Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • How to Find Free Shipping Online Retailers

    by Marilynne Rudick

    I buy a lot of things online. I like the convenience of having large objects — a lawnmower, reams of paper — delivered to my door. I like to avoid the hassle of running around malls looking for the perfect pair of boots. What I do not like is paying for shipping and handling. With fees typically 15% or more, the shipping and handling charges wipe out most of the savings from a 20% off sale. And then there’s the postage for returns.

    Free Shipping Websites

    That’s why I check out free shipping offers before making an online purchase. These three sites aggregate free shipping offers. You can search by store or by product.

    • BeFrugal
    • Ebates
    • FreeShipping.org. Make sure you go to FreeShipping.org — not Free Shipping.com — which lists free shipping offers, but charges a monthly subscription fee of $12.95 to access them.

    Free Shipping on Wedding Gifts

    This past summer I was invited to a number of weddings. That meant wedding registries. They make buying wedding gifts effortless (and impersonal!). I especially hate shipping and handling fees charged by gift registries. It’s a gravy train for merchants, and they have to do absolutely no work for the sale. The least they could do is ship for free. That why I was happy to discover two free shipping alternatives for wedding gifts.

    I purchased china for a cousin’s wedding gift at Best Crystal. In addition to free and speedy shipping, they offer free gift wrapping, no sales tax and discounted prices. Another couple registered for wedding gifts at Target. I was pleased to find that the KitchenAid Stand Mixer, an item on their registry, would ship free. You don’t have to be ordering a gift to get free shipping from Target. They ship any of 500,000 items free if your total order is at least $50.

    Free Shipping Both Ways

    If I like free shipping, I love stores that pay return postage, too. A pioneer in free shipping both ways is Zappos, which started out as a shoe store and has expanded into clothing, housewares, accessories, and beauty products. Now almost all online shoe stores and dozens of other stores offer free shipping both ways. To find merchants that ship free both ways, check out FreeShipping.org’s listing.

    Beware! Faux Free Shipping

    Sometimes free shipping is bait and switch. For example, Amazon offers it on orders of $25 or more. But their free shipping is via the slow boat to China — as long as two weeks. If you want your order delivered in timely manner you have to switch to paid shipping (or subscribe their program, Amazon Prime, for $79.00 a year).

    Equally annoying are offers that require you to spend a high minimum. For example, a recent e-mail promotion from J.Jill offered free shipping on orders above $150. I found myself adding items to my shopping cart that I didn’t want or need to qualify. When I realized that I was spending an additional $75 to save $9.95, I bit the bullet and paid for shipping.

    Let’s Make Free Shipping Standard

    I make an effort to reward Free Shippers with my business. Perhaps if we let merchants know we want this by buying from free shipping e-tailers, it will become the norm.

    ©2011 Marilynne Rudick for SeniorWomen.com

  • How Can You Resist; The Royal Wedding Website

    The official Royal Wedding website celebrating the marriage of Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton was launched by St. James’s Palace.  We did see recent polls that revealed that few are interested in the details.  However, Yahoo.com News has a separate heading for the Royal Wedding.

    And just what is a fascinator? It’s said that the famed Philip Treacy is the milliner for the bridal party, as he was for Kate’s future mother-in-law, the now-Duchess of Cornwall for her own wedding to Prince Charles.

    Philip Treacy shop front

    The website, www.officialroyalwedding2011.org, is the official information service for anyone interested in the forthcoming Royal Wedding. The wedding will take place on 29th of April at 11 ayem, Greenwich Mean Time. (The clocks in most of Europe and the United Kingdom (UK) will move forward at 1am  Coordinated Universal Time to 2am  UTC on Sunday, March 27, 2011 in observance of daylight saving time.)

    Regular announcements of wedding details in the run up to the wedding day will appear on the site. The website will be regularly updated with exclusive content, including photo galleries, features, videos and links to important information for visitors on the day.

    The website will bring together all of the official social media around the event, including the Clarence House and Buckingham Palace Flickr account, Twitter (@Clarence House), The Royal Channel on YouTube and the British Monarchy Facebook page, providing direct easy access to all channels of communication. Subject to further planning work, the website may feature a live web stream broadcast of the wedding itself.

