Author Archives: Steve Mays

Iowa PBS announces new Iowa Press moderator

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(Press release) Kay Henderson, the dean of the Iowa Capitol press corps and long-time guest panelist on Iowa Press, will be the next host and moderator of the Iowa PBS public affairs program. Henderson replaces David Yepsen, who retires from the Iowa Press desk on September 10, 2021. Her first formal broadcast as host will be Friday, September 17.

“Kay is already a member of the Iowa PBS family,” said Molly Phillips, executive director and general manager of the statewide public television network. “She has capably subbed as host and has been a regular second chair at the Iowa Press desk. She’s participated in countless campaign debates over the last three decades. We couldn’t ask for a stronger, more esteemed and experienced journalist to continue the Iowa Press legacy.”

Henderson first appeared on Iowa Press in October of 1987. For the past 20 years, she has been the national political director for Learfield news networks in Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota and Wisconsin. She has served two terms as president of the National Association of State Radio Networks’ news directors group. Henderson was hired by Learfield in 1987 as a statehouse reporter for Radio Iowa, a statewide news and sports network serving more than 70 commercial radio stations. She’s been that network’s news director since 1994 and will remain in that role alongside her new weekly assignment at Iowa PBS.

“It’s an honor to be invited to take on this new role,” Henderson said. “Watching Iowa Press hosts Dean Borg and David Yepsen guide the program over the past 34 years has given me a glimpse of the responsibilities ahead. I’m humbled by the opportunity and excited about the task of helping Iowa Press move into its fifth decade of service to our viewers.”

Henderson received the Iowa Broadcast News Association’s 2002 Jack Shelley Award, an annual recognition of “outstanding contribution to the cause of professional journalism.” The list of Shelley Award recipients includes the late Dean Borg, who retired as Iowa Press host in 2016, and the late Dan Miller, the long-time Iowa PBS general manager who was an Iowa Press producer early in his 37-year career with the network.

“After three decades of Iowa public affairs coverage on radio and on Iowa Press, Kay Henderson is the backbone of political journalism in this state,” said Andrew Batt, Iowa Press senior producer. “Our viewers have found Kay to be a trusted source for news and information throughout annual legislative sessions and nearly 20 election cycles.”

Henderson’s first salaried job in journalism was a three-month summertime stint as managing editor of the Lenox Time Table, the weekly newspaper in her southwest Iowa hometown. In addition to her work in Iowa broadcasting, Henderson has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week” as well CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

The annual doctor visit

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The following excerpts are from a Wall Street Journal piece titled: Tech Advances Put the Annual Doctor Visit on the Critical List. The gist of the article is the yearly check-up with your doctor is in for some big changes.

Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., has started sending laboratory kits to patients in advance of their physicals. Patients, especially those who live far away, can get blood drawn at a local clinic and send it back for standard lab and genetic analyses and discuss results with their doctors virtually. The future, says Carl Andersen, medical director of the clinic’s executive health program, is “bringing healthcare to patients where they are as opposed to asking them to come in.”

Mayo eventually expects to gather additional patient information remotely via smartphone and smartwatch apps, wearable sensors and blood pressure cuffs that enable monitoring of such health indicators as blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, physical activity, heart rate, heart rhythm, blood sugar and sleep quality. Doctors elsewhere have begun adopting this strategy; some experts believe it is poised to fundamentally change how the physical is done and could prompt patients to engage more proactively in their health.
“When people start using a smartphone to monitor their blood pressure, they become experts at managing it,” says Eric Topol, director of Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Maybe “it’s only a problem on Monday morning when they go back to work.” That finding wouldn’t emerge in a once-a-year visit, but it opens options for a patient other than a prescription for blood pressure pills.

Digital stethoscopes are available that allow doctors to check heart and lung sounds remotely. Dr. Tison and his colleagues at UCSF have developed a technique using a smartphone camera and flashlight that can detect a biomarker of diabetes in patients without a blood draw. Mayo doctors have tested an algorithm that can reveal heart weakness from data obtained in an electrocardiogram long before symptoms of heart failure, heart rhythm irregularities or cardiovascular disease arise.

DNA is poised to become part of the routine physical too. As part of its blood analysis, Mayo will soon offer liquid biopsy tests, which look for evidence of cancer in DNA fragments that even early-stage tumors shed into the bloodstream. The test will search for many more tumor types beyond the screens performed for breast, lung, prostate and colorectal cancers as recommended in current health checkups.

