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Shareholders need to start voting "No"...a lot
Transcript from a 16-minute segment from the "Brian Gongol Show" on WHO Radio last Sunday.

A change to Google search results
They're calling it the "knowledge graph", a riff of sorts on Facebook's "social graph". The idea is that Google will start delivering summaries of information about a topic, rather than just a series of links. They're trying to answer the "next question" people are likely to ask about a given topic. This isn't anything new -- WolframAlpha has been serving up these kinds of results for a long time. But it's definitely a change of pace by Google.

Court order blocks access to lots of mainstream file-sharing sites in India
A court ruled in favor of the producers of some films being made in India, who argued that sites like Vimeo were allowing people to share their work and cut into their profits. But legitimate content on those sites is being blocked, too.

Facebook versus Google by the numbers

How your friends may be undermining your online security
Even innocuous things like untagged photos on Facebook or Twitter may still give away clues about your identity that you might want to think twice about letting out

American parents are some of the world's snoopiest
A survey for antivirus company AVG says that 61% of American parents access their teenagers' Facebook accounts without the kids knowing. Ideally, there would be more openness and transparency about what happens online -- but there are likely a lot of kids who wouldn't willingly let their parents supervise their Facebook habits. Let it be noted, of course, that now that Facebook is entirely mainstream and known by everyone, that there is a tremendous market opportunity for an "anti-Facebook" alternative where kids could go about their social networking with less notice and supervision...while still being able to technically tell their parents the truth when asked, "Can I see what's on your Facebook page?" Youthful rebellion will always present lucrative opportunities to those who are paying attention.



On the Facebook IPO
A lot of people who were early investors are getting rich. But: Suppose I own a small business. Five years ago, it lost $13,800. Four years ago, it lost $5,600. Then it started to turn a profit. In the next three years, it made $22,900, then $60,600, and then $100,000. ■ If I told you today that I'd be happy to sell you half of that business for $5 million, but that you would have no say in its management, would you buy it? No? Then don't buy Facebook stock today.


Survey says college students are infatuated with the idea of going to work for Google
Business majors...computer majors...even liberal-arts majors want to work there. For all the loudmouths who constantly bemoan "corporate America", there sure are a lot of people looking to work for big corporations. It would be interesting to know what proportion of students think seriously about working for much smaller companies, where their impact on results is much more direct.

First private-sector delivery to International Space Station scheduled for Saturday
NASA is outsourcing deliveries to the ISS to contractors -- SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. SpaceX is planning to make their first launch this weekend.



"JPMorgan Chase has a big hedge fund inside a commercial bank"
And that's an unnerving situation. According to the New York Times, "[T]he complex position assembled by the bank included a bullish bet on an index of investment-grade corporate debt, later paired with a bearish bet on high-yield securities, achieved by selling insurance contracts known as credit-default swaps. A big move in the interest rate spread between the investment grade securities and risk-free government bonds in recent months hurt the first part of the bet, and was not offset by equally large moves in the price of the insurance on the high yield bonds." Get all that in one take? Of course not. ■ The problem with excessive complexity inside financial markets is that the feedback loop is human-driven and not very easy to feel. Surgery can be complex...flying an airplane can be complex...forecasting the weather can be complex. But in each of these cases, the natural world is a large part of what initiates the complexity -- and we learn every day about how better to manage that complexity. Moreover, we get real and immediate feedback -- an artery bleeds, a rising column of air causes turbulence, or a mesocyclone starts to spin. These things are observable. ■ But financial markets remain the complex results of millions of individuals, many of whom can easily panic at once for no rational reason. We should be apprehensive about making our financial system more susceptible to the herd mentality than is really necessary: It only takes 5% of people going crazy to set an entire group into a panic. ■ If heavily-leveraged, complex, and large financial instruments can be susceptible to the panic of just 5%, then those instruments probably have no real place right next to the deposits that Grandma makes in her passbook savings account. We should give serious thought to reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act.

