendations and support, and ensuring every woman has a healthy heart.”

On May 20, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hosted Economic Security for Working Women – A Roundtable Discussion.

Speaking in support of paid sick leave policies, Ellen Bravo, executive director, Family Values at Work, said, “FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act (P.L. 103-3)] was a great first step for families – but as our economy and our families have changed, so too must our laws. The FMLA leaves out more than 40 percent of the workforce. It does not include routine illness or preventive care. While an employee covered by FMLA could take leave to care for her father if he had a heart attack, that same employee could be fired for taking Dad to the doctor to get his cholesterol down and prevent a heart attack in the first place. Furthermore, many of those who are covered are unable to take the time they need because it is unpaid. In 2012, two and a half times as many people as in 2000 needed leave and were eligible but didn’t take it, mostly because they couldn’t afford it. Many others went back from leave too early, without fully recovering.”

Speaking on behalf of the Society for Human Resource Management, Gayle Troy, human resource manager, Globe Manufacturing Company, LLC, said, “We have found that one of the best ways to retain talented and dedicated employees is to create an effective and flexible workplace, with generous benefits and innovative workplace flexibility policies. Our workplace flexibility practices help meet the work-life needs of our workforce while also ensuring business operations continue … As a small company, Globe is creative in providing employee benefits and flexible work strategies. These employee benefits have contributed to our company’s 93 percent employee retention rate. Higher employee retention leads to greater economic security and stability for our workforce. Organizations like ours want to be able to continue to manage our workplace in ways that work for our company culture and that help us meet our business objectives, including our financial sustainability.”

The following witnesses also testified:
- Neera Tanden, president, Center for American Progress;
- Amy Traub, senior policy analyst, Demos;
- Fatima Goss Graves, vice president, Education and Employment, National Women’s Law Center;
- Lori Pelletier, executive secretary-treasurer, Connecticut State Federation of Labor;
- Armanda Legros, Jamaica Estates, NY; and
- Rhea Lana Riner, president, Rhea Lana’s, Inc.
*Clark Introduces First Bill: Infant and Toddler Care Improvement Act

Congresswoman Katherine Clark introduced her first bill, the Infant and Toddler Care Improvement Act of 2014, legislation that improves the quality of child care for children under the age of 3. More than 6 million infants and toddlers receive care from someone other than their parents each week, and the quality of child care is often the most critical assurance parents need in order to continue working. In addition to addressing the need for finding quality care, the Infant and Toddler Care Improvement Act focuses on the vital importance of providing quality care at the most crucial developmental stages in a child’s life, specifically from birth to age three.

“As the mother of three, I understand that parents want nothing more than to make sure that their kids are safe, healthy, and thriving,” said Clark. “Hardworking parents spend an extraordinary percentage of their income on child care. Even when they are able to get child care, they are not always sure that it meets the needs of their kids. This bill gives states the tools to ensure high quality in child care environments.”

Women are especially impacted by a lack of access to quality, affordable care. Making up two-thirds of minimum wage and tipped earners, women are disproportionately impacted by the high cost of child care. Recent data shows that low-income working mothers spend an average of 38 percent of their income on child care.

“High quality early childhood education and care is as close to a silver bullet as we are going to find to solve our economic challenges. It supports working families, creates economic opportunities for women and provides a great start for our youngest learners,” said Clark.

Clark’s bill updates the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that provides child care subsidy grants to states. The Infant and Toddler Care Improvement Act is designed to give working parents the confidence they need about the quality of their child care so they can continue providing for their families. The bill enhances the federal program by providing strategies and best practices for improving the quality of infant and toddler care. Research shows that at this stage of a child’s growth, as millions of synapses are being formed, quality care is critical for the development of the cognitive and behavioral skills.

Clark’s bill has drawn strong support from organizations advocating to improve the lives of women, working families and our youngest learners: AFSCME, Child Care Aware (formerly NACCRA), Child Care WORKS, CLASP, Early Care and Education Consortium, First Five Years Fund, National Association for the Education of Young Children, National Women’s Law Center, SEIU, and Zero to Three.

Full text of the Infant and Toddler Care Improvement Act of 2014, can be found here.

Video of Clark’s remarks can be found here.

