Media Watch

For years, football fans have parked at Iowa City's Olive Court and passed a ball, grilled brats and enjoyed a beverage. But the former owners say they're tired of cleaning up the mess. Sheryl Neuzil is quoted on KGAN's web site as saying they parked 700 cars every home game for a fee of $25 per car. That comes to $17,500 per home game. At that rate, six home games per year generates $105,000. Were they really tired of it or did they see much higher dollar signs by selling it off to a developer? KGAN: "Neuzil signed a deal Wednesday and 31 condos will be here next fall." She said she was sorry it happened, but "...that's the way it goes." The "it" being business, I imagine.

I like complaining about the way media professionals misspeak regarding the Internet, not really understanding how it works. They'll skip the "." between the "www" and the domain name and say, "w-w-w-c-n-n-dot-com". Or they think they have to refer to a slash in a web address as a "backslash" (clearly a regular old "slash"). My other big pet peeve is putting spaces in filenames. This would've been unheard of back in the DOS days, when filenames were limited to 11 characters ('mypost10.txt', for instance) and when spaces were simply not impossible. Filenames were also not case-sensitive. But today, with long filenames, people try all sorts of crazy things, like long desriptions, complete with caps and spaces and bizarre characters. And while most technology supports long filenames, not all are fully friendly to them, most notibly web browsers and email programs. Case in point: when you upload a file that has spaces

I'd put Des Moines' school district budget at $385M, from the State of the Schools speech last fall. That's wildly outdated today. Board member Jon Narcisse said [on WHO Radio] on August 2 that the budget was $415M this year. Plus he said the district had tapped its $20M reserve. Assuming that's accurate, I'll adjust my figures and restate the cost per pupil is now $14,500 this year or $80 per day, assuming 30,000 kids still attend school in the district. $80 per day! With a student-to-staff ratio of 6:1, that's like paying each of the 5,000 district staff members an annual salary of $87,000 to teach your kids. If you could entrust three competent people with 18 students and say, "go spend 180 days with these kids, secure the needed resources, and teach them what they need to know," would it cost $261,600? For that, you could build the classroom, feed and cloth the students, equip them each with notebook computers, fully loaded with world-class

I was reading a welcome message by Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Nancy Sebring (http://www.dmps.k12.ia.us/schoolboard/1sebring-index.htm) and her State of the Schools speech entitled. "EDUCATING DES MOINES. THEN. NOW. TOMORROW." (http://www.dmps.k12.ia.us/schoolboard/1stateoftheschools07.pdf) from October of '07. From these two sources, I retrieved some facts that paint a picture. Here, let me help you with that brush. The budget for school year '07/'08 was $385,500,000.00 (that's 385-point-5 Million dollars). There are 30,000 students and 5,000 staff. That seems like a lot of money and a lot of staff, doesn't it? I think so. I'll break the big numbers down into the most singular form possible for context and to help us get our mind around what they represent. Let's start by figuring the per-student dollar figures. It's $12,850.00 per year and $71.39 per student per day for 180 days. There's a 6:1 student-to-staff r

Smartphone Start-Ups Have a Friend in This Fund - NYTimes.com This could be something. iFund invests in select startup companies that write applications for the iPhone. To give you an idea of popularity of these apps, Apple's iPhone App Store has served 60 million of then since the store's launch last month. Blackberry maker RIM (Research in Motion) sees this trend and will announce a yet-to-be-named fund specializing in developers of applications for its smart phone. Are we paying attention? One thing we don't fully appreciate about hundreds of millions of smartphones in users' hands is that they have eyes, ears, know their location and are connected to the Internet. Developers can leverage these assets to unimaginable ends -- with potentially questionable aims, possibly creating a transparent world or the mother of all big brothers.

I don't believe the paper's decline is because of any perceived liberal bias, dittoheads. Fewer readers get their information from print because there are so many free and instant sources -- including this web site. 1. Local delivery audiences are dying off -- literally; and 2. local advertisers don't understand how to market to an audience that's obviously shifting to online sources. Consider that a typical newspaper reporting staff today is comprised of two-thirds online content producers. That's telling. And it lends a lot of credence to the Craigslist argument in the comment section of this story; my baby boomer mother uses it. And partly because...it's the economy, stupid. This is an awkward time for traditional media, but I assure you that "liberal bias" is nothing more than a branding campaign aimed at the feeble-minded.

When we see what has become of our nation and the impending crisis that faces it, we the people should take action and not wait around for the next election cycle. Problem The economy, the war, forced taxpayer charity, immigration issues, diminishing standard of living and inaccessible health care in this country are all related to the ineptitude of congress, who acts as agency for corporate and foreign interests instead of its constituents. Solution A temporary national charter mandating the legislature, executive and judicial to implement and support the following measures immediately: Recall all diplomatic personnel, armed forces and materiel to US soil and ports Withdraw from world financial complex Eliminate Homeland Security Secure all borders and waters Place a moratorium on all all foreign trade and aid Eliminate national income tax Redesign transportation infrastructure to support universal electrified rail Replace coal and petroleum derived energy with wind, solar, hydro and