    As well as regular updates on the wedding details ahead of the event, on the day itself the site will be the first place to view information such as the details of Miss Middleton’s wedding dress.

    The website is launched on the same day as DirectGov’s specific Royal Wedding page (www.direct.gov.uk/RoyalWedding), which contains practical information for members of the public, whether they’re planning to visit London to take part in the celebrations or organising their own event within the local community.

  • Culture Watch – What We Aren’t Told and That Salandar Woman

    DROPPED THREADS, What We Aren’t Told
    Vintage Canada, paperback, 358 pp.; © 2001
    Edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson

    Reviews by Joan L. CannonImage from Amazon

    DROPPED THREADS – What We Aren’t Told: Starch Salt Chocolate Wine; What Stays in the Family; Notes on a Piece for Carol; Lettuce Turnip and Pea; Casseroles; Hope for the Best – Expect the Worst; Tuck Me In – Redefining Attachment Between Mothers and Sons

    Thirty-five women write about what they wish they had known earlier. Dropped Threads is an enticing title for a collection of essays drawn from so many different perspectives. Their origins seem so dissimilar it’s hard to imagine that those metaphorical threads justify such a collective notion of them. Two things are common to all:  all the authors are Canadians and all are within a generation.

    Predictably, their stories aren’t equally well told. A few may raise eyebrows and others hackles among readers. There are conclusions with which not all readers will agree, and which some readers won’t understand, probably to some extent, depending on their ages. Some stories are told with great skill, some forthrightly, some as if the reader were being kept at a polite distance.  But, each story is interesting.

    A few authors’ names will certainly be familiar to American readers, like Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields; others might make a reader want to become familiar with the women who wrote them. Not all are professional writers. Several hail from rural western regions, some from the Maritimes, some from larger cities like Vancouver or Toronto.

    Their perspectives reveal academic careers, or law and politics or journalism; a very few come from lives spent in conventional ways, according the customs of the fifties and sixties.
    A reader’s reactions will probably be as varied as her own personal experiences. There are one or two pieces that reiterate the rallying cries of the women’s movement, but by and large, the analyses of their writers’ lives arise from very different questions about women’s places in society from those of employment equality and legal gender discrimination. These discussions really are about how the fact of being female makes the lives of women differ from the lives of men at a deeper level. If there’s a common plea, it is for all forms of recognition despite one’s gender, but also because of it. And there are discussions of aspects of feminine life, as opposed to all the distinctions between the sexes.

    Elizabeth Huggan writes about aging as much as about being female. She refers to herself as a child whose aim was to please. Which of our readers won’t relate to that?  She claims to have hidden herself inside a shell that hides the same child she used to be, and quotes Yeats via Annie Dillard: All virtue is a form of acting. The essay continues on the theme of the futility of passing on information to someone who is without the experience even to recognize its value. A few masterful anecdotes attest to her talent as a writer (which is her profession). Her prose is humorous and poignant. She speaks of herself and some friends as adults who don’t realize that they’re only girls dressed up as ladies, pretending.

    Jaqueline McLeod Rogers is a professor of writing and literature. She uses the Psyche myth as an engaging metaphor for her own youthful inability to see the forest for the trees. She argues for the fact that the quotidian has a tendency to dominate women’s lives, not always to their detriment. If a woman can stop trying to see problems in a masculine way — that is, as wholes with single solutions — and can learn to accept their resemblance to the laborious task Psyche accomplished (separating millions of seeds from one another), she will gain new self respect. That understanding of feminine talent will enable a woman to perceive her importance in the larger picture. Rogers also addresses the time it takes just living before once can learn to be satisfied. She tells how she apprehended the limits of control over events through the near death of her child. 

  • NIH, Moderate Exercise May Improve Memory in Older Adults

    A new study in older adults shows that brisk walking can increase the size of a brain region involved in memory formation. The finding suggests that moderate physical exercise can help protect the brain as we age.

    The brain region called the hippocampus begins to shrink in older adults as part of the normal aging process. This can contribute to forgetfulness, memory loss and increased risk of dementia. Physical fitness is known to be associated with both increased hippocampus size and improved cognitive ability. However, it was unclear how exercise might affect people who’d already had some hippocampus deterioration as a result of aging.

