January 2014


www.hamptonroadsmessenger.com


Research: Art Activities Preserve Health, Heritage for Ethnic Elders


The Hampton Roads Messenger


elders questions about preparing taxes, balancing checkbooks and talking in public to determine how engaged they were in everyday living.


Research questions like these


may be relevant to Native Americans, but scientists also need to be aware of cultural considerations, Jeffrey Proulx said.


A member of the Mohawk Nation


Marlene Herrera holds up a saddle blanket woven by her great aunt. (Colleen Keane/Navajo Times)


BY COLLEEN KEANE ALAMO, N.M--Carefully


dragging out a large, clear plastic container from her bedroom closet, Marlene Herrera, a member of the Alamo Navajo community said, “I’m glad I saved these.”


Opening the lid, she pulls out a


red, brown and black saddle blanket her great aunt Minnie Martine weaved. Then, she pulls out several her mother, Isabelle Pino-Thomas made.


Altogether, there are 12 weavings


mostly of the distinctive and colorful eye-dazzler design.


Pino-Thomas, 78, grew up in


Alamo, a satellite community of the Navajo Nation located about 200 miles from Window Rock, Ariz., the capital of the Navajo Nation.


From Albuquerque, Alamo is


a two-hour drive southwest through Socorro then to Magdalena. From there, it’s another 28 miles north on a road that winds uphill into high desert canyons, hills and mountains.


Looking closer at the rugs and


blankets, Herrera wonders how she can help her mother document and archive her work, which she said is spread across the country in different museums, some she knows about. But, there could be others.


At the same time, Herrera wants


to do all she can to help her mother maintain good health as she gets older. Herrera is not alone in these concerns.


“Ninety-five percent of older


artists don’t archive their work,” said Joan Jeffri, who directs the Research Center for the Arts and Culture at the National Center for Creative Aging, in Washington, D.C. She’s also the director of Art Cart, an intergenera- tional project that partners older artists with students who help them document and archive their lifelong art work.


To determine the health impact,


Jeffri conducted research study through Columbia University, where she taught for 22 years. She presented her preliminary data at the 66th Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Annual Scientific Meeting held in New Orleans in November.


Jeffri told a group of about


20 people who attended one of her sessions that the Art Cart experiment included 35 white, Hispanic and African American artists ages 62 and older, who make their livings as artists primarily in New York City and Washington, D.C.


She said one of the artists, age 92, had 2,500 paintings unrolled and


unsigned before the project started. Although her final results are


pending, Jeffri said preliminary data showed that Art Cart artists did significantly better in at least one physical activity compared to a control group in the study of seniors not involved in art activities.


“Older adults can still be


productive and with meaningful activities; they will live longer,” Jeffri said.


Jeffi’s scientific inquiry was


one of several at the conference that addressed the impact of art-related activities on healthy aging.


Doctoral student Crystal Bennett of


the University of Florida, Gainesville, said she received inspiration from a Creek Indian traditional dance for her research.


“Every Thanksgiving, we have a


tradition in my family to go to a small town on the Creek Indian reservation. As I watched the tribal dancers and saw older Native Americans dance nonstop for about an hour, I thought dance really has some value,” she said.


From those experiences, she


designed and conducted a pilot project to see if line dancing--country and western style group dance that does not call for a partner--is a feasible intervention to improve the overall health and wellbeing of elders.


Bennett, who presented her results


in a poster session at the conference, explained, “I looked at the effects of eight weeks of line dancing and found that the dance group [in comparison to the control group that did not dance] had better physical health and reported improved social functioning,” she said.


According to Bennett, the oldest student who participated was 87.


Nina Kraus, who received GSA’s


2013 Gene D. Cohen Research Award, which recognizes research on creativity and aging, studies the influence of musical experience on older adults.


Kraus, a professor of neurobiology


and physiology at Northwestern University, in Chicago, found that people who play musical instruments their entire lives hear better when they are older compared to people who have not played musical instruments.


“Healthy aging begins in


childhood. Playing music is the anti-aging lifelong experience,” she said.