Good idea: Taking lots of pictures and videos of your kid
Bad idea: Putting all of those pictures and videos on the Internet. The advent of digital photography and video make the cost of recording family memories virtually zero. But there's an implicit cost to sharing everything on the Internet: It causes the child's digital identity to become something the parent forms, whether deliberately or inadvertently. If employers are asking for Facebook passwords today, and burglars are targeting the homes of people who post on Facebook that they're away, and all of that is happening today (when the Internet is, after all, still pretty young), then parents really shouldn't be sharing much -- if anything -- about their kids online. ■ Register the child's name as a domain name, yes. That will help them later. But don't pile on the content in the child's name. The kid will need as much of a blank slate as possible by the time they actually need to use the Internet to apply to college or to a job. And parents should really think twice about the security risks involved in sharing pictures and videos of their children on the Internet -- where you simply don't know what kinds of creeps might be looking for them. ■ There are already too many chances for a young person to screw up on his or her own, and to do a virtual face-plant in front of the world via the Internet. Lots of them don't have adequate discretion to be sharing things in front of a global audience without making serious errors of judgment. Parents shouldn't stack the deck against them by also sharing pictures and videos that may someday turn out to be embarrassing. Sure, Jessica's daily affirmation is hilarious and charming, but she and David of the dentist's strong anesthesia are both going to be defined for a lifetime by their childhood YouTube fame, no matter whatever else they do. (Make no mistake: There's still nothing funnier in the universe than the laughing baby. But a lot of parents seem to think it's a good idea to publicly document everything about their children, as though they're auditioning for some life-changing theatrical role. But are we quite sure that growing up in the public eye was the best thing for the Olsen twins?

Berkshire Hathaway becomes an overnight newspaper empire
Warren Buffett's company just paid $142 million for a group of 63 newspapers. It helps pull the selling company out of a serious financial hole, and it adds what Buffett called "keepers" to the company's roster of subsidiaries. What's amusing about this is how minor the acquisition is for Berkshire: The company brought in $3.245 billion in net earnings in the first quarter, or about $35 million a day. So the entire newspaper chain cost about 4 days' worth of profits from elsewhere in the Berkshire empire. What a bizarre sense of scale. (Full disclosure: Written by a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder.)

200 buffalo now roam free across northwestern Iowa
They escaped from a ranch near Sibley.

Debt is relatively on the rise again in Africa
Borrowing by governments is growing faster than the economies of those countries

Cubs versus White Sox
(Video) Credit is due to whomever put together the New Era Cap ads featuring Nick Offerman and Craig Robinson. "Would you go skinny-dipping in Lake Michigan in December?" "Again?"

A milestone in demography
Canada and the United States are both places defined by ideas and ideals, not the color of a person's skin. And that's a good thing.



This is why America will survive anything
Some goofball at MIT has built his own real-life Mario Kart. It's preposterous, it's silly, it's a complete frivolity. But it's hilarious and ingenious as well. And it's an example of what happens when someone wants something -- even if it's just for fun -- and has the resources, knowledge, and freedom to create it. Command economies scoff at things like this, instead taking resources from all of the individuals in the land and turning them over the the authorities, who build their own preposterous monuments -- but do so in the name "of the people". ■ The truth is that exotic and ridiculous Stalinist projects like the Ryugyong Hotel are really just meant to glorify the state and the people who run it. Sure, the Moscow Metro has some magnificently beautiful stations, but did the people of Moscow need a fabulous subway station in 1938, or did they really just need an opportunity to keep more of their own resources in the middle of the Great Purge? ■ Even non-Stalinist states are often too quick to turn over profits to governments which then use them in pursuit of ego trips...the colossal Burj Khalifa/Burj Dubai was heavily funded by government spending. Free economies have their excesses, too -- any trip down the Las Vegas Strip will tell a person that. But what's most important is that individuals have the opportunity to make their own decisions about what to create and how to invest their time. ■ There will be plenty of people who chose to fritter away their lives in front of dull television programming every night. But there will be others who will tinker and experiment and create, and reap the rewards -- whether those are financial or just visceral (like riding a real Mario Kart). And as long as that occasional genius is rewarded and allowed to flourish, everyone else gets a free ride on the results.


Honda's new motorized wheelchair looks nothing like what's been built before
Further proof that life keeps getting better -- whether or not people recognize that fact





The State of the Web: Spring 2012
Satirical/comedic site The Oatmeal pretty well nails the state of things. This is the same site, it should be noted, that recently rose to the defense of the honor of Nikola Tesla, because that's what geeks (a term of endearment, here) like to do.

Thank goodness for Taiwan-imation
(Video) How else would we be able to fully grasp the magnitude of the grandmother-cheerleader tryout story?