    Photo of an older woman walking briskly around a track.

    To investigate, a research team led by Dr. Kirk Erickson at the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Arthur Kramer at the University of Illinois recruited 120 sedentary older adults without dementia. Participants were randomly placed in 2 groups. One group was asked to walk around a track for 40 minutes a day, 3 days a week. The other group did only stretching and resistance training. The study was largely supported by NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA). The results appeared on January 31, 2011, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    MRI showed that, after one year, the aerobic exercise group had an average 2% increase in hippocampus volume. Those in the other group continued to show a decrease in hippocampus volume, on average about 1.4%. While both groups showed an improvement on spatial memory tests, there was a significant correlation between increased hippocampus size and improved memory performance only for those in the walking group.

    The researchers also examined levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a small molecule known to be involved in learning and memory. They found that increases in hippocampus size were associated with increased amounts of BDNF.

    Taken together, these results suggest that inactive older adults may be able to stop or reverse age-related hippocampus atrophy in just one year of moderate aerobic activity.

    “We think of the atrophy of the hippocampus in later life as almost inevitable,” Erickson says. “But we’ve shown that even moderate exercise for one year can increase the size of that structure. The brain at that stage remains modifiable.”

    —by Amy Alabaster

    Related Links:

  • America’s Byways

    There’s an  unusual sponsor for this entertaining and well-composed travel site, the Federal Highway Administration,  and it’s managed by the National Scenic Byways Online Project at Utah State University.

    The National Scenic Byways Program is part of the US Department of Transportation and is a grass-roots collaborative effort established to help recognize, preserve and enhance selected roads throughout the United States. The  Transportation Department recognizes certain roads as All-American Roads or National Scenic Byways based on one or more archaeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational and scenic qualities.

    Not only are there ‘budget-friendly’ tips, we found some that are just as practical for what to wear and to be prepared for on this Big Sur Sandy Beach section: “While Big Sur‘s [California] beaches hardly resemble the vast stretches of sun-baked sand that dot Southern California’s easily accessible coastline, they do offer the visitor a wide variety of recreational possibilities. Even during the summer, Big Sur’s beaches are subject to generally cool weather. Sunny days are sporadic as a blanket of seasonal fog often hugs the coastline, dropping the temperature in the process. To be prepared, bring a change of warm clothes. Also, bring a pair of sturdy shoes — Big Sur’s beaches require at least a short hike.”

    And even more helpful is a direction and safety tip about the same area:

    “Although Pfeiffer Beach is Big Sur’s most popular coastal access point, this beach is hard to find if you’ve never been to it before. The trick is locating unmarked Sycamore Canyon Road. Here’s a tip: Sycamore Canyon Road is the only paved, ungated road west of Highway One between the Big Sur post office and Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. Once you find the turnout, make a very sharp turn. Then follow the road for about two miles until it ends. Drive carefully —this is a narrow and winding road and is unsuitable for trailer traffic. From a large parking area at the end of the road, a short, well-marked path leads to the beach. Cliffs tower above this stretch of sand, and a large arch-shaped rock formation just offshore makes for some dazzling sunsets.”

    There’s also a section called Unique Adventures and here’s an example:

    “If you hear strange and spooky sounds drifting through the seemingly endless corridors of the centuries-old Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, don’t count on blaming it on your overactive imagination! At one time this 242,000-square-foot asylum in Weston, WV, held 2,400 patients in claustrophobic chambers.  Many died there. Some say their ghosts still linger in the hallways, eager to communicate with an intrepid mortal – such as yourself.  Perhaps you too will be haunted by ghostly apparitions, or shiver at a woman’s bone-chilling laughter echoing through the hallways. Perhaps you’ll hear footsteps following you through every doorway, their cause invisible to your eyes no matter how many times you spin around to seek it.”

