Author Archives: Steve Mays

RadioIowa.com

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My next “small histories” project will be an Internet timeline showing when and how the company I worked for viewed and used this new technology. We registered our first domain (Learfield.com) on August 30, 1995 but didn’t do much with that (corporate) site. In July of 1996 we created a site for one of our news networks (Radio Iowa) but I don’t recall what kinds of content we were posting in those early days.

By November of 1999 we had gotten the hang of things and were putting up a lot of news (text and audio). The Iowa Caucuses pulls lots of attention to the state every four years and our network created a feature called Campaign Countdown. Our website made it possible to extend the life of the stories we fed via the radio network and reporter O. Kay Henderson cranked out a LOT of stories and interviews, all of which went online.

As we moved and updated servers and software, much of this content was lost. Or so I thought. While poking around on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine this weekend I found the Campaign Countdown reports.

The design of the website is nothing to write home about (that’s on me) but he history is real and — thanks to the Internet Archive — preserved. (I made a donation and hope you will, too). From this screenshot (partial) of our Affiliates page and you can see that about half of the stations had websites in 1999.

In my experience, radio stations were slow to embrace the Internet. There were a lot of reasons for this. Some good and logical, some not. Most of the programming on small market stations was music and licensing and technical issues made it impractical to “stream.” I’m not sure we had that word in 1999. And why, many station managers asked, should I go to the expense and effort of creating a website when everyone we care about (advertisers and listeners) can hear our programing on the radio? Duh. And nobody was going to listen to music on a computer. (iTunes, the iPod, and XM Radio came along in 2001. Podcasting in 2004)

Second opinion nets different diagnosis 88% of time

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“A new study finds that nearly 9 in 10 people who go for a second opinion after seeing a doctor are likely to leave with a refined or new diagnosis from what they were first told. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic examined 286 patient records of individuals who had decided to consult a second opinion, hoping to determine whether being referred to a second specialist impacted one’s likelihood of receiving an accurate diagnosis.”

“Among those with updated diagnoses, 66% received a refined or redefined diagnosis, while 21% were diagnosed with something completely different than what their first physician concluded.”

The study was published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.

Calculator Vault

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Apps like this have been around for several years but I wasn’t aware of them until this morning when a friend told me about Calculator Vault. Looks just like the Calculator app that comes with iOS but when you put in a secret sequence of numbers and symbols, it takes you to hidden folders where you can safely store those naughty photos. Apps like these became popular, I’m told, when teens started Snapchatting.

The Fake PIN features creates “a second PIN that opens a decoy KeepSafe for times when someone pressures you to open your KeepSafe. You can even put photos in your fake KeepSafe that are ok for others to see.”

The Secret Door feature will “masquerade your KeepSafe as another app. With Secret Door enabled, others will see what appears like another app when they open KeepSafe, but you will know the secret to reveal the PIN pad and open your KeepSafe.”

I’m told the only way you’d see these hidden folders — assuming you were looking — is from within the app. Yes, the NSA probably knows about these but your mom might not. You should tell her before she gets busted.

Flying about to change completely. Because of cars.

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10 to 15 years from now, the flying experience could look vastly different because of self-driving cars.

In Europe, high-speed rail wins 50% of all traffic when the journey length is less than 4.5 hours, according to the French National Railroads, and wins 90% of traffic when the journey is two hours or less.

Bags will get picked up in the city and travel separate from you and land at your destination. People won’t be traveling with their luggage. Perhaps it’s picked up by a self-driving car or a specific baggage robot instead.

And if an airline is controlling your ground transportation, it’ll be able to provide other services as well. “They come pick you up, they load your baggage, and potentially, your bag will be screened while sitting in the vehicle.

Teletype

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I recall visiting the radio station where my father worked and standing in front of the Associated Press teletype, entranced by the endless stream of words. Who was typing? Where were they? Did they ever stop?

Years later, as a young man, I got a job at the station and came to depend on the AP “wire.” It was our only link to real-time (I’m not sure that phrase even existed in 1972) news and information from outside our little town. The daily newspaper was tossed on the doorstep every afternoon (or you could get the Memphis paper a day late). The three national TV networks gave us a half-hour of national news each evening.

Our radio station didn’t have a national news network (until 1974) so we relied on the Associated Press newswire for just about everything throughout the day. During a live “board shift” we would dash to the AP teletype (in the transmitter room) and “rip the wire” which involved tearing a long strip of printed wire copy into piles of news, weather, sports, entertainment news, etc. If the paper jammed or the ribbon broke, we missed whatever was fed. If something the AP considered urgent was fed, an alarm bell on the teletype sounded.

A radio station had to have a wire service. Without it they were limited to playing records and reading local news and school lunch menus. The AP knew this and charged accordingly. Thousands of dollars a year. Contracts were for five years. But there was no alternative.

In 1984 I left the radio station to take a job managing The Missourinet, a statewide news network originating from Jefferson City, Missouri. I worked for (parent company) Learfield Communications for the next 28 years. One of the more interesting projects I worked on was the creation of a low-cost alternative to the Associated Press. We called it Learfield Data (later, Learfield Newswire).

I worked on this (along with bunch of other people) for a dozen years from the late ’80s through 2000. At one time we had 300 subscribers. When the World Wide Web became a reality in the mid-90s it was clear the days of wire services were numbered. Road kill on the Information Highway. You can read (PDF) the story of how it began and ended here: Learfield Data