Estimate: People pulled $2.3 billion out of the S&P 500 last week
Um...why? American companies are bringing in record-level earnings, and yet stock prices as a multiple of those earnings are well below historical norms. This is hardly a formula for pulling money out of equities. In other words, if you can buy companies that are more profitable than ever, and you are paying less per dollar of profits than normal, why in the world wouldn't you be eager to buy more pieces of those companies (that is, shares of their stocks)?



The Walmart effect is now mostly stabilized in Iowa towns
Sales declines in surrounding communities have supposedly stabilized, according to new research from ISU. The stores are bad for in-town direct competition, but specialty stores nearby actually appear to do a little better, since the Walmart acts like a magnet for shoppers from nearby.

The really bad idiom: "He has hate in his heart"
Nobody has hate in their heart. They have it in their heads. And then they choose not to think hard enough to overcome that hate.

"Errors, sloppiness, and bad judgment" cost JP Morgan billions
A $2 billion loss isn't going to sink the company. But it's getting to be almost impossible to think that investment bankers (as a class) have really cleaned up their act.

Iowa's worst rollover spot could be fixed...in 15 years
A redesign for the really awful I-80/I-380 interchange is up for a vote later this month. But it's still going to be long before anything actually happens.

Iowa kids win prize for video about financial literacy


A checklist for keeping bad CEOs out of the executive suite
Managing the managers is the chief job of company boards. But too many directors have been too complacent when it comes to acting in the shareholders' interest.

Upcoming movie will probe the private side of Johnny Carson



US could have a big corn surplus this year
That's going to hurt prices

Robots may reach out better to some autistic kids than people can




Technology advice for moms on Mother's Day

A Facebook rival?
Diaspora is intended as essentially an open-source rival to Facebook and Google Plus, in which users own the data they post (as opposed to Facebook's we-claim-everything rule). They're wisely integrating the service with the existing competition.

Microsoft claims it will be carbon-neutral by July


Israel passes law prohibiting undisclosed Photoshopping of models
If he or she has been airbrushed to look skinnier, they have to disclose it

Google commences offering integrated ads with its Maps service
They're already starting to offer indoor walking directions for some notable buildings

Goldman Sachs has 5,400 people with titles at or above vice president


WiFi-blocking wallpaper
It's been developed, and better yet, it only blocks the frequencies used by WiFi, and doesn't mess with cell phone

Architect wants to build tall buildings out of wood




Police and DOT think stayed-cable median barriers are working well




"It's a mistake to stop doing business with China. Just as it's a mistake to think this is business as usual."
An analysis in Bloomberg Businessweek cites the theory that "China's economic miracle will fade because the security-obsessed government will continue to resist the creative destruction that is crucial to innovation".

Dinosaur gas may have killed Jurassic Park

Microsoft is going to kibosh "Windows Live" and just start integrating cloud services anyway
They're going to keep on providing the same services, like e-mail, online storage, and messaging, but they're going to start just calling it "Microsoft Account" and using it as the basis for Windows 8.

The plague of inflated job titles



Notes from the 2012 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting
Notes attempting to capture the essence of what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger said on May 5, 2012



First-quarter economic growth: 2.2% annualized rate
At least, that's the first estimate from the government. It's subject to change. It's an acceptable number, but nothing exciting. It's much better than the 0.2% contraction in the UK, but much slower than the 8.1% growth rate in China. Now, there's no way for the US to grow at the same rate as China -- the gigantic US economy simply can't grow as quickly as a smaller economy, just like a car going 100 mph can't speed up (in percentage terms) as quickly as a car going 25. As Warren Buffett put it, "A fat wallet, however, is the enemy of superior investment results." Of course, he wrote that in 1995, when his company had $11.9 billion in shareholder equity. Today, it's worth $168 billion. What's been true for Berkshire Hathaway can be quite easily true for America: The rate of growth may not be astonishing, but it can be good and can still compound over time to produce really amazing long-term results. The key to take away from investing that applies to the broader American economy is this: Keep growing, try to raise that rate of growth, and don't suffer losses. Losses are a perverse thing, in both finance and macroeconomics: When something (a stock price or a GDP figure) falls by half, it has to double in order to recover. Put another way: The first rule in making money is to not lose money.

Tech tip: Could China launch a cyberwar against us?