    The website has provided some interesting facts, and it’s amazing that so many are centered in Alaska:

    • Alaska’s Glenn Highway boasts the largest collection of glaciers of any US National Park, in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
    • The Baranov Museum Building, a National Historic Landmark in Kodiak on the Alaska Marine Highway, is the oldest of only 4 Russian structures remaining in the US. Built in 1808, it is the oldest building in Alaska.
    • Alaska is the only state which has three bear species: brown (which includes grizzlies), black and polar. Admiralty Island, reached by the Alaska Marine Highway, is said to have the densest bear population on Earth at almost one per square mile.
    • Experience a little bit of Scandinavia while visiting Petersburg on the Alaska Marine Highway. Celebrate Norwegian Independence Day and admire the Norwegian tole-painting on the buildings.
    • Enter the Ring of Fire on Alaska’s Marine Highway where you can explore 81 of America’s 86 volcanoes.
    • Want to ski in the South? Come to Mt. Lemmon Ski Valley on the Sky Island Scenic Byway in Arizona, the southernmost downhill ski resort in the US.
    • Drive from desert to mountaintop along the Sky Island Scenic Byway in Arizona, and in just 27 miles you will pass through biological diversity equivalent to a drive from Mexico to Canada.
    • Southern California doesn’t take a back seat to San Francisco in Victorian-era architecture. Step back in time at Heritage Square on the Arroyo Seco Parkway in Los Angeles, where all the houses have been restored to their original Victorian architecture.

  • To Read and To Write

    by Joan L. Cannon

    POETRY is a big word, in both denotation and connotation.  Hours of classroom time and reams of thesis papers have been wasted in the attempt to analyze, categorize, classify, and define it.  Rhyme, rhythm, diction, subject … since before written language, from nonsense through ritual and history, folk songs, epics, in all languages, the list of schools and variations in form is too long to contemplate. However many attempts are made, full agreement is not likely.

    At a poetry reading discussion conducted by a fine poet, editor and professor of creative writing, I was astounded to hear him say that rhymed poetry is not poetry, “only verse.” It was neither the time nor the place to engage in a furious debate in spite of my yearning to do it. Later, after I regained my sense of humor, I decided that poetry is indefinable, like pornography:  we know it when we see (or hear) it

    I suspect that like most of the English-speaking population of the US, anyone reading this essay almost never reads poetry. Even though the statistics on the number of Americans writing poetry are mind-boggling; even though this town of 18,000 has well-attended readings. (I think a couple of dozen in an audience for a poetry reading could be considered well-attended). The nearest small city has a monthly event just for poets and poetry readings that averages 35 or more at meetings in a coffee shop downtown. As for the predictable college towns and big cities — I can’t even guess at the activity just in our state.

    The North Carolina Writers Network lists dozens of venues every month for a reading, discussion and book-signing — specifically for poetry. I suppose that means that at least some of those poets are being published. Whether any of them sell more than two or three books even at a well-attended event like public library talks and signings at chain book stores is another question. 

    I have to ask: who has read a poem in the past year? I mean, if you’re paging through a magazine or having a look at a website and see something that on the page looks like a poem as opposed to prose, did you read it? 

    Having fallen in love with poetry again so late in life, I began to consider ideas about what most of us haven’t given a thought to since we sat in an English class, possibly as far back as high school, not just about reading poetry, but (seriously!) about writing it as well. 

    If the specter of ingenious rhymes and lilting rhythms makes you cringe at the thought of trying to write something to compete with those masters who managed them seemingly effortlessly, try to banish it. Even though you would never want to admit certain intense experiences in declarative sentences, in the guise of poetry, there is a way to relieve and relive them. Giving vent to a poem feels similar to the suspension of inhibitions resulting from therapeutic massage. Both are quite capable of releasing long-pent tears.

    In addition to the fashion for Oriental forms like tanka and haiku, there are no longer limits or lack of respect for free verse. What it takes to get started is a willingness to stop being literal and start being physical and dreamy and above all, observant. From the strict conventions of drama and epic that date from ancient civilizations through all the permutations of forms from villanelle, heroic couplets, and on and on, poetry has changed at least as much as prose. Free and blank verse (never mind the technical distinction) are now the norm. That is not to say there are not whole societies dedicated to the sonnet. 

