Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Medicare Investigates Misleading Mailings

    The Medicare site issued a concern about Humana’s misleading communications to Medicare recipients. What follows is from the Medicare release about the investigation to come:

    “Medicare today called on Medicare-contracted health insurance and prescription drug plans to suspend potentially misleading mailings to beneficiaries about health care and insurance reform. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently asked Humana, Inc. to end similar mailings. Humana has agreed to do so.”

    “We are concerned that the materials Humana sent to our beneficiaries may violate Medicare rules by appearing to contain Medicare Advantage and prescription drug benefit information, which must be submitted to CMS for review” said Jonathan Blum, acting director of CMS’ Center for Drug and Health Plan Choices. “We also are asking that no other plan sponsors are mailing similar materials while we investigate whether a potential violation has occurred.”

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  • History by the Thimbleful

    Julia Sneden writes: My grandmother used to point out pieces of her favorite childhood dresses in those quilts, or bits of Martha’s riding cape, or a brother’s baby dress, or a single square of her father’s worn, velvet vest. A couple of those quilts, now threadbare in spots but still viable, lie on the beds in my son’s old bedroom, and his children sleep under them when they visit during cold weather.

  • The Hidden Art of Fore-Edge Book Painting

    The Boston Public Library has an extensive approach to the art of fore-edge painting, On the Edge, introducing the subject thusly:

    “When you hold the covers of a book in your hands, you will see three edges and a spine. The top edge and bottom edge are obviously named, but the edge at which you open the book has an unfamiliar title. It is referred to as the FORE-EDGE. Originally this edge of the book was titled in ink for the purpose of identification. Then the old books were stacked one on top of the other with the edge facing outwards in order to read its title. In the beginning, there was no effort to beautify the fore-edge.”

    “By the sixteenth century, a Venetian artist, Cesare Vecellio, devised a way to enhance the beauty of a book by painting on its edges. The images, mostly portraits, were easily viewed when the covers of the book were closed. A century later in England, Samuel Mearne, a bookbinder to the royal family, developed the art of the ‘disappearing painting’ on the fore-edge of a book.”

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  • Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN)

    Although we’re generally familiar with the Nun Study and Massachusett’s Women’s Health Study (an epidemiologic investigation of menopause), SWAN (Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation), is another notable longterm scientific investigation. It was constructed to examine the women’s health during their middle years and has the financial backing of such agencies as the National Institutes on Aging, of Nursing Research, of Mental Health and Child Health & Human Development, among others.

    Here’s SWAN’s background: The study began in 1994 and is in its eleventh year. Between 1996 and 1997, 3,302 participants joined SWAN through seven designated research centers. The research centers are located in the following communities: Ypsilanti and Inkster, MI (University of Michigan), Boston, MA (Massachusetts General Hospital), Chicago, IL (Rush Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center), Alameda and Contra Costa County, CA (University of California Davis and Kaiser Permanente), Los Angeles, CA (University of California at Los Angeles), Hackensack, NJ (Hackensack University Medical Center), and Pittsburgh, PA (University of Pittsburgh). SWAN participants represent five racial/ethnic groups and a variety of backgrounds and cultures.

    And highlights of the study’s findings: What factors increase heart disease risk?

    American women who have experienced chronic stress or discrimination in their lives have more risk factors for cardiovascular disease (thicker carotid artery walls and more carotid artery plaque) than their Caucasian counterparts.

    Major depression, even before menopause, predicts cardiovascular risk. Mid-life women (Caucasian and African American – the only two ethnicities studied for this project) who have a history of two or more major depressive episodes are twice as likely to have a risk factor of heart disease (like cardiovascular plaque) before menopause than women who have no history of depression, or only one episode of depression.

    How do women cope with midlife changes? (more…)

  • Financial Markets and Real People

    Professor Robert Shiller, the author of Irrational Exuberance has delivered a series of lectures constituting a Yale Economics course online entitled Financial Markets. The last in the series is called Making It Work for Real People: The Democratization
    of Finance

    . The course is part of Open Yale Courses and distributed through Creative Commons

    There are a number of ways to listen to the lecture(s) using Audio
    mp3, or on video using medium, low or high bandwidth. Finally, it can read in html.