West Des Moines "business incubator" expands
Business incubators are interesting: They highlight some of the problems for startup businesses (access to affordable office space, the need for support services like IT, and the need for capital) -- but they don't really solve them on a large scale. And if those problems exist on a large scale, shouldn't they be addressed in a way tha tdoesn't favor particular businesses over one another? Obviously, private firms are welcome to manage their own incubators (usually in return for a cut of the ownership and future profits of the startups), but when incubators are government-run or -subsidized, that makes them a little harder to accept.

Anti-counterfeiting packaging rules planned for EU
Is it a tax on generic drugmakers in favor of brand-name manufacturers? Or is it a legitimate method of preventing crooks from profiting off of the hard work of drug development done by legitimate research?

Orderly thought
A great line from Charles Krauthammer, regarding a man who helped him finish med school after a paralyzing accident: "He was a man of orderly habits and orderly mind, but he never flinched from challenging the orderly"

Watches used to be a necessity; now they're almost strictly for show
Technology has put a clock on every phone -- and one that's more accurate than any wristwatch. So what used to be a necessity is now just a luxury good -- and one that can be used for a signaling effect.

And that's why you use the One-Call notification service before digging
The sight of a huge fireball in the middle of an empty Iowa farm field is pretty surreal

Who owns IKEA? The answer isn't all that clear.
The legendary furniture company is privately-held, and definitely profitable. But its ownership structure is positively bizarre, and though it's doing a great job of growing, it's really not clear where all of the profits for that growth are going to go. One's first hint that something is bizarre about the company is that even though it's notoriously Swedish in heritage (and design), the company is registered in the Netherlands.



Department of Energy study says Corn Belt faces more pressure from climate change than from government energy policy
Cited is an increase in heat waves that can do a lot of damage to corn as it's growing, rather than as the effect of a degree or two of additional heat evenly applied throughout the summer



Parents should talk with their kids about smartphone safety
Location-sharing applications and photos can get kids into a lot more trouble than the corded phones on the wall of 20 years ago used to allow.

Have young people gotten the financial education they need?


Google plans second data center in Council Bluffs
It's a $300 million project, and will supposedly employ 50 people when finished

Intellectual-property theft and industrial espionage aren't getting any less serious


Homestead Act to be displayed in the most-homesteaded state
45% of Nebraska was claimed by homesteaders

Texting, faster for so many other things, is still a slow way to deliver 911 reports


West Des Moines wants plans for a "Grand Technology Gateway"
The city wants to put in a stretch of, presumably, tech-heavy businesses along the south side of town along the river



Online advertising volume rose by 22% last year
The Interactive Advertising Bureau says it totaled $31 billion in 2011, including about $15 billion on search-engine-related advertising, and a little under $2 billion for both advertising on mobile devices and on video.




April 2012 EconDirectory

Voting habits by what you drink, what you drive, and what TV shows you watch
The campaigns know this information. Also, by where you eat and what you do on the Internet.



Shareholders give big rejection notice to Citigroup executive-pay plan
It was only an advisory vote, but when 55% of shares cast say "no" to the CEO's pay plan, it's hard not to notice

New York Times cuts free-article access to ten per month
Stupid, stupid, stupid. The problem here is that they offer no digital-only option for subscriptions. Anyone who wants more than ten articles a month will have to pay for a print subscription. Lunacy. The print product is the costly part of the affair -- production and distribution cost money. But once an article has been written -- for print or for the Internet -- distributing it to every additional reader via the Internet is practically free. So if they were smart, they'd offer a low-cost digital-only subscription option and get thousands of users to sign up for $5 a month. But instead, they're just telling folks that it's either $4 to $7 a week or nothing at all. Totally dinosaur-like thinking. The New York Times is good reading...but it's not essential to most people's lives. If your cost of distribution to the next marginal customer is practically zero, then for the love of Milton Friedman, charge a low but reasonable price for it and maximize the potential revenues! Netflix charges $8 a month for unlimited access to television and movies. The price point for "all-you-can-eat" content on the New York Times -- for most users -- is going to be something less than that. But if they're too caught up in their own sense of self-importance to realize that, then they're not going to last very long.

Delta considers buying a refinery
They say that jet fuel is a little over a third of their operating costs, so perhaps some vertical integration will help ease that pain. If true, it's an interesting move.