    Today’s fashion is most often distinctly personal rather than abstract or persuasive. The personal requires a flexibility and freedom from older conventions for most people to be willing to try to unburden themselves. Poetry has become more accessible (in the sense that it requires no educational expertise to understand and appreciate it). It provides the possibility of self-expression outside the bounds of statement.

  • While the Oscars Present; Viewing Inspirations

    Film viewing is becoming increasingly popular for the over 50 crowd, or so we’ve heard, both at home parties and in theaters. We present a source for titles, in person and rental, such as those from the  Block Cinema in the Midwest which presents three new documentaries about visual art. The much talked-about new release Marwencol explores the fascinating world of outsider artist Mark Hogancamp; Secret Museums uncovers hidden collections of erotic art at major museums around the world, including the Vatican; and the award-winning Waste Land tells the inspirational story of contemporary artist Vik Muniz’s work with an underprivileged community in Brazil.

    These films are highlighted and presented by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, situated at Northwestern University at the Block Cinema. Since Leave Her to Heaven has been already shown, consider a rental or library source. Perhaps your library has the novel by Ben Ames Williams?

    Block Cinema 

    Winter 2011 Film Series

    The Roger Corman Film School

    This series celebrates filmmaking impresario Roger Corman’s role as producer and mentor for an incredible roster of young American filmmakers (including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich) eager to get a foot in Hollywood’s door while learning their craft from the bottom up.
    Caged Heat, March 3

    Twentieth Century Fox Fridays

    On six Friday evenings this January and February, Block Cinema presents new 35mm prints of beloved classics and underappreciated gems produced during the heyday of Twentieth Century Fox. Highlights include Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, Howard Hawks’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Ernst Lubitsch’s rarely-seen Cluny Brown, and much more.
    Leave Her to Heaven, January 14

    Art on Screen

    In this continuing series Block Cinema presents three new documentaries about visual arts, including the new release Marwencol, about outside artist Mark Hogancamp; Secret Museums, which uncovers hidden collections of erotic art; and the award-winning Waste Land, about contemporary artist Vik Muniz’s work with an underprivileged community in Brazil.
    Marwencol, January 21

    Revivals and Rediscoveries

    To complement the Block Museum’s Thomas Rowlandson exhibit, Block Cinema presents two films set in Georgian England, including Becky Sharp (1935), a stunning early Technicolor film starring Miriam Hopkins, and Kitty (1945), starring Paulette Goddard as a cockney lass catapulted into high society when the artist Thomas Gainsborough paints her portrait.
    Becky Sharp, February 26

    Winter 2011 Film Schedule

    1/14 Leave Her to Heaven 7 pm Fox Fridays
    1/19 Cedar Rapids 7 pm Sneak Preview
    1/20 Dementia 13 7 pm Corman Film School
    1/21 Marwencol 7 pm Art on Screen
    1/27 Piranha 7 pm Corman Film School
    1/28 Cluny Brown 7 pm Fox Fridays
    2/3 Boxcar Bertha 7 pm Corman Film School
    2/4 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 7 pm Fox Fridays
    2/10 Suburbia 7 pm Corman Film School
    2/11 The Hustler 7 pm Fox Fridays
    2/17 Grand Theft Auto 7 pm Corman Film School
    2/18 Bigger Than Life 7 pm Fox Fridays
    2/25 Wild River 7 pm Fox Fridays
    2/26 Becky Sharp 2 pm Revivals/Rediscoveries
    3/3 Caged Heat 7 pm Corman Film School
    3/4 Secret Museums 7 pm Art on Screen
    3/10 Targets 7 pm Corman Film School
    3/11 Waste Land 7 pm Art on Screen
    3/12 Kitty (Rescheduled Date!) 2 pm Revivals/Rediscoveries
    3/31 Alex de Grassi and A Story of Floating Weeds 7:30 pm Pick-Staiger
    4/8 Silent Surrealism with the Hot Club of San Francisco 7:30 pm Pick-Staiger

     

  • On the Eve of Women’s History Month: Women of Protest, of the Land and Sea

    It’s difficult in this age to imagine the courage needed to pursue a path to women’s suffrage. But the Library of Congress is highlighting one of those paths by a section entitled Women of Protest; Photographs from the Records of the National Women’s Party, Manuscript Division, LOC, Washington, DC. The Smithsonian, too, is focusing on those women who have forged and trod upon difficult paths.

