Knowledge About Active Speaker: History of Active Speaker

The National Conference of State Societies (NCSS) was charted by Congress on April 3, 1952 when President Harry Truman signed Public Law 82-293 (36 U.S.C. 1505). But the association was also known by other names in the early 20th and late 19th Century and the early roots date back to at least a listing of officers in the Congressional Directory of 1876 when the group was known as the Central Association of the States. NCSS is an umbrella organization for all state societies whose members include state and territorial expatriates including students, members of the military, active and retired lobbyists and government workers, members of Congress and staff living in the national capital region. The estimated membership of about 55 state and territorial societies in January 2009 was about 22,000 people. Only Rhode Island was not represented in the group in early 2009 for want of an active state society.

Early daysState societies have been nonpartisan since World War I. Before that, some were nonpartisan but there were some partisan clubs called state associations between 1854 and 1917. The first state club was the Illinois Democratic Club of Washington City which was founded in 1854 by government clerks from Illinois loyal to President Franklin Pierce. Clubs were formed for Maryland and Louisiana in 1856. However, partisan identification could change quickly as it did when the Illinois club quickly converted to the Illinois Republican Association when President Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861. Members of early state associations were mostly made up of government clerks in the days before Civil Service reform, who wanted to stay on the good side of whichever party controlled the White House. State clubs were considered to be an obstacle to Civil Service reform during the first administration of President Grover Cleveland whose Commissioner of Civil Service, Bishop John H. Oberly of Illinois, tried to abolish all state clubs but did not succeed due to their support on Capitol Hill, according to newspapers of the time.

As Civil Service reforms finally did take hold in the 1890s, government clerks became more secure in their jobs and less worried about political networks. More state associations became nonpartisan and the wide admission of women members helped to change the focus from political activities to nonpartisan social and civic activities. State clubs of the early 1890s included the Wolverine State Society for members from Michigan and the Lone Star Society for members from Texas. In 1905, the Lone Star Society we renamed as the Texas State Society of Washington, DC by founder Dr. Oscar Wilkinson who has also served as a former president of the Mississippi State Society. Wilkinson invited other state associations both partisan and nonpartisan to a picnic in 1913 to start the Union of State Societies. After halting starts during the First World War, the group went through several name changes between 1919 and 1943 including the National Council of State Societies, the All States Society, the Pan State Society, the Association of State Society Officers and finally the Conference of State Societies which helped Civil Defense officials track aircraft over Washington, DC during World War II. Many military service men and women were invited to attend state society dances free of charge during World War II.

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Harry A. "Tex" Sieben Jr. (born November 24, 1943) is an American politician and statesman from Minnesota, who served as the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives and as a major general and Adjutant General of the Minnesota Air National Guard. He is also a founding partner of personal injury law firm SiebenCarey.

Sieben was born in Hastings, Minnesota, and attended Hastings High School. He earned his B.A. in business administration from Winona State College (now Winona State University) in 1965, and J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1968. He joined the law firm of Grose, Von Holtum and Sieben (now SiebenCarey) until he was elected to the Minnesota House in 1970 as a member of the Liberal caucus in the officially non-partisan legislature, and later as a Democrat when political parties were recognized in the legislature. Sieben served 14 years in the Legislature and was Speaker of the House between 1981 and 1984. In 1985 he rejoined his previous law firm.

In 1968, Sieben joined the United States Army Reserve, where he served seven years with the Military Intelligence Branch working as a Morse code intercept operator and platoon leader. He then received a direct commission in the Minnesota Air National Guard in April 1975. He served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps for the 133rd Airlift Wing, 148th Fighter Wing and Headquarters Minnesota Air National Guard. In 1990, he was appointed as the state judge advocate for the Minnesota National Guard. In 1997 he was promoted to brigadier general and assistant adjutant general in the Minnesota Air National Guard, and later as acting adjutant general for the State of Minnesota. He was promoted to major general in 2003. After retiring from the military, Sieben became a civilian aide to the Secretary of the Army for Minnesota on October 27, 2006.

Sieben is married to wife, Virginia, and has two children and two stepchildren. Both his brother, Michael Sieben, and niece, Katie Sieben, have served in the Minnesota State Legislature. Sieben's father, Harry Sieben Sr., was also active in Minnesota politics.