Once I was the King of Spain...
The Moxy Fruvous song may have been an absurdity, but so is the real King of Spain. First of all, it's bizarre that Spain still has a king. The point of having any kind of monarchy in any advanced nation in this day and age is utterly beyond reasonable comprehension. But even further, this genius has gone off and hurt himself while hunting on an African safari. This is particularly embarrassing, considering that Spain's economy is a lot weaker than it really ought to be. And for an institution that gets an 8.4 billion Euro subsidy from the country, one would think that his time would be better spent doing things like conferring patronage on private businesses, instead of going around shooting elephants in Africa.

Will natural-gas prices stay artificially low?
One analyst thinks that natural gas prices are absurdly low -- perhaps just 1/6th or 1/7th of what they ought to be. That's going to reduce the incentive (in the short term) for anyone to invest either in efficiency projects (like improved insulation, where natural gas is used for winter heating), or in alternative-energy projects (where natural gas is used to fire up electrical generators to meet peak demand). But while the news is bad in the short term, it may be an signal that those investments that are presently depressed by very low natural-gas prices could be available at discount prices. After all, it's most attractive to buy things when nobody wants them -- if it's highly likely that they'll want them at much higher prices in the future.

US DOT secretary: "America's one big pothole right now"
That's a bit of an overstatement. But there is something to be said for putting some investment to work in the nation's civil infrastructure. The problem is that quick-fix items -- like repaving a bunch of roads -- isn't necessarily the investment we need most right now. The nation's water and wastewater infrastructure is in dire need of upgrades, just as badly as the roads need help. But sewers are a lot less sexy than superhighways, so politicians can be counted upon to divert funding to those projects that offer the best opportunities for ribbon-cutting and immediate gratification, rather than where the money really ought to be spent for the maximum public good. On a related note: The New York Times tells of new developments in rapid bridge replacement using prefabricated structures that can simply be lowered into place.

Chicago will add speed cameras
This kind of automated enforcement of traffic laws is easy to sell as a "for the children" kind of proposition -- but the insidious part of it is that it conditions people to expect to be watched by Big Brother. And when people tire of being watched all the time, they start to get subversive. It's a natural thing to want to rebel against an overzealous authority figure. Automated traffic-enforcement cameras are, rather by definition, that kind of overzealous figure.

How the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska turned gambling profits into a non-casino company


Caffeine is a drug, after all
College students in Sioux City were sent to the hospital after overdosing on caffeine during a physiology experiment. Caffeine is a funny drug -- it's legal and available virtually anywhere. It's also (for most consumers) a performance-enhancing drug, whether it makes it possible to wake up more easily or to get more done -- or, in some cases, to improve the ability to focus. But it's still a drug that can have hazardous side effects in excessive doses.

Heartbreaking story of Iowa teen suicide
A 14-year-old appears to have been harassed -- literally to death -- after coming out of the closet. Kids shouldn't be driven to that kind of despair by their peers or by anyone else.

Stadium plan falls apart, so the Vikings could leave Minnesota
Not that it would be a good idea for taxpayers to have to ante up $550 million to fund half of a new stadium

Chokecherry tree blossoms up-close



Creston incident shows why we need more weather-radar installations
The tornado sirens in Creston weren't activated prior to the tornado touchdown there, even though lots of people were on the lookout for a tornado -- including the National Weather Service. But Creston is around 70 miles away from the nearest National Weather Service radar installation, at Johnston. At that distance, the radar can only see to about 5,000 feet above the surface. Anything below that 5,000' level can be invisible to radar (this depends on the precise pattern that's chosen, but the curvature of the earth can't be overcome -- at a distance of 70 miles, the horizon is about 3300' above the ground. (Conversely, by the way, the orientation of the radar scans means that radar can't see things immediately above it.) Considering the dramatic improvement in the quality and speed of tornado warnings that occurred after the current generation of Nexrad radar sites were installed, it seems like the next logical extension is to increase the density of coverage by those radar installations, to improve warnings and forecasts even further. The coverage map for Nexrad installations still shows a lot of completely empty regions and others with very sparse coverage, including stretches of northern and southern Iowa. Considering that the initial installation cost of the original WSR-88D (Nexrad) installations was about $5 million each, it would seem that a reasonable cost-benefit argument could be made for installing a lot more of these radar sites in the interest of public safety.

