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A Call to Serve
As we all stood a few moments ago and joined in singing "The Spirit of God like a fire is burning" (Hymns, 1985, no. 2), I could visualize that beautiful little temple in Kirtland, Ohio, built by valiant Saints during their poverty and relentless persecution but sustained by their abundant faith in God. In my mind's eye I could see the temple filled with devout Saints awaiting the moment of dedication, and many gathered outside hoping to hear the inspired prayer of their prophet, for they knew "the authority of God was upon him." (Matthias Cowley, Wilford Woodruff: History of His Life and Labors, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1964, p. 68.) And then that moment of joy that must have filled their hearts as they joined in singing a new hymn, "The Spirit of God like a Fire Is Burning," which was hastily scribbled on the back of an envelope by Brother Phelps, so as not to lose the spirit of heaven that he felt.
We, as did they, have sung today:
The visions and blessings of old are returning,
And angels are coming to visit the earth. …
The knowledge and power of God are expanding;
The veil o'er the earth is beginning to burst.
We'll sing and we'll shout with the armies of heaven,
Hosanna, hosanna to God and the Lamb!
(Hymns, 1985, No. 2.)
The Spirit filled their hearts then, as we have been blessed this afternoon.
How grateful we are for our pioneer heritage and early history as the gospel has been revealed and restored in purity and truth. Only 150 years separate the sacrifices and struggles of Kirtland from today's anxieties and personal challenges.
"I suppose every Mormon [man and] woman [have] measured [themselves] at one time or another against [their pioneer ancestors]," wrote Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. "Am I as stalwart? As self-reliant? As devoted to the gospel? As willing to sacrifice?" Could I leave my wife and children without food or means to support themselves while I responded to a call to serve a mission abroad, or take these same innocent ones, dependent solely upon me for their survival, into hostile territory to set up housekeeping and provide a livelihood for them? Or, were I a woman, "could I crush my best china to add glitter to a temple, bid loving farewell to a missionary husband as I lay in a wagon bed with fever and chills, leave all that I possessed and walk across the plains to an arid wilderness?" (Ensign, June 1978, p. 54.)
Some may feel that their lives of relative ease and convenience lack the vigor and fortitude of those who survived the pioneer days, that they can never measure up to the toil, struggles, and challenges our pioneer ancestors faced and emerge the victor.
Yet, "Our challenges are just as important as those of the past. Our testing is as crucial; our contributions may be as great. …
"An essential quality of the first pioneers was optimism, an ability to see new possibilities in a strange and unsettling environment. To beautify the desert, they needed faith in God, but they also needed faith in themselves and in their ability to help shape the world. The need for that faith has not diminished. …
"A pioneer is not [necessarily] a woman who makes her own soap" or a man who grubs sagebrush from the land. Pioneers are those who take up their burdens and walk toward the future. With vision and with courage they make the desert blossom and they press on toward new frontiers. (Ibid., p. 55.)
The Lord emphasized one such frontier when he declared, "purify your hearts before me; and then go ye into all the world, and preach my gospel unto every creature who has not received it." (D&C 112:28.)
An inspired prophet, David O. McKay, expanded this fundamental principle in 1959 while at the Hyde Park chapel in London, England. He proclaimed these four simple words: "Every member a missionary."
In 1974 another prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, broadened our vision as he encouraged us to serve more diligently by lengthening our stride.
Our living prophet today, President Ezra Taft Benson, declared: "Missionary work—the preaching of the gospel—has been the major activity of the true Church of Christ whenever the gospel has been upon the earth." (Improvement Era, June 1970, p. 95.)
Each of us has a sacred duty to personally assist the accomplishment of the mission of the Church in proclaiming the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, perfecting the Saints to receive the ordinances of the gospel, and the teaching of the doctrines of salvation and the temple.
"All three are part of one work—to assist our Father in Heaven and His Son … in Their grand and glorious mission 'to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man' (Moses 1:39)." (Spencer W. Kimball, Ensign, May 1981, p. 5).
In the spirit of these prophetic watchwords, there is a continuing but growing need to extend the frontiers of new member conversion, fellowshipping, and activating the lost or the offended or ignored far beyond our previous levels.
In the past few months remarkable indications of interest in the Church have emerged in nations that have had restrictions. We sense providential opportunities beginning to appear where mature couples who have the experience, sensitivity, and insight into old-world customs and respect for tradition may be able to begin planting seeds of the restored gospel in good soil to flower and bloom.
For some time we have been encouraging qualified mature couples to serve full-time missions. President Kimball and President Benson have stated that the goal of physically able couples and some women who may now be single is to serve a mission. The need remains. Indeed, the requests from mission presidents for more —many more—couples are becoming more pressing.
While firefighters were battling roaring forest fires in the West recently, two grandmothers—Altha Clark, from Texas, and Hazel Stills, from Florida—kindled countless spiritual flames by creating new "interest of people who [had] investigated the Church for years, but who needed a firm, loving nudge to accept baptism," and with caring fellowshipping, reached out to the less-active members.
"They don't take no for an answer," the second counselor in the Altamont Utah Stake presidency said, "and they [teach] without offending anyone." They combine the Spirit with hard work.
A rancher said the two sisters "have kept us so busy I don't have time to get my hay in. We … keep them [booked with people] to teach. In this stake, the full-time missionaries teach very few discussions without a stake missionary or fellowshipper going along."
The two grandmothers travel about one hundred miles a day on unpaved country roads, and the dust and ruts don't slow them down.
While visiting a member's home, these remarkable missionaries asked if she knew someone they could teach.
The sister replied, "my husband."
Directed by the Spirit how to approach this husband, they taught him the gospel and rejoiced with his wife at his baptism.
Fourteen families have now become active and will go to the temple this year because of the efforts of these full-time grandmother missionaries coordinating with the stake missionaries and properly following a plan in fellowshipping new members. A change has come about in the whole stake that has influenced the less active as well as nonmembers. (See Church News, 10 September 1988, pp. 8, 9, 12.)
When people are taught and then fellowshipped with warmth and continued interest until they are integrated into the mainstream of the Church, they are "remembered and nourished by the good word of God, to keep them in the right way." (Moro. 6:4.) By working together, stake missionaries and full-time missionaries are able to keep new converts involved as they gain gospel knowledge and a needed testimony. They are also bringing back into fellowship the less active.
In stressing the need for mature men and women to be about the work of the Lord, President Benson related the experience of his two widowed sisters. One was the mother of ten children and the other the mother of eight. After they had sent their children on missions, they approached their bishops about going on missions themselves. President Benson relates that he remembers well the day a number of years ago when they called him and said, "Guess what? We have received our missionary calls." President Benson said, "What missionary calls?" And they replied, "We're both going to your old field of labor in England." (See Ensign, May 1984, p. 45.)
They did go to England and served as companions for twenty months.
Thousands of devoted mature couples and single sisters have touched the lives of many for good. We are grateful for their dedication and courage and oftentimes great personal sacrifice. One couple indicated on their missionary form that they would be ready to go just as soon as they were able to find a home for their eighty hives of bees.
There is an unusual opportunity for qualifed individuals to do their utmost to fulfill the Lord's injunction to preach his gospel to the ends of the earth and not only to teach but convert, as Alma said, that as many "as believed in their preaching, and were converted unto the Lord, never did fall away." (Alma 23:6.)
The Lord's work is blessed to have more than eleven hundred couples now serving throughout the world. In Latin America—including Mexico, all of Central America, and South America—there are now fifty-one missionary couples. From the Rio Grande in Texas to the southern tip of South America there are fifty-eight missions, and only fifty-one couples—less than one couple per mission, or, stated another way, one missionary couple to work with more people than live in the entire state of Utah.
For one couple to be assigned to every stake in this vast Latin America area, 278 couples would be needed. Even better would be to have a couple assigned to help two or three wards. To do this we would need another 1,900 couples—just in Latin America. Imagine, 51 now serving where we could effectively use nearly 2,000!
Leaders from our overseas areas indicate similar needs in most parts of the world. One of our pressing challenges is to keep the local leadership trained and ahead of the new members.
It has been estimated that within the United States and Canada there are at least one hundred thousand Church couples between the ages of fifty-five and seventy. Some researchers estimate that six thousand couples could serve missions now. The addition of many of these qualified, experienced couples would bring untold blessings not only to precious people waiting to hear the heavenly invitation to "come unto the Christ" and feel of his goodness, but those who answer the call will be blessed also.