    “What follows is a few paragraphs from that lecture:

    It’s not altogether bad because part of the reason inequality is getting worse is that they’re suddenly getting rich people. If everyone’s getting better off, you could say, what’s the problem? In many ways that is the right answer, but I think that we can’t tolerate excessive inequality. The beauty of it is that the very same capitalism that has been generating inequality has solutions for it. Many of our venerable economic institutions that we already have are working against inequality, so I’ll mention just for example life insurance. That helps alleviate inequality by eliminating one important cause of inequality. A lot of poor people, traditionally, are people who’ve lost – families that have lost one of the two parents, either the mother or the father. Of course, that puts the family in stress because they have just lost half of their adults. If you have life insurance, that solves that.”

    “Another source of inequality is solved by health insurance. An important cause of inequality is somebody gets sick, so they are unable to earn an income and they end up in disastrous economic situations. Another one is disability insurance. Disability insurance protects you against something like an accident that causes you to become unable to hold a job; that tends to be a lifetime thing. Disability insurance is a lifetime insurance contract; you pay for it while you’re healthy. If you become disabled, you get support for the rest of your life. These are just some examples of how inequality is already being dealt with through risk management institutions and why finance – I always lump insurance in – these are all insurance, but I lump that in with finance as risk management and why they’re so important.”

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  • Pixels to Textiles Exhibit

    “Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection (HLATC). An integral part of the academic program of the School of Human Ecology, the collection features 12,000 textiles and costumes representing countless eras, places, and techniques, making it one of the largest university textile collections in the United States. The size and scope of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, along with its related programs, make it an outstanding resource for scholars, designers, students, and members of the community.”

    “The main joy in weaving is to watch the article grow under your hands, to plan the colour schemes and the patterns and to watch them develop from row to row, to watch one’s colours combine as a painter watches his pigment form on the canvas the thoughts and the vision of his eye, to watch the pattern develop as an architect watches his building rise story by story.”
    – Helen Louise Allen, in a segment she wrote for WHA Radio. May 21, 1929

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  • Books and Authors Worth Revisiting: Islandia By Austen Tappan Wright

    Joan L. Cannon writes: The true depth of characterizations make the characters believable, as do the depictions of profound emotions. Wright’s ability to manufacture not just an imagined world in minute detail, but the people who inhabit it as if they were personally known to him and to produce prose poetry with equal facility is astonishing.

  • Focus On Green Communities

    The National Building Museum in Washington, DC is adding to their compilation of green communities across the US.

    “ The first section of Green Community explores sustainable planning strategies such as cleaning up and redeveloping brownfields and grayfields, transit-oriented planning, smart use of natural resources, land conservation, and minimizing waste. Each area will be illustrated by example green communities in the United States and around the world, including Greensburg, Kansas; Highlands’ Garden Village, Denver, Colorado; Mendoza, Argentina; Hali’imaile Maui, Hawaii; and Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.”

    Exhibition furniture was prefabricated and its production ganged together to increase efficiency and reduce waste. The designers used new processes — printing text and images directly onto the panels and choosing materials with embedded colors and finishes — and old techniques, like silk-screening text directly onto the walls, to eliminate need for excess materials.

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  • Off-Beat Travel Guides

    Offbeat Guides founder David Sifry describes the process of putting together the guide: “Travelers need reliable, accurate, and immediate information when planning a trip. Standard guidebooks are often 12 to 18 months out of date as soon as they hit the stores. Our content is the most up-to-date because we have an enormous technology base of spiders and crawlers that find the best information on the internet, and combine it with information from established authors and thousands of locals who are always updating the information about where they live. We believe strongly in Creative Commons, in which users can share, create and build information that is available for mixing and remixing into unique new applications. As well as Creative Commons licensed information, we also use proprietary content and professional authors, which makes for accurate and authoritative information in our guides.”

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  • What I Really Want Is … Staff

    Patricia Beurteaux writes: I lived with eggshell all my looong married life because my former husband and I couldn’t agree on a colour. The guy liked blue, and only blue. Well, florals, too — but blue. Without going into details, you can see that we had a problem from the get-go.