US and China play cyber-war games
It was a test to see if the two could get along without coming to a shooting war, even if they suspected the other of attacking them via the Internet. The results? Not particularly reassuring.

Anyone who's squeaky-clean enough to run for office in 20 years will have to be a borderline-psychopath
(Video) The Onion jokes about it, but it's true. Kids generally lack judgment -- and in the past, that made little difference. Mistakes were made, and the worst that could happen was generally that an embarrasing photo showed up in the school newspaper or in the yearbook. But tools like Facebook and Twitter are (a) arming them with the tools to do really colossally-stupid things in front of a global audience, (b) recording those errors for all time, and (c) encouraging them to say and do stupid things in the hopes of obtaining just a tiny sliver of passing notoriety. Whether the mistakes are small or large, it seems hard to imagine that anyone is going to be able to leave behind any kind of digital footprint that lasts from age 13 to age 35 without leaving behind a few regrettable patches. And anyone who is so good at avoiding those mistakes from such a young age and for so long is likely the kind of person who's so focused on being "perfect" that they lose touch with reality. As a society, we're going to have to (a) adjust to the new reality and become more forgiving of people's past errors, and (b) do a better job of helping kids understand that they shouldn't make unforced errors online.

Japan offers IMF $60 billion to keep the wheels from falling off the world economy
Meanwhile, the US nominee to head the World Bank has gotten the job, even if Brazil doesn't like the decision


Shingles that double as solar-power collectors now on the market
They're being sold in California, Colorado, and Texas to start



Sergey Brin: "Very powerful forces" are "lined up against the open Internet"
Google's in a precarious spot: It thrives on open access to the Internet -- sites walled-off behind password protection, like Facebook, get in the way of their access to the information that's out there. But at the same time, Google remains the 800-lb. gorilla of the "open" Internet, without any serious rivals -- so it looks and behaves sometimes like a monopolist. Users are correct to be skeptical of Google at all turns -- even if the company is simultaneously stepping out as a (self-interested) defender of openness on the Internet (which is a good thing).

Student loan defaults are "a necessary market correction"
It's an unpleasant reality, but it's true. People have been obtaining degrees with little or no real value in the marketplace, and they've been financing those educational experiments with debt. Dr. David Hakes of UNI puts it like this: "The fact is if you have to explain your major in a job interview, that is not a good sign." Sure, in an ideal world, we would all get to study whatever interests us most, deep down in our souls. But the reality is that we're not so advanced that we can all live lives of recreation. The cold, hard truth is that we still need a lot of people to do a lot of work to keep society functioning, and people need to know how to do useful things in order to do their part. The market cannot reward what the market does not need. And the educational industry has been subsidizing those low-value degree programs for quite some time, without acknowledging that we need to be a little bit tougher in order to ensure that society really continues to progress.

How thunderstorms prevented an even worse tornado outbreak this weekend
It was a bad outbreak -- but it could have been catastrophic, had more tornadoes formed, or if the ones that did develop had been closer to heavily-populated areas. As it was, there was a flood of mud, rain, and hail that did a lot of damage to an emergency room in Norfolk, Nebraska, and there was a lot of very serious damage at Creston, Iowa. And poor little Thurman, Iowa got hit hard -- and it's a community that was immediately adjacent to the path of last year's Missouri River flooding.

Jewish temple, Islamic mosque, and Episcopal church to share common campus in Omaha
Now, that's American.

The Sinatra Group
(Video) One of the best "Saturday Night Live" sketches of all time. "Sinbad O'Connor!"

Who's your (child's) daddy?
A Craigslist ad details an anything-but-immaculate conception

And now, a public service announcement from former child celebrities
(Video) Kirk Cameron, himself a former child celebrity, says of homosexuality: "I think that it's detrimental and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization". Some of the other child stars of his generation beg to differ.

Alex Karras sues the NFL for head injuries

Cell phones have (almost) killed CB radio

Why we need better personal-finance education in America
Young people are seeing offers for credit cards on websites like Facebook -- and they may not know enough to ask the right questions before committing in response to what look like very attractive offers.

Social-media sites are turning prom invitations into absurdly elaborate performances
It's just prom. Not everything needs to be a spectacle. And since you're not likely to marry your prom date, you might want to cut back on the digital trail you're leaving behind that may cause a future spouse to become jealous.