The Lord instructed in the Doctrine and Covenants, "If ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work." (D&C 4:3.) Many of you undoubtedly have the desire but may need some gentle encouragement to complete your decision.
I challenged eight couples in my former home stake in California to set aside their comfortable lives of planned retirement and to bless the Scottish Saints with their gospel knowledge and service.
Arthur Thulin had been a bishop, his wife Myra a skilled teacher. Arthur anxiously wrote that he was nearing seventy and might die in Scotland. I replied, "Arthur, you are going to die somewhere; Scotland is a great place to die—but when you die, die with your boots on, not in a comfortable rocking chair." The Thulins came, blessed the lives of many, and Arthur lived several years after their two-year mission.
Many couples have concerns about leaving their homes and families, or they picture themselves being sent to a developing area of the world or struggling to learn a new language or trying to keep up with the younger missionaries' tracting and work pace.
These concerns are generally unwarranted. Missionary couples are not expected to work at the same pace or follow the schedule of the younger missionaries. Mission presidents are sensitive to each couple's special need and establish activity and assignments that make the best use of abilities, experience, and talents.
With very few exceptions, couples are not assigned to developing areas or to missions requiring a new language without some experience or a willingness to accept such an assignment.
Emma Lou and Joseph Slagowski could not speak Spanish but were called to the Peru Lima South Mission. They participated in a trial pre-mission language project for mature couples that assists them in learning language skills in their own homes prior to entering the Missionary Training Center for their training. Sister Slagowski writes:
"When our stake president asked us [if] we would be willing to take part in [a new] pre-mission … language learning project, we were concerned, but accepted," she said. "I am now 66 years old, and school was [never easy] for me.
"Without the pre-Missionary Training Center Spanish program, it would have been impossible … [but] before [we arrived at] the Missionary Training Center I could read Spanish quite well, … could pray, and bear testimony of God the Father and Jesus Christ. To me it's a miracle.
"We plan on another Spanish-speaking mission after this one if health permits."
There are few things that invite the blessings of the Lord into our own lives and into the lives of our family members more powerfully than does missionary service—the broadening of knowledge of gospel principles, a deeper spirituality, a strengthening of one's faith in the Lord, a greater understanding of the workings of the Spirit, and the expanding of one's talents, as promised by the Savior in the parable of the talents.
Though you may have had many years of married life together, you will never work more closely and more intensely with one another in a more rewarding effort. Your love will deepen, and you will discover wonderful new dimensions of your companion's inner soul. You will have a greater feeling of unity, and a heavenly relationship will be strengthened.
If you as a couple meet the personal qualifications, don't wait to be asked. Go to your bishop. He is probably waiting for you. Humbly and prayerfully talk about your plans and desires, even though you may not be quite ready. He will counsel and guide you.
Study the scriptures daily, take care of your health, and start your own mission savings account, just as you have encouraged your children and grandchildren to do. You might even begin learning a second language.
Eternal justice requires that all of God's children have adequate opportunity to hear and receive the gospel message. Christ taught, "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come." (Matt. 24:14.)
Now, my dear friends, as we near the closing moments of this historic conference and receive counsel from our prophet, I add my witness of his divine calling to lead this church as God's holy prophet upon the earth today. We sustain and love him dearly. Our philosophy of life is in accord with divine purposes and, if followed in our actions, will lead us unerringly to eternal life. I leave you this witness and my blessings as you move forward to fulfill your commitments and to live the Lord's commandments. This work is true, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.


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Teacher Guidance in two Inquiry-based Instructions for Non-science Majored High School Students
Ting-ling Lai; Ying-Shao Hsu; Fang-Ying Yang; Meng-Jung Tsai
World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2008 (Jun 30, 2008) pp. 6343–6348
Educators generally believe that that inquiry was more appropriate for upper level, or science majors than for introductory or non-science major students. However, studies also found that given the appropriate guidance, non-science majored students...
Topics: Students, Elementary Education, Instructional Design, Teachers, Professional Development

subset: commoncrawl


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Fact Sheet: Embryonic Stem Cell Research
"As a result of private research, more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist" I have concluded that we should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines " where the life and death decision has already been made", This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research" without crossing a fundamental moral line by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life."
-- George W. Bush
Federal funding of research using existing embryonic stem cell lines is consistent with the President's belief in the fundamental value and sanctity of human life. The President's decision reflects his fundamental commitment to preserving the value and sanctity of human life and his desire to promote vital medical research. The President's decision will permit federal funding of research using the more than 60 existing stem cell lines that have already been derived, but will not sanction or encourage the destruction of additional human embryos. The embryos from which the existing stem cell lines were created have already been destroyed and no longer have the possibility of further development as human beings. Federal funding of medical research on these existing stem cell lines will promote the sanctity of life " without undermining it " and will allow scientists to explore the potential of this research to benefit the lives of millions of people who suffer from life destroying diseases.
Federal funds will only be used for research on existing stem cell lines that were derived:
(1) with the informed consent of the donors;
(2) from excess embryos created solely for reproductive purposes; and
(3) without any financial inducements to the donors.
In order to ensure that federal funds are used to support only stem cell research that is scientifically sound, legal, and ethical, the NIH will examine the derivation of all existing stem cell lines and create a registry of those lines that satisfy this criteria. More than 60 existing stem cell lines from genetically diverse populations around the world are expected to be available for federally-funded research.
No federal funds will be used for:
(1) the derivation or use of stem cell lines derived from newly destroyed embryos;
(2) the creation of any human embryos for research purposes; or
(3) the cloning of human embryos for any purpose.
Today's decision relates only to the use of federal funds for research on existing stem cell lines derived in accordance with the criteria set forth above.
The President will create a new President's Council on Bioethics, chaired by Dr. Leon Kass, an expert in biomedical ethics and a professor at the University of Chicago, to study the human and moral ramifications of developments in biomedical and behaviorial science and technology. The Council will study such issues as embryo and stem cell research, assisted reproduction, cloning, genetic screening, gene therapy, euthanasia, psychoactive drugs, and brain implants.
Embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, which come from the inner cell mass of a human embryo, have the potential to develop into all or nearly all of the tissues in the body. The scientific term for this characteristic is "pluripotentiality."
Adult stem cells. Adult stem cells are unspecialized, can renew themselves, and can become specialized to yield all of the cell types of the tissue from which they originate. Although scientists believe that some adult stem cells from one tissue can develop into cells of another tissue, no adult stem cell has been shown in culture to be pluripotent.
The potential of embryonic stem cell research. Many scientists believe that embryonic stem cell research may eventually lead to therapies that could be used to treat diseases that afflict approximately 128 million Americans. Treatments may include replacing destroyed dopamine-secreting neurons in a Parkinson's patient's brain; transplanting insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in diabetic patients; and infusing cardiac muscle cells in a heart damaged by myocardial infarction. Embryonic stem cells may also be used to understand basic biology and to evaluate the safety and efficacy of new medicines.
The creation of embryonic stem cells. To create embryonic stem cells for research, a "stem cell line" must be created from the inner cell mass of a week-old embryo. If they are cultured properly, embryonic stem cells can grow and divide indefinitely. A stem cell line is a mass of cells descended from the original, sharing its genetic characteristics. Batches of cells can then be separated from the cell line and distributed to researchers.
The origin of embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are derived from excess embryos created in the course of infertility treatment. As a result of standard in vitro fertilization practices, many excess human embryos are created. Participants in IVF treatment must ultimately decide the disposition of these excess embryos, and many individuals have donated their excess embryos for research purposes.
Existing stem cell lines. There are currently more than 60 existing different human embryonic stem cell lines that have been developed from excess embryos created for in vitro fertilization with the consent of the donors and without financial inducement. These existing lines are used in approximately one dozen laboratories around the world (in the United States, Australia, India, Israel, and Sweden).
Therapies from adult and embryonic stem cell research. To date, adult stem cell research, which is federally-funded, has resulted in the development of a variety of therapeutic treatments for diseases. Although embryonic stem cell research has not yet produced similar results, many scientists believe embryonic stem cell research holds promise over time because of the capacity of embryonic stem cells to develop into any tissue in the human body.
George W. Bush, Fact Sheet: Embryonic Stem Cell Research Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/279910


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Super Bowl XLVIII In New York City Negatively Impacts Broadway Ticket Sales Despite High Expectations That Broadway Ticket Sales Numbers Would Be Higher
Super Bowl XLVIII In New York Negatively Impacts Broadway Ticket Sales
On Sunday, February 2, 2014, the Seattle Seahawks crushed the Denver Broncos, 43-8, winning the National Football League championship at the Super Bowl XLVIII.