Women’s Policy Inc. provided the text on Congressional bills, hearings and mark ups.
May 27, 2014
A Family Inheritance: More Than ‘Things’ … Emblems of Our Lives

By Joan L. Cannon

When my paternal grandfather passed away, one of the provisions of his will was that all household goods were to go to his one daughter — my mother. The three grandchildren were each to choose three keepsakes from the house. One cousin (female) was nine years my senior, the other (male) two. None of us was a child, so at the time, we were struck by the thoughtfulness of such a bequest.

Vintage jewelry, Wikimedia Commons

We arrived to have the door opened by Josephine, my mother’s sister-in-law. I’d spent many happy hours with my cousins in their house in school holidays. My uncle was a jolly, enjoyable man. The hundreds of hours spent at ‘the farm’ were still always outstanding ones during those growing-up years. The house was like a second home, partly constructed of fantasies of a completely foreign and enchanting existence after the pleasant anonymity of New York’s lower east side.

The farm was in central Ohio, and my parents and I lived in New York City. Since my aunt and her husband (my mother’s brother) and their two children lived only about ten minutes away, it wasn’t a surprise that they were on the scene before my mother and I were.

I hurried to the big china cabinet in the dining room to put in my bid for iridescent finger bowls like soap bubbles I’d never seen anywhere but on their shelf in the glass-fronted cabinet. From the time I could walk, I’d spent time on every visit gazing at what looked like something from fairy tales.

In the living room of this house was my mother’s piano, built specially for her when she was a serious music student in her teens and early twenties. A ‘parlor grand’ fashioned by Steinway and cased in polished cherry with deeply carved cabriole legs. It was a beautiful thing of itself.

The front hall housed an enormous grandfather clock with the phases of the moon as well as the sun rising and setting according the date and time, its Westminster chimes a cherished accent of my childhood. That house and its surroundings are still almost part of me physically. I can’t think how much more it must have meant to my mother who had grown up there, though her occasional references to events were without visible emotion. Still, that was her style about life in general.

By the time we left that afternoon, my mother had told me that Josephine had claimed the grandfather clock, the piano, and the finger bowls I so coveted. I erupted with fury. At nineteen, perhaps I should have known better, but I was livid.

“Why didn’t you point out to her the terms of the will?” I demanded.

My mother kept her eyes on the road as she drove down the driveway to the state highway. “Not worth a fight,” she said flatly.

I fumed. “But she has no right…”

My mother cut me off. “They’re only things,” she said, not for the first time I’d heard her make that remark, though never before in such a loaded (to me) situation.

My mother passed away at ninety-two. Those words were to be repeated a number of times before she died, and they always silenced me. Because I’m only six years away from her final age, now I’ve realized the implications of her by-word are important and practical. The trouble is that now I’ve also come to realize that concrete objects have a variety of values besides the intrinsic or esthetic ones to which I assume my mother referred.

In that same house was a set of golden oak library furniture in what was always referred to as the morning room. The slant-front desk had two fully three-dimensional carved gnomes sitting with one leg crossed over the other on the spiral-carved stiles that supported the drawers. Similar figures adorned the four legs of the matching library table with its curved stretchers beneath, where another little man sat where those stretchers crossed. Glass doors covered the shelves of the bookcases with spiral posts surmounted by more gnomes at each end.

Even then I didn’t like golden oak, even though I knew it had been the fashion at one time, but I was enchanted by the carving. The workmanship was museum quality. Later I learned that the furniture had been made by the German craftsmen (pattern makers, they were called) my grandfather and his brother and cousin had recruited as part of the design and manufacture of the first roller doors made for factories and large warehouses. The three men had started fortunes with the help of those immigrant woodworkers. Their wonderful art would outlast us all and our children. The furniture seemed in its aura of elegance and rarity to be examples of the prime of life of that generation of entrepreneurs; each was one of a kind. I wish I knew what had become of them.

In a corner stood a small Louis XVI vitrine. It contained a blown ostrich egg, a small opalescent flask made of Roman glass that had a strange bloom on the surface like that on a grape still on the vine, and several other small objects collected from the family’s travels.

On the mantel piece in the living room hung a tiny brass lamp. On the lid covering the oil chamber sits a tiny crudely cast mouse. It now hangs on my mantel.

In my living room is an Empire table of mahogany veneer in fairly deplorable condition. Desperate to recover some if its good looks, I took a steam iron to the blistered and cracked veneer on the top, stripped its clouded finish off, and refinished it. It’s the only piece of furniture from my father’s Memphis forbears remaining after the Civil War.