    Suffragists picketing in front of White House

    Right:  Photograph of fourteen suffragists in overcoats on picket line, holding suffrage banners in front of the White House. One banner reads: “Mr. President How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty”. White House visible in background. Harris & Ewing. 1917.

    Overview

    The National Woman’s Party, representing the militant wing of the suffrage movement, utilized open public demonstrations to gain popular attention for the right of women to vote in the United States. Their picketing, pageants, parades, and demonstrations — as well as their subsequent arrests, imprisonment, and hunger strikes — were successful in spurring public discussion and winning publicity for the suffrage cause. Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party presents both images that depict this broad range of tactics as well as individual portraits of organization leaders and members. The photographs span from about 1875 to 1938 but largely date between 1913 and 1922. They document the National Woman’s Party’s push for ratification of the 19th Amendment as well as its later campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. This online presentation is a selection of 448 photographs from the approximately 2,650 photographs in the Records of the National Woman’s Party collection, housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.

    Women assembling for first national suffrage parade

    Women begin to assemble for the first national suffrage parade, Washington, DC. Harris & Ewing. March 3, 1913.

    Timeline Time for the Vote!

    Essay: Suffrage Campaign TacticsBerthe Arnold

    Right:   Informal, full-length portrait of Berthe Arnold of Colorado Springs, Colorado, wearing a hat and fur-trimmed coat with a bouquet of flowers pinned on the front, looking downward at an urn containing a burning “watchfire” maintained in front of National Woman’s Party headquarters in Washington, DC. The photographic agency was Harris & Ewing.

    Moving from the Library of Congress to the Smithsonian Institute during Women’s History Month, don’t overlook some of their most popular features:

    Newton Square Unit of Womans Land Army

    Before Rosie the Riveter, Farmerettes Went to Work
    During World War I, the Woman’s Land Army of America mobilized women into action, sustaining American farms and building national pride

    By Elaine F. Weiss

    Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/womens-history/womens-history-month.html#ixzz1F1Qk0r8T

    Naval officer

    Up in Arms Over a Co-Ed Plebe Summer
    Photojournalist Lucian Perkins reunites Naval Academy graduates Sandee Irwin and Don Holcomb, 30 years after his photo captured the new gender dynamics at the school.

    Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/womens-history/Salami-Mr-Holcomb.html

  • Pew Reports: The Tea Party, Religion and Social Issues

    by Scott Clement, Survey Research Analyst, and John C. Green, Senior Research Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

    The Tea Party movement clearly played a role in rejuvenating the Republican Party in 2010, helping the GOP take control of the House of Representatives and make gains in the Senate. Tea Party supporters made up 41% of the electorate on Nov. 2, and 86% of them voted for Republican House candidates, according to exit polls. But the precise nature of the Tea Party has been less clear. Is it solely a movement to reduce the size of government and cut taxes, as its name — some people refer to it as the Taxed Enough Already party — implies? Or do its supporters share a broader set of conservative positions on social as well as economic issues? Does the movement draw support across the religious spectrum? Or has the religious right “taken over” the Tea Party, as some commentators have suggested?1

    A new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues.2 And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.

    The analysis shows that most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party. But support for the Tea Party is not synonymous with support for the religious right. An August 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that nearly half of Tea Party supporters (46%) had not heard of or did not have an opinion about “the conservative Christian movement sometimes known as the religious right”; 42% said they agree with the conservative Christian movement and roughly one-in-ten (11%) said they disagree.3 More generally, the August poll found greater familiarity with and support for the Tea Party movement (86% of registered voters had heard at least a little about it at the time and 27% expressed agreement with it) than for the conservative Christian movement (64% had heard of it and 16% expressed support for it).

    In addition to the August poll, this analysis draws on other Pew Research Center polling from September 2010 through February 2011. The polls included a variety of questions about the Tea Party, social and economic issues, and the role of religion in forming people’s opinions on these issues. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has additional resources on the Tea Party. See, for example, the analyses from February 2011 and April 2010.