The game was held just over the Hudson River from New York City at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. As it turns out, the Broncos were not the only ones who could have used a better defense.
Lower Numbers Despite Positive Expectations
Though Broadway shows across the board adjusted performance schedules and made promotional efforts to engage the influx of sports fans flocking to the city, theatre ticket sales were at a disappointing low, with weekly box office grosses dropping $2.4 million and with 15,000 fewer tickets sold compared to the previous 7-day period.
Total ticket sales were only $16,714,694 in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, though they reached $19,122,428 in the preceding week.
Even Long-Running Hits Were Impacted
The only shows to reach full audience capacity were The Book of Mormon and the double-bill Mark Rylance-led Shakespeare productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III. Even long-running hits such as The Lion King saw a big drop in sales, decreasing 10 percent since the week before.
Although the total weekly gross for all productions was comparable to the total gross in Super Bowl week last year, there are presently four more shows running than this time last year. In recent history, Broadway producers have seen non-weather related ticket sales slumps, the most recent during the Republican National Convention in 2004, when ticket sales dropped 22%.
Underlines The Terrible Crossover Between Football Fans and Broadway Audiences
This time the slump was so severe, that the New York City Mayor may rethink efforts to bring other events to the area, like the Olympics, the World Cup or even the Stanley Cup. It may increase hotel receipts, but do little for the rest of the NYC economy.
In honor of the football event, New York City and the Super Bowl Host Committee joined forces to carry out an unprecedented shutdown of 13 blocks in Midtown Manhattan. As a result, traffic was restricted in the heart of Times Square on Broadway between 34th Street and 47th Street for the four days leading up to the game.
Super Bowl Boulevard
The officially dubbed "Super Bowl Boulevard" hosted a slew of events ranging from a toboggan run to an outdoor stage featuring performances by, among others, the Broadway casts of Rock of Ages and Jersey Boys.
Other shows – including Rocky, Pippin, Motown, Chicago, Mamma Mia! and Newsies – gave special performances in nearby Bryant Park. Still, it appears the excitement of the game overpowered the convenience of the theatre district welcoming the flood of visitors with open arms.
Broadway Producers Try To Make The Most Of The Situation
The "Super Bowl Boulevard" festivities felt crushed in the small space on Broadway, especially given that the Javits Center, on the West Side of Manhattan was the original location earmarked, but another event grabbed the booking. Broadway producers, anticipating the conflict, made significant efforts to take advantage of the tourist traffic.
Broadway Week, an annual 2-for-1 ticket promotion, happened to coincide with the shutdowns, and every running production (with the exception of the confident hit The Book of Mormon) participated in the discount program – most likely aiming to attract Super Bowl theatregoers.
The Broadway League Aims To Attract Super Bowl Theatregoers
Furthermore, the Broadway League (calling themselves "the theatrical equivalent of the NFL") released a press statement welcoming Super Bowl XLVIII to Times Square, providing a user-friendly map for pedestrians to navigate their way to the theatres, and announcing alternate curtain times to accommodate football aficionados.
One show, Rock of Ages, made multiple efforts to attract football fans. The 1980s rock jukebox musical has traditionally done very well with the adult male demographic, which is unusual for Broadway musicals. It therefore makes sense that they would take this opportunity to gain added exposure among sports fans.
"Rock Of Ages" Performs At Super Bowl Boulevard
In addition to performing a half hour set onstage at Super Bowl Boulevard on Thursday afternoon prior to the game, the cast made the journey to MetLife Stadium on game day, performing two sets outside the gates prior to kickoff. In an even greater feat, the producers convinced three NFL stars to join the cast onstage at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theatre, playing bartenders in four brief scenes for a temporary stint.
However, Rock of Ages was no exception in terms of poor box office performance; their gross was $60,000 less than the previous week. Overall, despite positive expectations that the event might help rally the crowds to Broadway, the performance week was disappointingly low.
Limited Hotel Availability May Have Also Been A Factor
Presumably, the grosses might have been even worse had it not been for the Broadway League's efforts to woo the scant few Super Bowl fans that actually did go to a show. It is likely that the Super Bowl fans also booked all the hotel rooms in New York City, which meant that the normal tourists didn't have anywhere to stay.
Super Bowl Boulevard also served to distract the remaining tourists from going to the theatre, merely adding to the multitude of entertainment options available in Times Square. Still, some of these marketing efforts may prove fruitful in the long run, having possibly increased national awareness of the current Broadway slate.


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Since yesterday's NY Times Magazine piece "What Do Women Want?" about new research into female sexuality was so long and hard (to parse!), it took two of us to try to take it on.
MEGAN says:
Graphics of supposedly aroused women aside, I think we should first off give some credit to Daniel Bergner for writing a much more nuanced piece about Meredith Chivers' research than did his colleague Andy Newman earlier this summer who gleaned nothing from it other than women are really, really bi. Thankfully, the longer form piece allows Chivers to clarify one very key point, which Chivers says:
"I hammer home with my students, 'Arousal is not consent.' "
I think that's a really key point actually, for both men and women: men don't necessarily get erections because they want to have sex at a given moment, and women don't necessarily get southern blood flow (the physiological ladyboner, such as) and lubricated because they do, either.
And although I think the discussion about rape fantasies and physical arousal during rape is interesting and key to developing a better understanding, I think that Chivers' colleague Marta Meana sort of misses the point of a rape fantasy to a large degree. Chivers findings that women become at least minorly physically aroused by depictions of sex regardless of the depiction — and Meana's point that the female body hides its arousal from a distance while the man's is (pardon the pun) rather pointed, which means that, social constructs of women as sexual aside, it's possible that we are also biologically attuned to view the female form as more arousing regardless of orientation — are together quite interesting. Chivers work indicates that there are quite possibly evolutionary reasons for women's ease to some level of physical arousal despite circumstances — which, sadly, says a depressing lot about the long-term and wide-spread existence of rape from our earliest days — and hammers home the point that arousal isn't consent.
But Meana's points in particular about rape fantasies, and to a lesser degree Chivers', really stuck with me. This idea that women want in some way to consent to being ravished, to allow themselves to be "taken" or to be forced into submission and, through that, into enjoyment strikes a different chord for me than it does for Meana. Chivers says:
"It's the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought," Chivers said about rape fantasies. "To be all in the midbrain."
But even that says that it's not biological, that it's cultural and psychological, that it's some desire to overcome women's own personal barriers to full sexual enjoyment through being forced over them. That's sort of a sad state, I think. Sex is great when you are all in your mid-brain, when what you're told ought to feel good or what is supposedly good is gone and rational thought has fled; when you don't give a shit that your ass is dimpled or your breasts are sagging or that he has a belly or whatever; when you don't care what noises you are making or he is; because those are things the social-you cares about and that version of yourself has been subsumed by the biological-urges-are-paramount iteration of self. And I just feel like this idea that women need to be desired to the point of domination fails to recognize that some part of that — in my opinion, some large part of that — is rooted in the Madonna-Whore social construct in which "good" girls don't want it as much as boys, or don't like it as much, or don't enjoy it as much, rather than in some inherent biological wiring.
ANNA says:
I'm less interested in the rape-fantasies discussion than you are, probably because on some level it makes me uncomfortable, and probably because I don't feel I have the tools to adequately address it, but can we stop here and, as Meana somewhat suggested, cease to use the phrase "rape fantasy"? The underlying definition of the word "rape" implies not only a lack of power but lack of choice, and for those who fantasize about being dominated, to me (and to Meana) there is a lot of power and choice inherent in that fantasy: you get to pick the time, the place, the person. As for the sexologists' evolutionary theory that the female sexual organs - even under threat of harm - can and will protectively lubricate, that is no surprise to anyone who has willingly had intercourse with a partner despite not exactly being in the "mood"... and found herself becoming wet "despite" herself.
To address your point about being "biologically attuned to view the female form as more arousing," I agree that it is possible, but I don't quite buy it. Having come of age in the early '80s, when most every Hollywood movie seemed to be a college-comedy headlined by men but made for the express purpose of showing naked, nubile young women, my ideas about what was considered "sexy" were firmly rooted in the female form. I think in many cases, they still are. Although it's hard for me to say whether or not I was consciously mentally attracted to these images, I sure as hell know my body was; but was that my biology speaking or my subconscious as influenced by the culture, in which "sex" = "naked breasts, and crotch shots"? I will say that Mr. Bergner's early line about Chivers' research - "the readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord" - resonated quite strongly with me. Or, as Chivers says later down, "the horrible reality of psychological research is that you can't pull apart the cultural from the biological."