As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it’s psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material.

Perhaps the most obvious example is a wedding band. There’s a string of coral beads that belonged to a great-grandmother, samplers made by an ancestress of my husband’s in 1813, the parchment doctoral degree awarded to my father, the unsigned portrait of a three times great-grandfather and his wife, the wedding presents, military medals, camp swim trophies and school athletic medals.

Every home worthy of the name is blessed, however humble or luxurious it might be, with those things that recall what’s important to us. Souvenirs of holidays we might not remember without their presence on a shelf. Plaques to remind us of a time when someone close to us was important — to other people; dozens of special gifts, and numberless photographs.

Unless memories and tradition count as ‘things,” these concrete reminders are not just things. They’re emblems. They’re absolute reminders — souvenirs in a literal sense — of what has happened in many lives, not just our own. As such, they serve as records that are apt to endure longer than any on paper.

So I choose to take a different attitude from that of my eminently practical and ordinarily completely unsentimental mother, and cherish and even show them off. I’ve begun a list of which items our children have mentioned or shown a fondness for so they may claim them. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters already have some antique jewelry. My daughter will get quite a bit more, much whose greatest value is that it was gifts to me from her father.

I try to take care of our “things.” Like the priceless photos of my late husband, they offer a surprising degree of comfort on days when nothing else can.

©2014 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com

May 27, 2014
Remembering … On a Day Once Known as ‘Decoration Day’

Sailor and woman at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Washington, DC, May 1943. Photographer, John Collier, 1931 – 1992. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

By Julia Sneden

It is Memorial Day weekend, and everyone I see seems to say “Happy Memorial Day.” I suppose having a holiday is a cheerful thing, but anyone who has ever observed the long rows of white stones in the veterans’ cemeteries scattered across America, or seen photos of the rows and rows of crosses in Normandy, must surely pause before using the word “Happy.” Somehow, this day of remembrance seems to have segued into a weekend at the beach, or a backyard wienie roast.

If you pause to think about it, perhaps those activities in themselves are not an unreasonable way to offer tribute to all those young men and women who have died in service of their country. It is thanks to them that the rest of us are able to enjoy the beaches and the backyards and even the wienies that so mark our good times. It’s right that we pause to remember the cost, and also right to look back and remember that they were often youngsters who fought as much for their own remembered good times as they did for that anomalous thing called “my country.”

But honor and remember them we must, in whatever way we can, and I suspect that for many of our military, a beach and a wienie would be just fine.

On Memorial Day, I particularly honor three of the members of my extended family who served in the military during World War II, when I was somewhere between six and nine years old:

• Bill Sill, USN (in the Pacific)

• Allan Willard Burleson (ARMY, in the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge)

• Hugh L. Burleson (ARMY, army of occupation in Japan)

To me, they were just my big cousins, glamorous in their uniforms — so brave, so tall, so handsome — and it while I knew they were going off to danger, I never for a moment considered that they might not come back.

Bill Sill was a distant relative. His grandmother, I think, was a childhood pen-pal of my Great Aunt Martha. Bill lived in New England, and when the Navy sent him west to the ‘Point of Embarkation’ that was San Francisco, his mother or grandmother wrote to Aunt Martha, who lived with us, and said she was giving him our address and phone number. As I recall it, he telephoned from San Francisco while he was on leave, waiting for assignment, and my mother invited him to come and stay with us for a weekend. We lived several miles south of the city and out of our town, atop a steep hill, and in those gas-rationed days, getting down to the train depot used lots of gas ration stamps, so she told Bill the time that my father’s commuter train was due into San Carlos, and said that if he could get to that station by then, he should look for a dark-haired man who would be getting into a ’32 Plymouth jalopy (his commuter car that we called “Prob’ly,” because Probably it wouldn’t last out the war. It didn’t.)

So my poor father, at the end of an exhausting day of work in San Bruno, exited the train, walked to his car (not many in the tiny parking lot), and found a young sailor leaning on the hood, with a big grin, hand extended, saying “Cousin Hank?”