UCSF’s Dr. Tison suggests a more dynamic approach to the physical lies ahead: Doctors will provide, say, monthly electronic reports to patients on metrics such as blood pressure, heart function, blood oxygen levels and weight, based on the data stream from digital devices. Unless an abnormal signal turns up, in-person exams—with the hands-on touch doctors and patients value—could be set for every two or three years.

One big room for everything

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Imagine a big room in your house where you keep the stuff you want to find later. Things you had written; articles from magazines; newspaper clippings; excerpts from books; cassette tapes of recorded music; VHS video cassettes… everything.

To save something you simply opened the door and tossed it into the room. Yes, in time my stuff would accumulate in piles waist high. But I know where everything is. It’s in this room.

To what extent does any such saved item really exist if I can’t find it?

Now imagine said room lined with filing cabinets, each clearly labeled as to contents. In each drawer there are section dividers and folders within. A 3-ring binder hanging on the wall for quick reference to what is in each of the filing cabinets (or banker boxes).

This has been my thinking as my blog has grown to 6,000+ posts in the last twenty years. I’ve been pretty disciplined about putting each post in one or more categories, and tagging for the finer grain. Without that metadata, my blog would be almost useless.

BUT WAIT! you say. You can also search the blogs db? You can, if you can remember what to search for.

PS: Sadly, I can’t think of an appropriate category or tag for this post… so I put it in STUFF.

Live Streaming Star in China

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From the New York Times: “Over the past year, as Covid-19 has severely limited our ability to interact with the world beyond our front door, livestreams have helped transport us to places we couldn’t visit, people we couldn’t see and events we couldn’t attend. In China, live streaming services command an audience of nearly 560 million, with streamers broadcasting to devoted followers who tune in every night. Successful live streamers can earn thousands of dollars each month in direct donations from fans, and those at the very top earn millions from brand sponsorships and major contracts. In the short documentary above, we enter two agencies that scout promising newcomers and mold them into high-earning stars. But what’s it like working for a company that engineers every aspect of your life — and then requires you to livestream it all day?”

Not sure which I found more frightening… the lives of the “stars” or their fans.

Tiny machines trying to kill us?

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“The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life. […] The Berserkers’ bases are capable of manufacturing more and deadlier Berserkers as the need arises.” (Wikipedia)

I read my first Berserker story in the late 60s so, 50+ years ago? What if the COVID-19 virus (all viruses?) is a form of intelligence whose purpose/mission/raison d’être is to destroy all human life? Is the COVID-19 virus really a tiny Berserker machine?

Speaking of science fiction…

We won’t see the first movies about the COVID-19 pandemic until it’s over, right? But if it’s never really over… I’ll wager some early “treatments” are already being pitched. There have been so many movies about viruses and pandemics (link below), what’s the fresh take?

I don’t think you can make a movie about the COVID-19 pandemic of 202(?) that doesn’t have vax-deniers and conspiracy nuts as a major plot element.

Topless

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I’ve had the Land Rover for three years now and this is the first time I’ve gone completely topless. We’ll put the hard top back on later this month and I decided to remove the mesh top hoop kit early. Really kind of fun driving around with nothing between me and the sky. If I’m out and it starts raining? Everything gets wet.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”

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I recently finished Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson, considered by many the best single-volume history of the American Civil War. I wouldn’t know where to begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this book. We all know how the story ends, right, but I was on the edge of my seat till the final page. The mark of a truly great story-teller.

We all know about Union general William T. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and his “march to the sea.” My simplistic Hollywood understanding of that chapter in the war was changed by this book, especially by this excerpt from Sherman’s memoirs.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.” Until then, though, “we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist—must be devastated. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . [and] make them ‘so sick of war’ that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

— Memoirs by William T. Sherman

The passage reminded me of a passage from a novel by Robert K. Tanenbaum:

“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”

— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge

War as video game

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America’s Army is a video game “conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski, the Army’s Chief Economist and a professor at West Point, the idea was to provide the public with a virtual soldier experience that was engaging, informative, and entertaining.” I got curious about this when I started seeing recruiting videos on some cable channels.

Not suggesting there is anything wrong with this approach, just that it got me thinking about what motivates a young man or woman to enlist in the military. Sebastian Junger alludes to this in his 2010 book, WAR.

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.”

“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”

So, is it “defending the homeland,” or the rush of surviving a firefight? Or something far more complicated?