What I was most interested in, and kept coming back to all day on Saturday after my first read-through of this piece, was the idea of how "narcissism" plays a role in female desire:
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. "Really," she said, "women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic" - it is dominated by the yearnings of "self-love," by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.
Although I have a problem with the word "narcissism" to describe this phenomenon, the underlying idea, "being desired is the orgasm", stuck with me. (I should have said this earlier but I think it's obvious at this point that I am coming at this piece not so much from an analytical POV as a personal one.) I would say that, over the course of my adult life, a good half of the sexual urges directed at a particular man (whether I knew him intimately or not) sprung up on their own (i.e., I found him attractive) and the other half made themselves evident only after (and, I would guess, in response to) interest expressed by him. It's as if discovering that I was the object of someone's lust, interest, or curiosity flipped a switch inside me to the "on" position.
MEGAN says:
Well, goodness knows I never lose interest in rape fantasy discussion, but I think we're sort of saying something without even saying it. It's a rape fantasy not necessarily because it's about domination and forced submission within the context of sex, but because it's a fantasy of what rape is: that it's about sex, or physical desire, or a man desiring you and so losing control of his civilized self that he reverts into something animalistic (I believe at this point Dennis Prager would bring up rape-y chickens) not bound by social mores. And, yet, rape isn't about the expression of physical desire but about the expression of dominance, sadistic dominance, over more than one's body. Actual rape is removed from sex, insofar as it isn't about sex but that sex is the tool used to achieve deeper and more sociopathic ends. Rape is rooted in society, inextricably so, because the use of sex as a tool to achieve those ends requires the framework of consent to be able to subvert as a means to a different end than simple sexual gratification. So actual rape isn't about losing control or about giving up control or, one might say, if one were more versed in the language of the BDSM scene, topping from the bottom. Rape fantasies are, as you say, fantasies about submitting to a supposed aggressor with full consent and knowledge that you can be the one ending it. It's a fantasy of domination even as it's a fantasy about what rape really is. But I think it's a useful description of what the role-playing is for those reasons. I don't have a problem with the term: unlike one of the commenters on the article, I have no illusions that either of the men that sexually assaulted me did so because they thought I "wanted" it. They might have chosen to justify their actions to themselves or others in that way afterwards, but there was no mistaking what was going on either time.
And, the point about being biologically attuned is more Meana's point than mine.
Meana explained the gender imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers's thinking. "The female body," she said, "looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex" - a suggestion that sends a charge through both men and women.
Though I agree more with you that such is most definitely cultural (of course, we all know I have a prediliction for nuture over nature arguments), it's an interesting counterpoint to the argument that arousal is not desire/consent, particularly as it applies to men and women and Chivers' findings that women respond sexually to even naked women engaged in mundane activities but not to unaroused men — though that, too, could be cultural or social, since we're sort of taught that aroused men are indicative of — as you point out — being desired.
In terms of the "narcissism" argument, though, I am not convinced that this is an inherent difference between men and women. Aren't we all equally narcisstic? Don't we all kind of get off from being desired? Is that not the impetus for the "girlfriend experience" in prostitution, to take it to an extreme I don't like? Is showing an interest in a man who might not otherwise find you attractive not equally a turn-on for him? I mean, I think women are more conditioned not to set themselves up for rejection in quite the same way, certainly, but showing an interest in a guy, at least in my experience, can work about the same way. So I'm not sure it's female narcissism as much as human narcissism.
Meana's point with regards to narcissism and masturbation were really interesting, actually. She wrote:
Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it.
I wonder, though, if it sort of depends on how one defines pleasure. I guess, to me, the thought that men don't masturbate to orgasm thinking about orgasming is sort of hilarious? But it makes me wonder if Meana is definining "getting pleasure" as being penetrated, and "giving pleasure" as... oral sex? Or something? Is a man automatically thinking of "giving" pleasure if he is penetrating a woman (in my experience, the reality of that is, um, well, it's not automatic) and a woman only receiving it if she is being penetrated? But I guess I don't define myself as being pleasured if I am being penetrated; I think of it as both giving and receiving it. It is interesting how much Meana comes back to issues of power and control, now that I think about it.
ANNA says:
I agree with you about the "narcissism" argument not necessarily being specific to women, but it was the first time I had really ever heard it broached w/r/t sexual desire and response (let's be clear I am not a voracious reader of sex research), and, although it could be interpreted as insulting, condescending and sexist - and is most assuredly politically incorrect - I didn't take it that way, mainly because I don't think that the researcher MEANT it that way. But to answer your question, "don't we all kind of get off from being desired," I suppose the easy answer is "yes", but there are such subtleties even there, and for some women, "being desired" can quickly go from flattering to intimidating or scary.
Agreed on the narcissism and masturbation: I wish Meana and/or Bergner had defined exactly what is meant by "giving pleasure" and "getting it" actually. And that, of course, brings up a larger, really interesting question that, although it has no one "answer", is still something I'd want to hear from people: What do you think about when you masturbate, and how would you define it: As "giving pleasure" or "getting it"?
Jesus Christ, there was a lot to unpack in this piece and I feel like we didn't even touch on a lot of other, important things - the methodologies used in research (a friend emailed me today saying, "Apparently the research study that showed women were more catholic in their capacity for arousal than men are was performed with equipment that can't tell the difference between a near-orgasmic blood flow to the vaginal walls and a research subject shifting in her chair? Are they fucking kidding us?"); questions about the participants in the research and whether they represent the "norm" in any way; what that "norm" is; the fact that a man wrote the piece; more exploration into same sex attraction among self-identified, firmly "heterosexual" women... the list goes on.
What I came away with ultimately, were dozens of questions, no answers, but a renewed desire to, as Chivers says she hopes her research will, "shift the way" I perceive my capacity to get turned on.
MEGAN says:
Strangely enough, I can answer some of the methodological questions, having participated in one of these sex studies. First off, they screen you pretty thoroughly — people with a strong aversion, morally or otherwise, to pornography are generally left out because of the inhibition factor mentioned in the piece. Second off, the plethysmograph they use is a really blunt instrument — it doesn't measure changes in what is going on in your vagina as much as it measures light. It's sort of the size of a regular plastic tampon applicator, fitted with a light sensor and a light emitter. When you insert it, it establishes a baseline measurement for light reflections, based on its location in one's vagina and then, as one becomes aroused and the vagina becomes engorged with blood, more light is absorbed than reflected and that's how it measures things. But, as you shift, the light and the sensor move closer to (or further away from) the walls, which impacts how the light refraction is measured. So, that's why it's not as sensitive a measure, but it's also what makes it relatively easy to pick up the difference when dissecting the data.
Also, Chivers' research doesn't touch on same-sex attraction among self-identified heterosexual women, and Lisa Diamond's research is the one that touches on fluidity in sexuality among self-identified lesbians and bisexual women. Chivers' research only shows that women respond to sexual stimuli physically in ways they aren't conscious of — but, again, physical arousal isn't consent or even desire. Both Chivers and Meana speculate that it is partly an evolutionary response to overall sexual stimuli (keep in mind, watching monkeys fuck got a sexual response from women) and partly, perhaps, a social/cultural response based on being socialized to find female nudity attractive and arousing. They specifically aren't arguing that it makes women more bisexual, because that's both desire and consent, not arousal. I think most of us would agree no matter if we get a little physically stimulated watching monkeys fuck, that doesn't mean we want to fuck monkeys. We just tend to want to fuck who we'd want to fuck anyway.
What Do Women Want? [New York Times]
Related: What Women Want (Maybe) [New York Times]


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BOGOTA, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Colombia is ratcheting up its war on sea-faring drug traffickers and has invested in German submarines and marine craft in a boost to its navy.
Sea-borne narcotics cargo bound for North America is a growing problem in Central and South America as organized and well-resourced drug gangs deploy submersible craft and other sea-borne vessels to transport contraband.
Mexico's crackdown on drug cartels led to organized drug gangs spilling over in the Caribbean, Central and South America, a threat Colombia wants to confront head-on.
New Colombian defense purchases include vessels for a gradual modernization of the navy, increasingly in the frontline of attack on drug cartels. A wide variety of equipment is on order from France, Germany, Israel and Russia in addition to U.S. defense aid under bilateral anti-drug support programs.
