Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Hearings: Equal Health Care for Equal Premiums and Long Term Care Insurance Costs

    At 2:30 pyem edt on October 14th the Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate (Special Committee on) Aging will be conducting a hearing on Federal Long-term Care Insurance Costs:
    Sticker Shock: What is the True Cost of Federal Long-Term Care Insurance?”

    On October 15 at 10:30 ayem edt, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing, “What Women Want: Equal Health Care for Equal Premiums.”

    To keep up with weekly hearings of interest go to the Senate site, Committee Hearings Schedule. For the House hearings, consult a similar page:

    C-Span does offer a service that presents a list of committee hearings at CapitolHearings.org but the House hearings require going to each committee rather than consulting a unified list of hearings. What follows are instructions for viewing streaming video of the hearings:

    Senate Hearings Schedule

    Check the schedule for times and locations of hearings. The hearing room number is listed at the end of each entry; you may have to scroll to the right to find it. When the hearing you want is scheduled to begin, click on the hearing room number or the corresponding hearing room from the scrolling list to the right of the screen to begin streaming audio. Read detailed instructions.

  • Elinor Ostrom, 1st Woman Nobelist in Economics

    A concise background for Elinor Ostrom (from Tufts):

    Elinor Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at the Indiana University. Her work concerns collective decisions and voluntary cooperation. In laboratory experiments, she studies when and how human beings cooperate. As a formal theorist, she has contributed essential insights to our understanding of collective action and collective choice. She has also collaborated with and advised nonprofit organizations in many countries as they address practical issues. These collaborations have enriched her formal theory and her scientific research. She has founded and directed institutes that combine theory, empirical research, practice, and the analysis of policy. The contexts of her research have ranged from traditional agricultural practices to policing in urban America to the Internet as a ‘commons.’ As a teacher, a college administrator, and a leader of institutions, she has been a civic educator and has advocated for civic education. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former president of both the American Political Science Association and the Midwest Political Science Association.

    “I assume multiple types of players – ‘rational egoists,’ as well as ‘conditional cooperators’ and ‘willing punishers’ – in models of nonmarket behavior. I use an indirect evolutionary approach to explain how multiple types of players could survive and flourish in social dilemma situations. Contextual variables that enhance knowledge about past behavior assist in explaining the origin of collective action. Among the important contextual variables are types of goods, types of groups, and rules that groups use to provide and allocate goods. Finally, I reexamine a series of design principles that were derived earlier from an examination of extensive case materials.”

    There’s a photograph of Elinor Ostrom at the Nobel site delivering a lecture at Indiana University, Bloomington, July 2008.

    Beyond sharing the Nobel for Economics (the first prize so awarded to a woman), she’s received in the same year the 2009 Reimar Lüst Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange, which recognizes humanities and social-science scholars for contributions to cultural and academic relations with Germany.

    (more…)

  • American Beauties: Drawings from the Golden Age of Illustration

    The Library of Congress produced an exhibit some years ago entitled American Beauties: Drawings from the Golden Age of Illustration.

    The Marketing of the American Beauty:

    “The unprecedented success of the ‘Gibson Girl’ in the 1890s unleashed a visual barrage of American beauties which lasted throughout the Golden Age of American Illustration and continues to this very day. The different types of women presented in this exhibition demonstrate not only a nationally evolving ideal of beauty, but also a concentrated effort on the part of publishers, advertisers, and the artists themselves to develop an easily identifiable, aesthetically pleasing product. It is no wonder the marketers increasingly turned to the allure of the American female; in the early part of the twentieth century women were thought to control 80 percent or more of the consumer dollars expended in the United States. Accordingly, advertisers turned to images of feminine mystique to which consumers could aspire (and hopefully emulate) through the purchase of goods and services. Men were also charmed by these images, however, and magazine publishers used the attraction of pretty faces on their covers to boost impulse buying for their all-important newsstand sales.”

    Exhibition Overview

    “Arresting and gorgeous, icons of feminine beauty from America’s ‘golden age of illustration’ (1880-1920s) dazzled viewers with an intensity, vividness and variety that captivate us today. The creation in the 1890s of the ‘Gibson Girl’ by Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) began a decades-long fascination with idealized types of feminine beauty in America. Other gifted illustrators of the era such as Coles Phillips (1880-1927), Wladyslaw Benda (1873-1948), Nell Brinkley (1886-1944), and John Held, Jr., (1888-1958) fashioned diverse portrayals of idealized American womanhood that mirrored changing standards of beauty. More fundamentally, however, this popular art highlighted transformations in women’s roles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During what historians call the era of the “new woman,” increasing numbers of women pursued higher education, romance, marriage, leisure activities, and a sense of individuality with greater independence. This exhibition features drawings selected from outstanding recent acquisitions and graphic art in the Library’s Cabinet of American Illustration and the Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon.”

    (more…)

  • On Losing a Sib

    Julia Sneden writes: When my first husband announced that he didn’t want to be married any longer, my brother drove 500 miles overnight to show up at my front door. “What on earth are you doing here?” I asked in astonishment. “You’re my sister,” was all he said. It was enough.