    Conservative and Critical of Government

    As previously reported by the Pew Research Center, the Tea Party is much more Republican and conservative than the public as a whole. Indeed, Tea Party supporters are more conservative on economic issues and the size of government than either Republicans in general or all registered voters.4 According to a September 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, almost nine-in-ten registered voters who agree with the Tea Party (88%) prefer a smaller government with fewer services, compared with 80% of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 56% of all registered voters.

    In the same survey, fully 87% of Tea Party supporters said government is almost always wasteful, eight points more than Republicans overall (79%) and 26 points more than all registered voters (61%). And while more than half of registered voters (54%) said that corporations make too much money, Tea Party supporters were inclined to see corporations as making a fair and reasonable amount of profit. Indeed, Tea Party supporters took this position by a two-to-one margin (62% fair profit vs. 30% too much profit). A somewhat smaller percentage of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (55%) said corporations make a fair and reasonable profit.

  • Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day; Are 70% of Graduate Engineers Foreign?

    … and just what does an engineer do?

    But, first … : Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN) is a national not-for-profit organization with over 600 members from engineering schools, small businesses, Fortune 500 corporations, and non-profit organizations. WEPAN works to transform culture in engineering education to attract, retain, and graduate women. With a clear focus on research-based issues and solutions, WEPAN helps its members develop a highly prepared, diverse engineering workforce for tomorrow.

    The following is from Wikipedia: How to Become a Civil Engineer, from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

    Civil engineering is an exciting career with opportunities in many different areas. Some civil engineers work in the field, some work in offices doing design, and others work in a combination of the two. Here are some helpful steps to starting your career as a civil engineer.

    Steps

    1. Understand what a civil engineer does. Basically, this is the side of engineering concerned with designing, building, and maintaining public works.[1] Civil engineers focus on structures and facilities such as transportation routes, features (tunnels, bridges, flyovers), and hubs (such as airports and bus interchanges), water treatment (sewage, dams, pipelines, etc.) government buildings (police and fire stations, major office buildings, etc.), and other structures required on a large public scale. In some countries, such as the United States, civil engineering also involves military engineering.[2] Another way of looking at what a civil engineer does is to see it as a role of reducing complex ideas initiated by policymakers, chief executives, and other such people into concrete reality.[3]
      • It’s a job that pays a reasonably high income due to the level of skills and expertise required, and the ongoing responsibilities to ensure safe, accurate, and enduring engineering outcomes.
      • Civil engineers can work in a variety of work environments, including in the public sector, as contractors, consultants, or even as part of a firm that undertakes work outsourced from municipalities and government.[4] Civil engineers also work with architect firms and construction firms.[5] Throughout the lifetime of a civil engineer career, you might vary your employment circumstances considerably to work around different needs and interests; the good thing is that your qualifications will allow you much flexibility.
      • Within civil engineering there are different roles open to you. For example, in the United Kingdom, you can become an engineering technician, an incorporated engineer, or a chartered engineer.[6] Your personal interest in where to specialize will be something to consider as you pursue your studies and the different options offered through the course, so be sure to ask what’s available in your country or region.
    2. Assess your skills. Civil engineering requires good mathematics, design, and science skills.[7] [8] In addition, having a “big picture” mentality, creativity, the ability to function as a member of a team, the ability to work without supervision and to handle high levels of responsibility, the ability to clearly and concisely communicate your ideas both verbally, and through the use of writing and images, are all important, well-rounded features to ensure a successful civil engineering career.[9]
      • If you’re still at school, appropriate subjects to focus on most include mathematics, design and technology, information technology, and physics, with economics, geography, and geology also being of help.[10]
      • At school and during university, participate in engineering style competitions with teams, such as model bridge building competitions. These can increase your knowledge of how things work structurally and will give you a taste of how to work as a team.
      • Contact the universities offering civil engineering degrees that interest you to find out what their exact requirements are. The requirements are constantly updated to reflect new technologies and methodologies.
      • If you have already left school and haven’t taken the appropriate subjects during school, you may need to undertake bridging courses or aptitude tests to prove that you’re able to undertake the subjects offered in a civil engineering degree.