What recruiters see in a resume
Heat maps show what people are seeing when they spend a few seconds on a resume

Google tries redesigning Google Plus to get people to come back




Huge risk of big tornadoes and large hail across Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas today
As well as Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri

The United States needs to put more diplomatic and trade attention on Latin America
The President is there for speeches and meetings now, but the region really needs to be much more than an occasional area of focus. Too often our worldview breaks down into the equivalent of "Us (yay!), China (scary!), and Europe (buddies in trouble!)." There's a lot more nuance deserved than that.

God bless the memory of Jackie Robinson
(Video) Even some of his friends in baseball still held stupid prejudices about people like him, years after he broke the color barrier in baseball



Article 18: Why Italy's economy is hard to jump-start
The law makes it nearly impossible to fire employees -- which naturally makes them extremely reluctant to hire people in the first place


North Korean rocket launch failure
Was it a tool of space exploration or just a thinly-veiled weapons experiment?

Why there's not a big market for "social media experts"
Lots of people who lack other skills are trying to sell themselves as "professional" users of sites like Facebook. The reality is that no amount of publicity can make up for a lack of good content.

Google announces stock split


Western Iowa groups hope to speed up the widening of Highway 20


Historical images overlaid on modern Google Street View shots
Really fascinating



The telegraph transcripts from the night the Titanic sank -- read aloud
Though they're read aloud by synthesized voices -- devoid of any human emotion -- it's absolutely riveting listening. Truly a stellar piece of work by the BBC. We all know how the story ends, and we all know how it's been characterized in movies and in pop culture -- but this is the equivalent of listening to the cockpit voice recorder from an airplane crash.

Prepare for a future of higher taxes and fewer government-funded benefits
Ben Bernanke reiterates what should already be widely-understood in America today: We're spending too much and taxing too little (at least, too little for the amount of stuff we seem to want government to do). And if we don't get our act together and undertake some belt-tightening in both directions, we're going to face a very unpleasant moment of reckoning when our creditors decide to stop raising our effective credit limit.

Engineers need to get their PR mojo back
An article from the Sioux City Journal from 125 years ago speaks in glowing terms about civil-works projects with an enthusiasm that news reporters reserve today for covering celebrity gossip on Twitter. One of these things is more important than the other, but we celebrate too much of the wrong one.

Judicial review is enshrined in American law. Get used to it.
It's called consistency. The judicial branch has just as much right to overturn acts of Congress (like the health-care reform law) as it does to judge same-sex marriage a constitutionally-protected right under state law. The kinds of people who like to position themselves as "against judicial activism" have to realize that they must be consistent about their relationship with the courts: If they want courts to safeguard certain rights, then they have to accept that courts may sometimes protect other, sometimes unpopular, rights. That's what the judicial branch is for.

Disincorporating an Iowa town
A sad move, nostalgically. But if nobody wants to step up to manage the city's affairs -- or even to bother voting in a municipal election -- then it may not serve a lot of purpose to keep it on the books.

More speculation on the end of Google Plus
The service is still struggling to really spark fanatical popularity, but rest assured that Google is going to keep plugging away at trying to build some kind of social-networking site that resonates with users, somehow, some way.

Facebook, really? $1 billion for Instagram? Really?
$1 billion for a company with nine employees and no particularly spectacular new technology? Welcome to Bubble Town.

A ride on the solid rocket boosters that carried the Space Shuttle
(Video) A unique video.

Cedar Rapids Gazette company buys stake in local cable TV and Internet provider
The Gazette Co. is an unusual organization -- it's not part of one of those highly-leveraged firms that bought up everything in sight using lots of debt. It's an ESOP company under local ownership. ESOP companies aren't perfect -- notably, they can get into trouble when lots of old employees want to sell out and there aren't enough willing young employees looking to buy-in. But without the debt albatross that's sinking a lot of other media companies, they can do creative things like buying into other media organizations, and experimenting with things like online delivery with a more forward-thinking approach.



Nebraska watches candidates for US Senate fight over whether their kids' Twitter accounts are fair political game


Google isn't the only digital librarian in town
An online collection of two million digitized books is hitting the Internet next year. They're going to try to digitize books only after the five- to ten-year period during which new books sell most of their copies and make most of their money.

Chinese power brokers to military: Ignore rumors of a coup


Is your investing style a result of genetics?