Bill came home with my dad, and stayed for a couple of days, that first time, enjoying some home cooking and playing catch with my older brother. As for me, I developed an instant case of hero worship, and (at all of 7 years old) fell hard for him. He stayed in touch with us during his time in San Francisco, and even came back one or two times, bringing some of his friends with him.

May 25, 2014
Pauline C. Fryer, Union Spy and Miss Sarah A. Bowman, San Francisco National Cemetery

On Dec. 12, 1884, the War Department designated nine acres, including the site of the old post cemetery, as San Francisco National Cemetery. It was the first national cemetery established on the West Coast and, as such, marks the growth and development of a system of national cemeteries extending beyond the battlefields of the Civil War. Initial interments included the remains of the dead from the former post cemetery as well as individuals removed from cemeteries at abandoned forts and camps elsewhere along the Pacific coast and western frontier. In 1934, all unknown remains in the cemetery were disinterred and reinterred in one plot. Many soldiers and sailors who died overseas serving in the Philippines, China and other areas of the Pacific Theater are interred in San Francisco National Cemetery.

The cemetery is enclosed with a stone wall and slopes down a hill that today frames a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Its original ornamental cast-iron entrance gates are present but have been unused since the entrance was relocated. Tall eucalyptus trees further enclose the cemetery. The lodge and rostrum date to the 1920s and reflect the Spanish Revival styling introduced to several western cemeteries.

Two unusual interments at San Francisco National Cemetery are “Major” Pauline Cushman and Miss Sarah A. Bowman. Cushman’s headstone bears the inscription “Pauline C. Fryer, Union Spy,” but her real name was Harriet Wood. Born in the 1830s, she became a performer in Thomas Placide’s show Varieties and took the name Pauline Cushman. She married theater musician Charles Dickinson in 1853, but after her husband died of illness related to his service for Union forces, she returned to the stage. During spring 1863, while performing in Louisville, Ky., she was asked by the provost marshal to gather information regarding local Confederate activity. From there she was sent to Nashville, where she had some success conveying information about troop strength and movements. In Nashville, she was also captured and nearly hanged as a spy. She returned to the stage in 1864, to lecture and sell her autobiography. Entertainer P.T. Barnum promoted her as the “Spy of the Cumberland” and through Barnum’s practiced boostership she quickly gained fleeting fame. After spending the 1870s working the redwood logging camps, she remarried and moved to the Arizona Territory. By 1893 she was divorced, destitute and desperate; she applied for her first husband’s military pension and returned to San Francisco, where she died from an overdose of narcotics allegedly taken to soothe her rheumatism. Members of the Grand Army of the Republic and Women’s Relief Corps conducted a magnificent funeral for the former spy. “Major” Cushman’s remains reside in Officer’s Circle.

Civil War spy Pauline Cushman-Fryer narrowly escaped execution for her service to the Union cause. She is buried in the San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio

Also buried at San Francisco National Cemetery is Sarah Bowman, also known as “Great Western,” a formidable woman over 6 feet tall with red hair and a fondness for wearing pistols. Married to a soldier, she traveled with Zachary Taylor’s troops in the Mexican War helping to care for the wounded, for which she earned a government pension. After her husband’s death she had a variety of male companions and ran an infamous tavern and brothel in El Paso, Texas. Bowman left El Paso when she married her last husband. The two ended up at Fort Yuma, where she operated a boarding house until her death from a spider bite in 1866. She was given a full military funeral and was buried in the Fort Yuma Cemetery. Several years later her body was exhumed and reburied at San Francisco National Cemetery.

San Francisco National Cemetery was listed as a National Historic Landmark as part of the Presidio in 1962.

May 24, 2014
Janet Yellen Toasts NYU’s Graduating Class, a Quality of ‘Grit’ and a Lowly Sea Slug Who Helped Decipher the Chemistry of Memory

Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen At New York University’s 2014 Commencement, New York, New York; May 21, 2014

Commencement Remarks

Janet Yellen — the first woman to serve as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — addressed the graduates and guests at Yankee Stadium. Ms. Yellen received a Doctor of Commercial Science degree, honoris causa at the ceremony © NYU Photo Bureau: Gallo

Thank you, President Sexton. On behalf of the honorees, let me express my thanks to NYU. And congratulations from all of us to you, the Class of 2014, and to your families, especially your parents. This is a special day to celebrate your achievements and to look forward to your lives ahead.