Read More
Colombia is funding some of its multibillion-dollar purchases through a taxation regime introduced by former President Alvaro Uribe and continued by President Juan Manuel Santos.
Several lines of new expenditure are aimed at modernizing the military, El Tiempo newspaper reported.
Two existing U209/1200 Class submarines, ARC Pijao and ARC Tayrona, are being modernized at the state-owned ship at Cartagena. These will be joined by another two German U206A submarines that generated interest in Thailand and other countries that originally planned to buy them.
The U206s are critical to Colombia's fight against the drug gangs' semi-submersible vessels.
There was industry speculation that Colombia is exploring supplies from former Soviet bloc shipbuilders including Poland, Romania and the Ukraine, mostly out of the need to secure compatible equipment at competitive prices.
An estimated 60 fast patrol boats are on order from France and Germany and the local manufacture of the Israeli-designed Galil rifles is set to continue to equip all three armed forces, Defense Industry Daily said.
The pattern adopted by Colombia in its naval acquisition program isn't much different from the diversity of sources accessed by Bogota for modernizing the air force, which ordered 25 Brazil-made Super Tucano counterinsurgency aircraft followed by 15 UH-60L Black Hawks, five Russian Mi-17s, 12 Bell 212 Rapaz helicopter gunships, plus various unmanned aircraft from different sources.
Israel Aerospace Industries earlier supplied Colombia with upgraded C10-C12 Kfir fighter jets and is also helping Colombian armed forces with conversion of various aircraft airborne fuel tankers.
A Boeing KC-767 aircraft was targeted for conversion by the IAI for Colombia's air force. The KC-767 is a military aerial refueling and strategic transport aircraft developed from the Boeing 767-200ER.


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Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Jimmie Johnson views himself as a patient person. But mired in a brutal winless streak, the seven-time NASCAR champion is putting all options on the table when his contract is up next year.
"I'll have to evaluate what I'll want to do after that," he said.
Johnson is growing more and more impatient with each passing week as his Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 race team keeps struggling on the track.
"Over my career, I've been able to be patient and let things work themselves out," Johnson said this week. "There are two factors that are leading to my impatience now — one is I haven't won in a couple years; two is that I don't know what I'm going to be doing in a couple years."
The 43-year-old Johnson hasn't won a Cup Series race since reaching victory lane at Dover on June 4, 2017.
He enters this weekend's NASCAR All-Star race at Charlotte Motor Speedway a disappointing 16th in the points standings with only one top-five finish. Last season, he had just two top-five finishes in 36 starts.
Johnson fully understands that if he wants to capture an eighth Cup Series championship he needs to find a way to win a race soon — or at least get into the mix.
"We haven't been in contention to win a race yet this year," said Johnson. "We've got to fix that. If I'm not in contention to win a race, there's no chance of winning a championship. For me right now, this middle portion of the season is the key for me to get things where they need to be so we can ultimately win races and win a championship."
As Johnson scuffles along,, teammates Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman are off to solid starts with seven top-five finishes and a win between them. Bowman has back-to-back runner-up finishes headed into this weekend.
With the pressure to win mounting, Johnson's team is using the non-points All-Star race as a chance to experiment with different setups on the car.
"We have great flexibility at Hendrick to change cars and build cars in different ways," Johnson said. "At times we've found ourselves very close together. I think there are some areas where our cars are closer together than they've ever been, especially from a body standpoint."
But the No. 48 team hasn't hit on the right package for his Chevrolet Camaro, even though all the team's drivers have access to all the same components.
"We're building our mouse trap and there are options along every part of building that mouse trap that you can take different options and different things," Johnson said. "I believe some of those options, we just haven't chosen the right ones. That's led to where we are right now."
Johnson spoke to the media this week at the Hendrick Motorsports team center for an unveiling of his new military-themed camouflage paint scheme for the Coca-Cola 600 on May 26. Over his shoulder, on the wall behind, was a list of some of his most memorable wins.
They include four All-Star race wins and four Coca-Cola 600 victories.
So there's a chance a positive move could come at a place where he's familiar with winning.
"Our teammates have hit their stride and are looking really good, so we need to head that way," Johnson said.
More AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/apf-AutoRacing and https://twitter.com/AP\_Sports
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Oral Histories
Jack S. Futterman, 1965.
SSA History Archives
Jack Futterman, 1946.
SSA History Archives
Jack Futterman was one of the earliest employees of the Social Security Board, beginning work in the start-up days in the Candler Building in Baltimore. He went on to a long an distinquished career in many areas, but most especially in Administration.
This very brief interview, conducted in early 1974 while Mr. Futterman was still busy as SSA's top official in Administration, gives only a small tasting-sample of the vast expertise and historical knowledge Mr. Futterman has to share.
January 23, 1974
Interviewed by O.R. Garcia
Q.: Mr. Futterman, when did you begin your career with Social Security?
Mr. Futterman: In November of 1936. Do you want to ask me questions or do you want me just to reminisce?
Q.: Well this is really conversation, I suppose, rather than an interview. You began in November of '36. Is that at the very beginning of this program?
Mr. Futterman: Well the law was actually signed, or course, in 1935. There was no appropriation for an organization, and actually there were few people that were loaned from the Department of Labor to form a nucleus in which to do the planning. And I think that they used money that was available to the Department of Labor to finance that small group.
The person that really had major responsibility in those very early days in 1935 was Arthur J. Altmeyer. He was, I think, at that time, Assistant Secretary of Labor, and he was assigned to build up this Social Security organization. But there were no funds available for Social Security as such. It was operating on handouts and there were some small number of people that were hired during the year after the law was signed in August 1935. Offhand, Esther Sholl was one such person; Jim O'Beirne; and I think Jim Murray, the present Regional Commissioner, was hired. But then around the fall of 1936 they had money and they began to hire people. And my recollections, of course, go to the installation in Baltimore which is now known as the Bureau of Data Processing.
Q.: What was then known as DAO.
Mr. Futterman: What was then known as DAO.
Q.: You didn't work at that time in Washington? You worked in Baltimore?
Mr. Futterman: I never have worked in Washington. My entire career with Social Security has been in Baltimore. By the time I moved from the Division of Accounting Operations, which was in December of 1948, the headquarters of Social Security had come to Baltimore. It had come to Baltimore in 1942, or approximately during the war. But I was in service from early 1942 through, I believe, November of 1945, when I returned from service. The early days of Social Security in Baltimore--and I stress that because there are other parts of Social Security with which I was not familiar at the time; but I'm talking about the record keeping organization which is now known as BDP--were illustrative, I think, of much of the environment and the circumstances under which Social Security Administration was born. If you'll stop to think about it, in November of 1936 when I first started to work with Social Security, the country was in the deepest depression it had ever known. It was a worldwide depression. I don't know how many millions of Americans were out of work at that time, but my recollection is that there were numbers like 13 million, and keep in mind that this was a much smaller total population and at a time when a smaller part of the population was part of the working force, so that percentage-wise unemployment was tremendous.
I mention this as being pertinent because while most of the hiring, almost all of the hiring for the Record Center in Baltimore, was at the then grades 1 and 2, with some very rare exceptions at grade 3, the number of people that we had to draw from, and these were people large numbers of whom were Ph.D.'s of all kinds from music to physics or they had graduate degrees, master's degree. I had a master's degree in Education. Bachelor degrees were a dime a dozen. And the poor applicant who had no college background at that time was really facing very tough competition for the most menial clerical position that existed.
Q.: Of course some of these people who started about a grade 3 [inaudible].
Mr. Futterman: Well that was much much later.
Q.: Oh. Not in '36.
Mr. Futterman: Well there are not too many people today in the organization that go back that far in the Candler Building. Some of the people who at about that time that I can quickly recollect, many of them today are in the field or retired from positions in the field in recent years. But people like Lou Zawatzky, although he was not a part of the Records Center, he had an assignment which brought him to work shortly thereafter.
Q.: He started out with the Division of Claims, didn't he?
Mr. Futterman: Yes, but he had some assignment in Baltimore that made him work there. Herb Borgen was one. Henry Schumer used to be my Deputy until a few years ago. There was another. Well literally for many years--and if I had known that this question would come up I could make up a list of 200-300 people who occupied very prominent positions in the Social Security Administration that came in those early days in the Candler Building and worked their way up to top positions in Social Security. Of course, Jim Murray started, and my recollection is as either a messenger or a grade CAF-1. Today he is a Regional Commissioner; Dick Branham also started in Government just shortly before he came to Social Security. He started as a grade 1 and I think he also started as a messenger and he ended up as Bureau Director in Social Security. Not too long after those years, people like Bernie Popick, Art Hess, and Bob Ball came into the organization in the late thirties, like '39 and '40, so that they can also be included in the group that while they were not there at the earliest days, they still were part of that depression reservoir of people that we had to draw on with tremendous confidence.