  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

    We can attest to the popularity of the Ball of Whacks and the X-Ball which we purchased at another Museum store; it’s been very popular with grandchildren as well as adults. I find the puzzle calendar tempting as it’s interactive, free standing and movable.

    Projection Clock: “The Projection Clock allows four different clock faces – or, your own photos or creations – to be projected onto a wall. Switched off, it functions as a surprising mirror.”

    A considerably less expensive object is the Early Bird alarm clock for $25, easy to set and “will awaken you gently and sweetly with woodsy chirping and a little bird icon that pulses and glows.”

    (more…)

  • Fifth Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Was a Woman

    Nobel Peace Prize 1905

    Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicita von Suttner, born Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau, Austria, 1843-1914

    Author. Honorary President of the Permanent International Peace Bureau (Bureau International Permanent de la Paix), Bern. World famous for the novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down your Arms).

    The biography below is quoted from Nobel Lectures, Peace 1901-1925, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972:

    Wanting to «be of service to the Peace League … [by writing] a book which should propagate its ideas», Bertha von Suttner went to work at once on a novel whose heroine suffers all the horrors of war; the wars involved were those of the author’s own day on which she did careful research. The effect of Die Waffen nieder [Lay Down Your Arms], published late in 1889, was consequently so real and the implied indictment of militarism so telling that the impact made on the reading public was tremendous. And from this time on, its author became an active leader in the peace movement, devoting a great part of her time, her energy, and her writing to the cause of peace – attending peace meetings and international congresses, helping to establish peace groups, recruiting members, lecturing, corresponding with people all over the world to promote peace projects.

    In 1891 she helped form a Venetian peace group, initiated the Austrian Peace Society of which she was for a long time the president, attended her first international peace congress, and started the fund needed to establish the Bern Peace Bureau.

    (more…)

  • Women in the Stars

    Two years ago I posted a Women in Science calendar for a possible purchase item for seniorwomen.com. This week one of the subjects of that calendar received a Nobel Prize for Medicine, *Elizabeth Blackburn.

    This year I might suggest She Is an Astronomer calendar.

    The calendar is a “cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy has produced a colorful calendar for 2010 featuring accomplished women astronomers from around the world.”

    “With this calendar we aim to help reconstruct the history of women in astronomy, which, as in other fields of knowledge, is poorly known. We have highlighted exceptional women whose contributions to the advancement of science deserve to transcend anonymity and occupy a place in history. We have tried to give visibility and to value the contributions of women astronomers from different epochs and countries.”

    The women who are profiled as astronomers are:

    (more…)

  • Herta Muller, Partial Text of Two Novels and Nobel Facts

    Herta Müller, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” joins the women who have won that particular prize previously:

    Women Nobel Laureates in Literature

    11 other women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was the first woman to be awarded in 1909. Selma Lagerlöf was awarded five years before she was elected to the Swedish Academy, the Nobel Prize-Awarding Institution responsible for selecting Nobel Laureates in Literature.

    1909 – Selma Lagerlöf

    1926 – Grazia Deledda

    1928 – Sigrid Undset

    1938 – Pearl Buck

    1945 – Gabriela Mistral

    1966 – Nelly Sachs

    1991 – Nadine Gordimer

    1993 – Toni Morrison

    1996 – Wislawa Szymborska

    2004 – Elfriede Jelinek

    2007 – Doris Lessing (Ms. Lessing was 88 years old when she was awarded the Prize in 2007.)

    (more…)

  • Do Those High Heels Really Mean Future Pain?

    Regardless of the fashion magazines inclusion of spiky, strapped heels to totter in, perhaps symbolically slowing you down in the race to keep your job (what is that guy wearing again?), the height of heels increase and the word ‘ouch’  comes to mind. Take it from someone who now has a titanium plate and screw in her right foot.

    Here’s an abstract from the journal Arthritis Care and Research:stiletto heels

    Foot pain: Is current or past shoewear a factor?

    Abstract

    Objective

    Foot pain is common, yet few studies have examined the condition in relationship to shoewear. In this cross-sectional study of men and women from the population-based Framingham Study, the association between foot pain and type of shoewear was examined.

    Methods

    Data were collected on 3,378 members of the Framingham Study who completed the foot examination in 2002-2008. Foot pain (both generalized and at specific locations) was measured by the response to the question On most days, do you have pain, aching or stiffness in either foot? Shoewear was recorded for the present time and 5 past age categories, by the subject’s choice of the appropriate shoe from a list. The responses were categorized into 3 groups (good, average, or poor shoes). Sex-specific multivariate logistic regression models were used to examine the effect of shoewear (average shoes were the referent group) on generalized and location-specific foot pain, adjusting for age and weight.

    (more…)

  • Current Reading, When Old Flames Beckon Online

    After all, we’re talking about the first person we had a crush on, or kissed, or cried over, or had sex with, or took home to Mom, or maybe even married. No wonder we’re curious.

    Perhaps we want to ponder the road not taken. Or maybe we’re searching for forgiveness — or vindication. If we are single, or unhappy in a current relationship, we might be looking for someone who was attracted to us at one time because, so the theory goes, they could be attracted to us again.

    That’s all fine and dandy. But I warn you: You are playing with fire.

    Read the whole article at the WSJ site.