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The social salience of an individual is a compilation of that individual's salient attributes. These may be changes to dress or physical attributes with respect to a previous point in time or with respect to the surrounding environment

Salient attributes of an individual may include the following:

Clothing (e.g., boldly patterned clothing)

Manipulation to physical appearance (e.g., novel hair color)

Accessory that is infrequent in presence across the general population or indicative of an individual change (e.g., a leg brace)The social salience of an individual in a group is defined both by individual salient attributes and comparison with the attributes of other members of the group. As with the salience of objects, the social salience of an individual in a group depends on the attributes of the other members of that group. Little is known about social salience between groups but within-group preferences lead to greater social salience for members of an observers own group than for members outside of the group or in a different group.

Salient attributes of an individual in a group may include the following:

Activeness

Trustworthiness

Friendliness

Volume of speech

Reliability

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During a visit to Europe in 1882, American suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony discussed the idea of an international women's organization with reformers in several countries. A committee of correspondence was formed to develop the idea further at a reception in their honor just before they returned home. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Anthony and Stanton, organized the founding meeting of the ICW, which convened in Washington, DC, on March 25, 1888. Representing Louisiana at the Woman's International Council was Caroline Elizabeth Merrick. The meeting was part of a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention.

Rachel Foster Avery managed much of the details of the planning of the first meeting of the ICW, and Susan B. Anthony presided over eight of the sixteen sessions. The ICW drafted a constitution and established national meetings every three years and international meetings every five years.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett of England was elected as first president but she refused to serve.

In 1894, the ICW met in Berlin, where Alix von Cotta said that many senior teachers stayed away. In 1899, they met in London, UK.

In the early years, the United States supported many of the expenses of the organization, and dues from U.S. members made up a significant part of the budget. Most meetings were held in Europe or North America, and they adopted the use of three official languages - English, French and German - which discouraged participation by women of non-European origin. The ICW did not actively promote women's suffrage, as to not upset the more conservative members.

In 1899, the Council began to take on more substantive issues, forming an International Standing Committee on Peace and International Arbitration. Other standing committees were soon established, and through them, the ICW became involved in issues from suffrage to health.

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In social psychology, social salience is the extent to which a particular target draws the attention of an observer or group. The target may be a physical object or a person. If the target is a person, they may be alone or a member of a group (of which the observer may also be a part) or else in a situation of interpersonal communication. It is based on the way a particular feature can be linked to a certain type of speaker, who is then associated with social and emotional evaluations. These evaluations are then transferred to the linguistic feature.

An observer's attention may be drawn to a target as a result of certain general features of that target. These features include:

General object attributes vivid colors, object's proximity to observer

Difference between object attribute and its immediate environment.

Difference between observer's expectations of an object and the observable attributes of that object.

Observer's goal an object that matches goal-oriented searching.Social salience allows for observers to quickly detect changes in their environment. Given the limited cognitive capacity of humans, this is advantageous but can lead to biases and misperceptions as in the case of the representativeness heuristic. Awareness of this heuristic does not always completely mitigate its effect.

Social salience is also distinguished from cognitive salience in the sense that it consists of the variation along with attitudes, cultural stereotypes, and social values associated with it. In addition, the variation has already been used to carry social indexation. On the other hand, cognitive salience pertains to the objective property of linguistic variation that allows language users to pick up on it.

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In 1904, at the Berlin congress of the ICW, a separate organization formed to accommodate the strong feminist identity of the national suffrage associations: the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. The 1909 congress was held in Toronto, Canada and the 1914 conference took place in Rome. The 6th Congress was held in 1920 in Kristiania, Norway; followed in 1925 by the Washington, D. C. Congress; and then in 1930, the conference was held in Vienna. The next conference was a jointly-held congress of the ICW and the National Council of Women in India, hosted in Calcutta in 1936. During World War II congresses were suspended.

In 1925, the ICW convened their first coalition, the Joint Standing Committee of the Women's International Organisations, to lobby for the appointment of women to the League of Nations. By 1931 the League of Nations called together a Women's Consultative Committee on Nationality to address the issue of a woman's rights (and nationality) when married to a man from another country. Two additional coalitions were formed in 1931: the Liaison Committee and the Peace and Disarmament Committee. The ICW constitution was revised in 1936. The ICW worked with the League of Nations during the 1920s and the United Nations post-World War II.

By 1938 the number of councils affiliated with the ICW, which had developed into one of the best known and most consulted of women's international organizations, had risen to thirty-six.

World War II caused great disorganization in the Council's work. Some national councils discontinued their work altogether; in others the leadership and organization were disrupted. In 1946, the ICW met in Philadelphia to re-focus its efforts and recover its former unity. The Conference issued a statement condemning war and all crimes against humanity, as well as demanding a more active role for women in the national and international arena.