Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Ten Amazing Facts about Beauty…

    Geoffrey G. Jones, author of Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry and Harvard Business School Business History professor,  put together a list of beauty industry hallmarks  from his book published by Oxford University Press USA in April of 2010. With his permission we are replicating his list:

    1. Eugène Schueller, the founder of the world’s biggest beauty company L’Oréal, invented the world’s first safe synthetic hair dye after numerous experiments in his own kitchen, with the police being regularly called because of explosions.

    (more…)

  • CultureWatch, July 2010

    Jill Norgren, Nichola Gutgold and Joan L. Cannon review: This Is a Soul is a moving biography of a physician that gives readers a small window through which to view international medicine; The Beauty Bias delves into many sociological, financial and biological issues related to getting older and why this matters; The Hundred-Foot Journey is a wonderful yarn, in part, because of exotic settings and non-academic dissertations on food.

  • Travel Notes; Tales to Tell

    By Adrienne G. Cannon

    “I’ll go to Cambridge and see the grandkids!,” I fantasize during a sleepless night in February. My husband is hospitalized for breathing problems, the second of two blizzards grips the area and on this third day with no electricity, the temperature in the house has fallen to 40 degrees. Cold and wakeful, I muse about lying on a tropical beach or taking a cruise along the Turkish Coast. As I drift in and out of sleep, I settle on a more practical scenario that includes a couple of days with the children in Cambridge, a day trip to London and a three day tour of Paris.

    (more…)

  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too:

    Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years.

    by Rose McDermott, Brown University; James H. Fowler, University of California, San Diego; Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard University. Contact information is at the end of the study.

    Abstract

    Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced.

    (more…)

  • A Summer Destination: 2012 Genealogy Workshops Across the US

    To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain perpetually a child. For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

    – Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.

    We’ve referenced the National Archives and Records Administration a number of times on SeniorWomen.com and want to update the genealogical workshops and records research offered by the  Administration:

    The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.

    Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.

    NARA offers the public a comprehensive program of genealogical workshops and courses in its facilities nationwide. Topics include an introduction to genealogy and research into records such as census schedules, military service and pension records, and passenger lists.

    May, 2012

    Passenger Arrival & Naturalization Records, San Francisco, CA, May 11

    Navigating the US Census, 1790 – 1940, Boston, MA, May 17

    Learn More about Fold3, Philadelphia, PA, May 23

    June

    Researching in Ancestry for Intermediate Users, Fort Worth, TX, June 1
    Searching for Seamen: 19th Century Crew lists, Shipping, Citizenship, & more, Boston, MA, June 5
    Military Records: Revolutionary War to Civil War, San Francisco, CA, June 8
    New York Sources: Repositories and Imagination, New York City, NY, June 12
    They Came From . . . TBA: Ethnic History & Genealogy, Boston, MA, June 21

    July

    Introduction to Genealogy, Boston, MA, July 10
    They Came From . . . TBA: Ethnic History and Genealogy, Boston, MA, July 19
    Military Records: Spanish American to Viet Nam, San Francisco, CA, July 20

  • Appreciating Seahorses, Dragon Fish and an Albino Alligator

    We discovered Seahorse Sleuth at the Expedition & Exploration Blogs which are part of the  California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. An entry from the blog in June 2009  introduces the goals of the unique group:

    Searching for Sygnathids

    “Last year, when I heard that the 8th Indo-Pacific Fish Conference was to be held in Fremantle, West Australia, a plan for a grand science adventure began to take shape. This conference is held only once every 4 to 5 years, and if you are researching fish that are found in the Indian or Pacific oceans, which includes the most diverse coral reef ecosystems anywhere, this is the conference to attend. Since the founding of the Academy’s Seahorse Research & Conservation Program in the Fall of 2006, our group of students, research associates, and staff had made significant progress on using DNA sequence analysis to understand fundamental questions about the taxonomy, evolution, biogeography, and conservation of seahorses and their relatives, the sea dragons, pipehorses, and pipefish. So three of us set out to share our work with our colleagues, and learn from them as well.”

    A year later:

    (more…)

  • Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) at CJM

    We went, last night, to a preview of Maira Kalman’s exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. We went as grandparents  whose grandchildren have discovered a number of the 12 books she wrote for them … for her … for us. We can’t recall books that we’ve so enjoyed reading out loud, and perhaps ‘loud’ is the operative word. The characters become more alive when we stress the words, the outrageous but oh-so-real words. And, we bought The New Yorker cover, New Yorkistan, made into a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle illustrated by Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz.

    Here is a more learned and ‘artful’ approach to the exhibit, by the museum itself:

    (more…)

  • When Does It End? Gender Equalities in 22 Nations

    The Pew Research Center  Global Attitudes Project has crafted a survey about Gender Equality Universally Embraced, but Inequalities Acknowledged:

    Fifteen years after the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women’s Beijing Platform for Action proclaimed that “shared power and responsibility should be established between women and men at home, in the workplace and in the wider national and international communities,” people around the globe embrace the document’s key principles.

    (more…)

  • The High Art of Photographic Advertising

    Harvard’s Business School’s Baker Library has produced an exhibition about a generation of photographers with a modernist sensibility pursuing commercial photography as both an artistic endeavor and a profession. Now that Madmen will be beginning their new season on July 25 (AMCTV), it’s well worth a look back through The High Art of Photographic Advertising:

    The exhibit is curated by Melissa Banta and what follows is from sections of the exhibit’s text:

    “On September 18, 1934, a stunning exhibition sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry (NAAI) and the Photographic Illustrators, Inc. opened in the gallery of New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The show featured 250 works by the top artistic and commercial photographers of the day, with a particular focus on advertising and industrial images. In 1935, approximately 125 prints from the NAAI exhibition came to Harvard Business School, which was actively collecting photographs for exhibition and classroom use. The High Art of Photographic Advertising revisits the 1934 exhibition — a collection that seventy-five years later survives as a telling chapter in evolving perceptions about photography’s artistic, commercial, and cultural significance.”

    (more…)

  • The Feminist Moles in the Federal Government

    Book Review by Jo Freeman

    The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State
    by Lee Ann Banaszak
    Published by     Cambridge University Press, New York; 2010,  247 pp.

    When I was in college long ago there was an ongoing debate on working inside the system vs outside of the system.  

    As I watched the women’s liberation movement emerge and unfold in the late 1960s and 1970s, and read more deeply in US history, I realized that this was a false dichotomy. The “system” was bigger than the government and other institutions. Indeed,  the best way to bring about change was a two-pronged approach, with people ‘inside’ and ‘outside’  the government working for the same goal, if not necessarily with the same methods.

    I wrote a bit about that in my first book, The Politics of Women’s Liberation. In her new book Lee Ann Banaszak has proven it.

    (more…)