Your NYU education has not only provided you with a foundation of knowledge; it has also, I hope, instilled in you a love of knowledge and an enduring curiosity. Life will continue to be a journey of discovery if you tend the fires of curiosity that burn brightly in all of us.

Such curiosity led Eric Kandel, here at NYU, to his lifetime goal, to discover the chemical and cellular basis of human memory. A few years after his graduation, he was doing research on cats. But he had the idea of focusing on an animal with a simpler, more fundamental brain: the California sea slug. His colleagues all but ridiculed him for the idea. They “knew” that the study of the lowly sea slug was irrelevant for understanding human memory. Kandel’s surgically-skilled collaborator deserted him. To get up to speed on sea slugs, he had to go abroad to study. But Kandel persisted and, in 2000, his curiosity won him the Nobel Prize. It was, as you must have guessed, for deciphering the chemistry of memory in humans, as revealed by his research on sea slugs. Kandel’s life, I believe, demonstrates how a persistent curiosity can help us reach ambitious goals, even with great roadblocks in the way.

A second tool for lifelong intellectual growth is a willingness to listen carefully to others. These days, technology allows us access to a great breadth of perspectives, but it also allows us to limit what voices we hear to the narrow range we find most agreeable. Listening to others, especially those with whom we disagree, tests our own ideas and beliefs. It forces us to recognize, with humility, that we don’t have a monopoly on the truth.

Yankee Stadium is a natural venue for another lesson: You won’t succeed all the time. Even Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio failed most of time when they stepped to the plate. Finding the right path in life, more often than not, involves some missteps. My Federal Reserve colleagues and I experienced this as we struggled to address a financial and economic crisis that threatened the global economy. We brainstormed and designed a host of programs to unclog the plumbing of the financial system and to keep credit flowing. Not everything worked but we kept at it, and we remained focused on the task at hand. I learned the lesson during this period that one’s response to the inevitable setbacks matters as much as the balance of victories and defeats.

May 21, 2014
Harvard Professor Brigitte Madrian Remarks on the Retirement Savings Landscape for Women

Remarks by
Brigitte Madrian; Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management, Harvard Kennedy School.

Prepared for the Hearing “Women’s Retirement Security”, Joint Congressional Economic Committee, Wednesday, May 21, 2014. Vice Chair Amy Klobuchar presiding.

Brigitte Madrian testifying in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on January 31st, 2013 on retirement Savings. C-Span

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today and share my thoughts on how we can strengthen America’s retirement savings system. By way of background, I am the Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. I have spent the past 15 years studying employer sponsored savings plans and the types of policy interventions and plan design features that can improve savings outcomes. There is much concern in both academic and policy circles about whether our current private defined contribution retirement savings system can adequately meet the retirement income needs of individuals.

My early research on automatic enrollment documented how small changes in plan design can have a large impact on savings outcomes. This research provided the impetus for the measures incorporated in the Pension Protection Act of 2006 that encourage employers to adopt automatic enrollment as part of their employer sponsored savings plans. There are many other measures that can further strengthen the private defined contribution savings system in the US for both men and women. In examining the retirement security of women in the US, there is both good news and bad news. Saving for retirement and then management one’s asset in retirement is one of the largest, if not the largest, financial task that any household will undertake. Yet recent evidence on the financial capabilities of the US population who that we are a nation are woefully unprepared for this task, and that women fare worse than men.

Women have significantly lower scores than men on a simple 5-question test designed to test knowledge of basic financial concepts such as inflation, compound interest, and the value of diversification. This is true for both married and single women. Interestingly, women are not much more likely to give incorrect answers than men; instead, they are much more likely to answer “I don’t know.”

Women are also substantially more likely than men to report that it would be difficult for them to come up with $2000 to meet an unexpected expense within the next 30 days (44% for women vs. 34% for men). Women are also more likely than men to report difficulty paying bills than men (47% for women vs. 57% for men).

But as women approach retirement, some of this gap narrows. There is some evidence to suggest that married women become more financially literate as they age in response to the likelihood that they will outlive their husbands and need to take over sole management of the household finances.

Planning for retirement is not an activity engaged in by the majority of either women or men; on the retirement planning front, there are no substantive differences by gender, with 43% of both men and women having planned for retirement, although a slightly higher fraction of men than women actually report having some retirement savings (63% for men vs. 58% for women).

May 21, 2014