In a conference session titled


“Secrets of a Long Life,” investigators said they asked Japanese and white


and a doctoral student at Oregon State University, Proulx noted, “Native Americans may have different things that are important to them or make them feel stronger inside.”


Bradley Wilcox, research director at the University of Hawaii, Manoa,


5


who studies life spans of Hawaiian centenarians—those who have lived to 100 or more--pointed to indigenous cultural beliefs and values.


He mentioned that one tradition


in Okinawa, known for it’s high proportion of centenarians, is called bashofu, or banana-leaf weaving. He said that bashofu weavers have been found to be healthy agers with less dementia and a passion to go on.


“Bashofu weavers appreciate the


[banana] plant from the time it’s a seed to the time it gives its life to the fiber,” Wilcox said, adding, “They can keep up their work, because they have done it for years.”


SBA Revises Size Standards for Utilities and Construction Sectors WASHINGTON – The U.S. Small


Business Administration (SBA) issued two final rules in the Federal Register today, revising size standards for firms in two North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) sectors, namely, Utilities (Sector 22) and Construction (Sector 23).


Size standards define the


maximum size a firm can be and still be considered a small business. The revised standards reflect changes in marketplace conditions and public comments that SBA received to its earlier proposed rules.


New size standards will enable


more businesses in these sectors to obtain or retain small business status; will give federal agencies a larger pool of small businesses from which to choose for their procurement programs; and will make more small businesses eligible for SBA’s loan programs.


For industries in Sector 22,


Utilities, SBA increased revenue-based size standards for three industries and changed the basis for determining business size from megawatt hours to number of employees in 10 electric power generation, transmission, and distribution industries. SBA retained the current 500 employee size standard for the one remaining industry (NAICS 221210) in the sector.


The final rule also removes


Footnote 1 from SBA’s Table of Size Standards, which stated that a firm was small if it, including its affiliates, was primarily engaged in the generation, transmission, and/or distribution of electric energy for sale and its total electric output for the preceding fiscal year did not exceed 4 million megawatt hours.


More than 400 additional firms


will qualify as small under these new size standards for Utilities and become eligible for SBA’s loan and federal procurement programs.


A summary of current and revised


size standards in sector 22, Utilities can be found www.sba.gov/content/ small-business-size-standards.


The SBA increased two size


standards in Sector 23 (Construction) and retained the current size standards for the remaining industries in the sector. Specifically, SBA increased the size standards from $7 million


to $25 million for firms in the Land Subdivision industry, and from $20 million to $25.5 million for businesses engaged in Dredging and Surface Cleanup activities, which is an “exception” to the size standard for NAICS 237990, Other Heavy and Civil Engineering Construction.


In its originally proposed rule,


SBA sought comments on eliminating or otherwise modifying Footnote 2, which requires that, to qualify as small, a firm must perform at least 40 percent of the volume dredged with its own equipment or equipment owned by another small dredging business. The SBA reconsidered, and based on those comments, the Agency is keeping Footnote 2 without change.


Nearly 500 additional firms


will qualify as small under the new construction size standards and become eligible for SBA’s loan and federal procurement programs.


A summary of current and revised


size standard in sector 23, Construction can be found www.sba.gov/content/ small-business-size-standards.


The new small business size


standards will be effective January 22, 2014. To review the rules and public comments, go to www.regulations.gov. Each final rule has a separate RIN number, specifically:


Sector 22, Utilities – (RIN


3245-AG25). Sector 23, Construction – (RIN


3245-AG37). The SBA is reviewing size


standards by taking into account the structural characteristics of individual industries, including average firm size, the degree of competition, and federal government contracting trends. This ensures that small business size definitions reflect current economic and market conditions in those industries. The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 requires SBA to review all size standards at least every five years.


SBA issued a “Size Standards


Methodology” White Paper, which explains how SBA establishes, reviews and modifies its small business size standards. This paper is available online at www.sba.gov/size. Also available on this site is the latest about SBA’s revisions to small business size standards.


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