By BILL TOLAND, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

American women have the ability and educational preparation to graduate from college with a science, technology, engineering or mathematics degree, but they are still underrepresented in so-called STEM undergraduate fields, according to a new survey.

Women, the survey says, "come to college poised for success but fail to graduate with STEM degrees."

This isn't an essay about the history of the Christmas tree, whose tradition can be traced back to late-Middle Ages Germany, but rather, a brief history about the people who discovered some of them.

This is not quite as boring as it sounds.

The Greatest Generation wanted workplace security and solid benefits. Boomers and Generation X wanted better pay, and Generation Y sought more vacation time and workplace flexibility.

As for Generation Z -- those "millennials" born in the 1990s or later, who grew up in the Internet age and will be entering the workforce in the decade ahead -- they want workplace connectivity.

Like many others her age, 60-year-old Mary Ann Mason fell through one of the biggest trap doors in the American health care system: She's too young for Medicare, with too much retirement income to qualify for Medicaid or similar low-income insurance programs, and with one too many health problems to buy an affordable individual plan on the open market.

Patients have another Internet tool to compare hospitals, and hospitals have another quality metric to parse, thanks to a new set of data being published by Medicare that purports to measure patient satisfaction, infection rates, surgical complications and other medical errors.

The domestic violence cycle is tough to break.

Recent federal actions have served as warnings to hospitals, insurance plans and any companies that traffic in private health data.

In February, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights fined Maryland insurer Cignet Health $4.3 million for failing to give medical records to patients who wanted them.

Tobacco purveyors have a love-hate relationship with the high-speed, high-tech "roll-your-own" machines that let customers make cigarettes on the cheap. Those who operate and profit from them love the machines. Those who don't say the machines might be illegal and are killing their tobacco businesses.

Both skeptics and supporters of the 2010 federal health care overhaul cautioned that there wouldn't be enough doctors to handle the increase in patients that would come about once health care becomes more widely available and Medicaid programs are expanded in 2014.

Taxpayers could soon be picking up the tab for new sexually transmitted disease screenings for seniors, as well as other Medicare recipients.

More than a decade after Viagra and its ilk began helping boomers and seniors to enjoy conjugal relations more frequently, sexually transmitted disease rates are up dramatically in the over-40 age bracket.