One thing I think you should be clear on are the salaries, the magnificent salaries that were paid in those days. Grade 1, which was then known as CAF-1, was $1,260 a year; grade 2, CAF-2, was $1,440 a year; and the lucky one who was able to get grade 3, was paid $1,620. There were some not in the record keeping center but in other elements of the Social Security organization at the time, they were, of course, professionals, and the beginning salary for a professional which was known as P-1, was $2,000, and that was the equivalent of a CAF-5, a grade 5. The P grades went by $300 jumps--P-1 was $2,000; P-2 I think was $2,300; P-3 was $2,600; P-4 was $2,900; and P-5, $3,200. And I think Mr. Fay who was the Head of the Bureau of Data Processing and Accounts, was at that time a CAF-11, possibly a 12, and that salary--a 9 was $2,700; a 10 was $3,000. I think I was about $3,00 or some such salary a year.
That's just an aside to give you some feeling of the salary scales. Of course prices were very much lower and one could get a steak dinner at what was then a pretty good eating place, the old Longfellow Hotel up on Charles Street-it was an old residential hotel with very fine quiet service, it wasn't a fancy hotel but the service was superb and the food--you could get a five-course club steak dinner, as I recall, for $1.25. And my wife and I enjoyed that on my tremendous salary quite frequently.
But the point was that there were literally thousands of people who wanted any kind of job and Social Security had the pick of tremendously qualified people. The problem was that for the work that had to be done at that time, they were overqualified and that caused problems. It was unfair, of course, for those that did not have this tremendous education to compete for jobs which they were perfectly capable of doing and lose out on the basis of what was really not relevant--education. But in another sense I have always felt that if I were to return to this life at some later date and be entrusted in an underdeveloped country or in some developing country with responsibility for setting the precise time at which to begin a social security program, I would take the depths of a depression--not that I would want to create one--but I would wait until one arose because that would be absolutely the best time to start off a social security program, to staff it, because what happened then was we drew into the Social Security ranks a tremendous reservoir of professional, intelligent, confident staff. And we drew off that reservoir of staff for many years to man the jobs that a developing program, such as social security, was setting up. In other words, we had a sort of standby army of highly-qualified people to select from when we got around to developing the full structure of technical and special jobs that were required to run a large program--a large national program--such as social security. And it wasn't until World War II that some problems developed in respect to not having all the people to fill all the kinds of jobs that were needed.
There's something, too, about the way we started that I think conditioned the style of the Social Security Administration. As I've said, it was in the deep depression and people were highly qualified, overly qualified. But fortunately, social security had overtones of sort of a semi-religious activity, one with which one could identify with a purpose because all about were evidences of economic insecurity, people who were old. And in those days, people over 40 might have been considered not in very good competition for the jobs that were then available because of the great unemployment. People in their old age were just unprotected and had no means of livelihood. And so when this social security scheme was developed, it was something that people could identify with with enthusiasm. In addition, there was absolutely no map of where we were to go or how we were to do it. The job was not defined; it had not been worked out. It reminds me of Alonzo Stagg-A Punt and a Prayer. The law was passed but the mechanics whereby people would contribute over their lifetime in relation to the work that they did and be entitled to benefits on the basis of the work that they performed, the record, that job of keeping lifetime records, there was no plan for it, there was blueprint for it.
And, as a matter of fact, there was a lot of opinion to the effect that the job was so big it would fall of its own weight and couldn't be done.
Well these highly-qualified people--and again, I'm only talking about that part of social security with which I was then familiar, the record keeping part-those people set about proving that it could be done, and they did it, as I've said, by improvising as they went along. And by application of great ingenuity, the illustrations abound, I think, that graphically indicate the kind of ingenuity with which people attacked what might be regarded as simple tasks but when multiplied by millions become very difficult tasks.
Take a simple thing like continuous forms. We used to have ledger sheets ostensibly prepared so that you could post each person's lifetime earnings record on that ledger sheet and that would be the record on which the individual's benefits would later be determined when he became 65. Well they were pin-feed forms and there would be a machine that would head them and they would still have the pin feed edges on them. And obviously before you put them in file you needed to do two things. You needed to take the edges off it, the edges with the holes, strip them as we called it, and then you had to separate one sheet from another. A relatively simple job, but when you have 30 million it becomes quite a task. And if you can visualize yourself taking one sheet at a time in your hand and then trying to pull the edge off it and pull that edge off to separate it, you can see yourself doing this into the 21st century. And this kind of a task was reduced to a mass-production job, people were given piles of ledger sheets without any instruction as to how to do it, and it was just a delight to see how their minds began to operate to find ways in which to speed up this operation and ways to reduce the cuts that people got from the edges of paper which could cut their hands. They'd start using gloves. Some started to use pliers to pull off single sheets but get a set of pliers and clamp and tear. They used gloves to prevent cuts. They used cutting machines to slice through falling edges. All of them had problems. And eventually one of my colleagues who had a job at that time just like my own, a fellow by the name of Gus Chesler, who wasn't one of the intellectually, one of the creative people, but he was an inventive type, he developed the machine which is used today, and it was patented by the United States Government, a simple device. The ledger sheets were fed in. There were two knives that were vertical and as the ledger sheets passed the knives, the knives just cut and this ledger sheet moved forward. And in order to separate them, they were on a set of rollers that were curved so that when they passed a certain point after the sides had been stripped, the tension on sort of a semi-change in direction of the flow would tear the sheets and they'd just fall on top of another. And what had initially turned out to be a very tedious, monotonous, unpleasant manual job was turned over to a couple of machines that were the product of the people's own creativity.
We also had such simple tasks as I recall of alphabetizing some 30 million what we then called office records. We had an alphabetic file and a numeric file. The SS-5 applications we have today were filed numerically. But we needed a file from which we could search and get that same information if we searched alphabetically. When you try to alphabetize 30-some-odd million records that size, roughly 3x5 I guess, that's a lot of paper to handle and it's a massive alphabetizing job. And here again, cards were given out for people to alphabetize and they just went to work in ingenuous ways. You might start out using whatever desk space you had and separate the A's and the B's and the C's and you'd have 26 places and you'd find you'd need a lot of desk space. So what happened was people took a board and took punch cards and stapled the punch cards one on top of the other with 26 slots and labeled the first one A, B, C, C and they put the board on their stomach. They said, here, instead of going like that standing up, they would file that way, right in the slot. I just use these two very simple illustrations. They graphically demonstrate the kind of ingenuity, the kind of enthusiasm , with which people undertook tasks for which there were no plans, no procedures, and applied great ingenuity to it.
Now there were sophisticated tasks that were done in the same way. The machinery that we had to do the job in those days to keep records did not exist. I should rephrase that. There was no machinery that really could do the social security job before the Social Security organization came into existence. It was only because the Social Security organization developed the idea of a machine and the specifications of it and worked with IBM, I think, that what is now known as the collator was developed. And the collator that was then developed was a punch card handling machine which was activated by a plugboard wiring arrangement, giving the machine some flexibility. If you changed the wires in the plugboard, it would do things somewhat differently. It was a fixed wiring in the machines that Social Security got. It was known as the Social Security setup, and that collator never existed until it was built on our specifications. And once it came out, it was the basis upon which IBM's business took off. It seemed because the country then had a set of tabulating equipment that could undertake to do jobs that up to that point were really not too possible with tabulating equipment. They could do limited jobs but the collation, the ability to take two sets of records and do a matching to see whether they were appropriate or the same and related to one another and then to make, in effect, decisions as to whether to interfile one or to reject it was a facility that did not exist in the equipment up to that time. Up till that time you could take cards and you could tabulate them and you could total them and you could add them and subtract them. You had a sorting machine which could arrange them in sequence. But you just didn't have the capacity to take a set of, let's say, bills for O.R. Garcia and Irene Gold and a lot of other people and mechanically post them to the accounts by first making sure that the item did relate to your account by checking your name and account number and after affirming that, then crediting it to your account. So this machine which was created by our technical people really was at the bottom of IBM's takeoff in the business. Well we were responsible for that.
The tabulating equipment in those days was extremely simple. And they were like large typewriters. You'd put cards in and then they would print. They would list the items. They would also list amounts if you wanted. And they had the capability of producing a total, so that the tabulator was a combination of an adding machine and a typewriter. And it was very slow. But before our people got through with that simple piece of equipment, it was a highly sophisticated tabulator for one job.
Now I'll stop with these illustrations.
Q.: Well they're very useful. I did want to find out--I did want to know what an organization table of DAO in 1936 would have looked like, and to take whatever existed then in the way of organization and disclose the changes it underwent for the first few years.
Mr. Futterman: Well I'm sure Abe Bortz has it in some detail. Let me just finish this other point. The ledger sheets which I mentioned to you, after they were stripped of their pin feed attachments and separated from one another then had to be available for posting of earnings reported for those individuals. And that job was done--they had this massive tabulator in front of you and you had a file of ledger sheets unposted and you had a bunch of cards that went into the machine. You took a ledger sheet and you put it into the machine and you turned the roller to position it to the line that you wanted it to print on. And the cards, one card might be there and the machine would go "bloop" and then you had to take the ledger sheet out. Now I should have said beforehand since not every ledger sheet had a wage card there had to be a listing made of all the wage cards so that you knew which accounts were active and you had to pull them out or offset them in the ledger sheet tray and then you had to be sure you had them in exact sequence. The punch cards, you know, have holes in them and you didn't read them. They were stacked up in the machine and you had to be sure that it was printed on the right sheet. Well that's a slow tedious job. And my recollection was that a very fast man could post 1,100 ledgers in a day. Considering we had 30 million ledgers, you can see what kind of a terrific job that would have been twice a year which was the semi-annual thing you had then.
They then put the electric eye on the machine that made it unnecessary for you to position the ledger sheet by turning the roller. It would automatically go to a certain position where the electric eye would control it and stop it. But that didn't solve the problem of making sure that the ledger sheet was for the right number or for the cards that were next going to be going through the machine. So we developed a way of putting holes on the ledger sheets that represented the numbers and a reading device in the machine that read the number on the ledger sheet and the number on the punch card made sure that they related to one another and eliminated all this offsetting that you had to do in advance. Well this went on and on and on and in the relatively short period what was very very primitive type equipment for the job was highly sophisticated within the limits of the kind of equipment that it was.
Of course we then pioneered in getting a whole new technology. Ed Rossii--well, before him, a fellow by the name of Perkins in the thirties, the late thirties, developed for us a whole advanced position on micro photography. They microfilmed. We were the pioneers in photographing records because if we had not we would have been pushed out of the Candler Building many times over. We were accumulating paper at a tremendous rate. Well so much for that one particular facet. There were many other facets that would be very interesting to go into, but you did ask about the beginning organization. And all I can say is that it was very fluid.
Q.: Oh, was it?
Mr. Futterman: It was very fluid. And you have to keep in mind that the nature of the job was changing. The initial job, one could not--well, to backtrack. One could not set up a permanent organization because you had first to set up the records, and that was a massive job. Then after you set up the records, you then had to develop procedures and you had some initial problems, and then of course you had the system underway. Then you made changes and you developed systematic ways of operating the system.
The first job you had was to take these millions of sacks of mail that had accumulated in the post office and produce--well the applications were issued. On the basis of the applications, social security cards had been issued to people and two records therefore came to Baltimore. One was the application form, the SS-5; the other was the office record form, then known as 702, OA-702, which had the name information but it was to be alphabetized.
The first thing that was necessary was to set up a punch card record that carried the essential information. So there was a tremendous punching job to punch up from these 30-odd million records punch cards, one that would be the basis for the mechanical system of maintaining the accounts, and another punch card that would be used--well it was known as an actuarial card. It would be used to develop some understanding of the basic factors that went into the costing of the system, the actuarial factors. And that card, representing the people who were coming into the system, was diverted to the analytical, not the record people but the actuarial people to study the age and sex and other composition of the work force that was enrolling. So the initial job was to set up the records. Now what are the records that we needed to set up? We set up a punch card record, master card. We set up a ledger sheet that I touched on. We set up a numerical register. After you had the punch cards, you'd list a hundred of them on a page, so that for a given area, which was the first three digits of a number, and for an area and group which was the next two digits, and thousand series, you'd have, let's see. The first six numbers would be the same and you'd have a whole page. Like for 001-01-0100, you'd start 0100, the top one listed, and 0199 would be the last one listed on the page. The next page would be 0200. It would be 001-01-0200,0201, etc. Those were known as the numerical registers.
There were other records that had to do with employers. Employers also had to file applications. They were more difficult to deal with and to alphabetize, and they needed to be coded. And I'm going to mention also that in the employee records an important job was to code these records. Another record I didn't mention was what we call the flexoline files, which became the national index. So Futterman would not be filed essentially as Futterman but it would be filed--Jack Futterman would be filed under F-360 which was the phonetic code which only went to the consonants in my name after you forget the F, but the succeeding ones, the T's were 3. The R--did I say 360? The T's were 3; the R was 6; and the M was 5. So Futterman would be, I think 365, if I'm right, after almost 40 years. And then they would file Futterman 365 with all other 365's. The next break would be first name and middle name. So it would be F-365, Jack S, and then within that group if there were more Jack S's, they would be by date of birth, sequenced by date of birth. So that you would have not only Jack S. Futterman's but you'd have Jack S. Futterman's, Futterman's, with D's, because D's had the same value, all kinds of variations but names which had essentially the same configuration of consonants which was a system designed to overcome some of the problems of an alphabetic system. An alphabetic system, if you're off by one letter you may search that file forever and never find it. If you're trying to find Smithe with an E, S-M-I-T-H-E, as against a regular Smith without the E, you might be able if you do a lot of searching. Then there are all kinds of variations on that, especially people the spelling of whose names are not always stabilized, people of ethnic origins. Spanish people and people like yourself don't particularly have problems, but the Poles and people of that sort--Z's and the S's and the Ch's and all the rest are not stable. Sometimes their names get simplified retaining the essence. This eliminated that kind of a problem.
But incidentally, we had a great deal of problems with Spanish names. First it was not really understood what the Spanish and Latin customs were. We often really didn't realize what the family name was. As you, Irene, I'm sure O.R. doesn't need me to tell him, but the Spanish custom is that the mother's maiden name is appended as a part of the father's maiden name. And later in life it's usually dropped or it's abbreviated. So that I don't know what your--what is your full name with your mother's--
Mr. Garcia: Garcia Y. Hinojosa.
Mr. Futterman: Do you use the--
Mr. Garcia: No, but an uncle of mine does
Mr. Futterman: He uses the full name. But sometimes you use just the letter, right? But anyway, if you use just the letter or you drop it, no problem about Garcia. But if you use Garcia Y. Hinojosa we set it up many times as Garcia as the middle name. And we had similar problems with the Chinese. The true name, family name, of the Chinese is the first name which is the family, and we made it the first name, see. Lee Hung, or something like that, Lee would be the name; Hung is the given name. And sometimes they would have Anglicized it, you know, themselves. So there was a lot of confusion. And of course it was essential to set the records up in the right name.
You asked me about organization and I'll try in the next 5 minutes so I can go back to work.
Q.: Rather than that, as you said I can get that from Bortz or someone else who was in DAO. You said that you left DAO in '48. Did you go into management then?
Mr. Futterman: I became the Budget Officer.
Q.:And the rest of your career you were in management or administration?
Mr. Futterman: Well I was in management when I was in DAO. I started out as a grade CAF-2, but that was for about 4 days.
Q.: Was that in 1936?
Mr. Futterman: 1936. Then I was appointed a group leader in charge of 20 people at CAF-2 for several months.
Q.:You were in effect then a kind of systems analyst planner or something in DAO for most of your career then.
Mr. Futterman: No, no, no. I had lots and lots of jobs.
Q.: Well what I'm getting at is that you served as Director of OA for 5 years and before that had a great deal to do in what eventually became OA, and there's nobody around--there are a lot of people who can tell us about, you know, what it was like in DAO but there's nobody who can tell us what it's like to run OA because you're the only one who's ever done it.
Mr. Futterman: That's not really so.
Q.: Well, all right, not OA, but you certainly had a big part in running the administration of the Social Security Administration. And I was wondering, since we are running out of time--I didn't know that.
Mr. Futterman: We have run out of time.
Q.:All right, we have run out of time--if you could in your own words sort of assess what it was like running OA, what you tried to do, or what you consider your chief achievements or disappointments have been.
Mr. Futterman: I don't think I'd want to try to undertake it in the time that we have available. Maybe at some future time. But that's trying to compress not 5 years of effort, I was there actually 7 years. In May of 1965 I reported officially to the then OA which was then DM, and I left in June of 1978. My calculation is that it was 7 years and it felt like 7, not 5. But there were many things there and I just would not want to try to characterize it. I'll just give you some small indication and then just leave it at that.
Mr. Futterman: There were, I think, many things that I did that went to establish a style of administration and was warm and sensitive, public-oriented, program-centered, an administration that was regarded as a means to a program end and not as so often is the case, an end in itself to be achieved in the cheapest way possible. But ends, program ends, always seemed to me to be the way you evaluated how good your product was, and that in administration if what we did was good, it meant something better at the end of the line for the beneficiary of the program, for the people in terms of either better service or in terms of quicker service, less errors, more dignity, more courtesy, et cetera. And this is not something that you accomplish by a single act or a single improvement. It had to pervade everything that you did.
But you can't accomplish this as an individual. This kind of thing involves a multifaceted attack. It involves the development of a philosophy to undergird the Administration. What you do ought to be consistent with some kind of a philosophical view of the proper role of Social Security. In that respect I had a happy relationship with Robert M. Ball. We shared the same kinds of thoughts and the same kinds of values as to public service, and so we sort of made music together in this respect. But as I said, it took a multifaceted effort. It meant the creation of an Administration philosophy, an administrative philosophy. It meant the creation of an Administration strategy, you know, how are you going to get to where you wanted to be? It meant the development of good people who shared the values that you had in terms of the role of administration in the whole scheme of things, you know, what were the important things? Were the important things to reduce the unit cost? And how does that relate to improving the end result of the program insofar as the individual for whom the program was designed is concerned.
I think that I did a lot of things. I'd hate to put one above another. But some of the things that make me feel very very good about are the things that I did that affected the staff, whether they knew it or not. Of course one visible product that most people identified me with and recognized my hand in was the establishment of a multifaceted employee development program which I think was outstanding for the Government as a whole. We had a program that no comparable agency even approached in terms of, I think, substance. I'm not prepared to say that some might not have been cushier or more superficially attractive, but when you look at the kinds of employee development programs combined with the idea of self-development that I had a large part in creating, if not imagining and developing--the internship program of course we've had--but to make it better we had to develop the staff associates program. We developed the fellows program. We developed and expanded the [unintelligible] program. We developed great participation in civil service programs at Berkeley, at Allenbury, and various other places. From a rather insulated outfit that rarely had our people leaving, we had scores of people in orbit being trained, separated from their duties. And this was one of the, I think, very big achievements, the ability to conceive of a way of getting the bureaus and offices to be willing to agree to let people go away and be trained. They used to be opposed to it, not because they didn't want people to be trained, but because it always presented a problem to them. They had a vacant job that they couldn't fill and the work was undone and, that was a problem. One of the real breakthroughs was the idea I developed of setting up jobs, fellows jobs, and setting up associates jobs, which in effect eliminated this problem because the jobs that these people vacated then could be backfilled. And not to be overlooked was the ripple effect of training that took place. If you had 30 fellows identified for this highly formal program which we had of 2 years and which I think is a manifestation of a willingness to invest, then there are 30 people that took their jobs on a temporary promotion and they developed skills and knowledge and experience, and the 30 jobs that they left were also filled by people. You had a ripple effect throughout the organization, so that by this device of creating a job you multiplied the development, the employee development factor by many times. The same thing applied to associates. We had something like 300-some-odd associates-two classes at a time. And those jobs were freed up. And so there were people taking their places and people taking the place of the ones that took their places.
Besides all of this activity, the whole tone of the organization, I think, improved because it opened up opportunities for people throughout the organization. It made some people visible who would never been seen. In a national organization like we have, if you're working in a place like Presque Isle, Maine the chances of anything happening to you like happened in the Horatio Alger stories is very rare. Who goes to Presque Isle, Maine? And what chance is it that the Commissioner or the Secretary is going to happen by chance to be in Presque Isle, Maine, and identify that there's a guy up there named O.R. Garcia who is a bright and able guy and we ought to bring him down? Part of the business of promotion has to rest upon people being visible. People are afraid--and legitimately so--to take a job that's important and fill it with an unknown. When you break down the barriers of--or at least if you don't break down completely, if you reduce the barriers, people are more willing to take a chance if they've had a favorable experience. Well if you came down from Presque Isle, Maine, and they got to know you, you worked there, and they liked what you did, then they'd bring you down, you know, and they'd consider you for a job. And if they had a good experience with you they'd be more inclined. They'd say, "Well now, you know, there are a lot of guys there. We just don't know them." So it breaks down a lot of the things. Well I've kind of rambled.
As I say, I can talk about maybe 50 different aspects of OA's activity systems work--planning for new legislation, upgrading the quality of the leadership of the organization, employee relations, civil rights. It's almost endless. And to say that I look on one as a more important achievement than another would be to be artificial. They are all my children and even the least of them I don't like less than I like the others. And on that note, which is a sort of poetic note, I will leave you.
Q.:Thank you very much.


text:
Living with Michael Jackson (2003) full version
By -
I just watched this again on TV the other day. It was startling then and even more so now. MJ says his father used to beat him with iron cords & make fun of his nose + says he used his own spem cells on all his children. (which we know now is definitely is not true)
Living with Michael Jackson is a documentary, in which British journalist Martin Bashir interviewed Michael Jackson over a span of 8 months, from May 2002 to January 2003. It was shown first in the UK on 3 February 2003 and in the US three days later on ABC, introduced by Barbara Walters. Martin Bashir put the proposal to Jackson as a way to show the world the truth about him and make nothing off limits. Jacksons decision to make the documentary was made on the suggestion by his close friend Uri Geller. It later emerged that Geller had turned down another bid for the interview by journalist Louis Theroux. The interview was very unusual, as it had been extremely rare for Jackson to allow such access to his personal life, or to talk so freely about his traumatic childhood. Nevertheless, he did show some reserve when asked to discuss other personal issues, such as the plastic surgery he has had.
R.I.P Michael Jackson


text: The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were undoubtedly the heyday of social, political and special interest clubs. Organisations were were generally meticulous in the detail that they kept about their associates and members. If an ancestor was a member of a club or society they may well appear in these records.


text:
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium turned to cloud-based analytics when it needed a way to better predict how many visitors would be coming on any given day. With 65% of its expenses dedicated to payroll and attendance swings that ranged from 1,200 to 5,000 people per day, finding a way to ensure that staffing levels corresponded to attendance levels represented a huge opportunity for savings. "We live and breathe by attendance at the gate," says Donna Powell, business and administrative services manager at the Tacoma, Wash., facility.
Unfortunately, historical attendance and revenue data was locked inside the point-of-sale system, and reporting capabilities were weak. "We needed to have better access to our data and apply that to the business," she says. But there was another problem as well: The two-person IT organization lacked the resources to take on the project.
Explaining that "we knew we couldn't bring an extra burden to them," Powell says she championed a strategy that involved bringing in Cognos and integrator BrightStar Partners to create a SaaS-based system that pulls data from the zoo's 12 million POS records and combines it with weather data to help predict attendance.
IT facilitated that initial connection to the POS data and then stepped back. Powell and visitor services supervisor Derek Chapin then worked with the vendor to create the system. "The big challenge was figuring out how to organize the data and making sure it was accurate," Chapin says.
Initial issues with connectivity to the cloud-based system required a network bandwidth upgrade. The new system, now running smoothly, includes both a data warehouse and an interactive dashboard with a drag-and-drop user interface that lets staff analyze trends around revenue, attendance, and food and retail sales.


text:
Software Map
Project Tree
Now limiting view to projects in the following categories:
Topic :: Bayesian Statistics [Remove This Filter]
Intended Audience :: Developers [Remove This Filter]
Development Status > 4 - Beta
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3 projects in result set.
|0. Bayesian Estimation and Model Checking - This package mainly deals with generalized linear spatial models in Bayesian way for estimation, prediction and model checking.
|Activity Percentile: 0.00
Registered: 2011-08-18 03:20
|1. arm - R functions for processing lm, glm, mer and polr outputs.
|Activity Percentile: 0.00
Registered: 2008-04-09 23:40
|2. casper - casper infers alternative splicing from high-throughput sequencing data both for known variants and de novo discovery. We use a Bayesian model with few assumptions, and modern model selection ideas with improved theoretical and computational properties.
|Activity Percentile: 0.00
Registered: 2011-10-11 08:51