Hugo Chavez looks for sympathy and a religious boost
Venezuela's political strongman has cancer, and he's using some televangelist-type fervor to look for sympathy. He actually has an opponent in the upcoming October elections, and he (Henrique Capriles Radonsky) is using the latest stunt to accuse Chavez of being a perpetual candidate. Worth watching: Whether the military really acknowledges the results of a fair election.

US Coast Guard sinks Japanese ship floating aimlessly since the 2011 tsunami
The owner didn't want it back, since it was already destined for scrap. And since it was floating around shipping lanes, it was a dangerous piece of debris to leave adrift. Must have been fun to use as target practice.

Tornado Alley is on the move, and it's eating up more of Iowa


Warren Buffett's life in a parallel universe


April is "Distracted Driving Month"


Report claims that more than half a million Macs are victims of a malware attack
Apple is trying to cut off the damage with a security patch



Hidden Valley wants people to use ranch dressing like it's ketchup
Apparently, they haven't been to Iowa, where people are probably more likely to use ranch dressing than ketchup, anyway. It's practically the state's official food.

What was Hillary Clinton texting from her BlackBerry?
The Tumblr account with spoof answers is pretty funny -- but it's hard to escape the observation that she could very easily be gearing up for a run for the White House again in 2016. The time she's spent as Secretary of State seems to have been a grade-A performance, and it's quite possible that Democrats will end up looking at the Obama Presidency with a sense of voter's remorse...realizing that Clinton was the better choice in 2008.

Google's "skunk works" lab is working on a next generation in eyeglasses


Whooping cough is back


Supreme Court says police have a lot of power to order strip searches


Smartphone security is the next big challenge for IT


Brian Gongol's show notes from filling in on the afternoon show on WHO Radio - April 4, 2012




Dallas-area tornadoes cause more than 400 American Airlines flight cancellations


Skyscraper fire in Moscow extinguished by helicopters dropping water
The building is still under construction, and it's supposed to be the tallest building in Europe when it's finished. The fire happened on the 66th and 67th floors. The whole thing is supposed to be 1150' tall when completed, but who's going to want to be inside a building hit by a major fire well before it was completed? It's not a problem to which Americans are immune -- there's still the fight over the Harmon Tower in Las Vegas, which has cost $279 million to build, but which the owner (MGM) wants to implode before it's even finished or ever used because it doesn't meet earthquake codes.

Should politicians follow their rivals' kids on Twitter?
Two candidates for the Republican nomination for Senator from Nebraska are in a fight over just that question

Has GE become a worse company?
Moody's has downgraded the company's credit rating, saying it's still a very strong company, but that its financing wing is a major risk to the rest of the company.

Yahoo will cut 2000 jobs to try to save $375 million a year
Contrary to what the buzz might be, the company still makes a lot of money -- $1.05 billion in 2011. That's down about $200 million from 2010, which might indicate where those intended cost savings from layoffs are supposed to come from. Total revenues, though, were way down in 2011, so they need to figure out what they want Yahoo to be.

Internet Explorer browser use is on the rise, of all things
Firefox and Chrome have both slipped a little bit, and ceded ground to MSIE, which still has a majority share of browsing time

Sarah Palin on the "Today Show"
(Video) The Daily Show has a pretty good look at the event. Just plain weird.

How much oversight should be applied to GPS tracking of criminal suspects?
Quite a lot, really. There's always the question of whether it becomes necessary to wake up a judge in the middle of the night to get a warrant, but isn't that the least we should be able to ask from our criminal-justice system? And what of drone aircraft used by local police authorities?

Microsoft is losing share in the smartphone market


Data breach at a major credit-card processor




How the beef industry should fight back
The perjorative name "pink slime" has been used to malign beef trimmings used in ground beef. It's a really awful slander, considering the stuff they're attacking is just plain old beef. But because the beef industry has failed to market the product in a comprehensible way (calling it "lean finely-textured beef" is fine for the FDA, but nobody is going to the store to pick up a pound of LFTB), they need to give it a sensible, marketable name. It should be called "the cookie dough cut". Everyone's familiar with rolling out a batch of cookie dough and using a cookie cutter to get shapes (like Christmas trees and Santa hats, for instance) -- and then rolling the excess dough back together again to cut more shapes. That's really all that LFTB is -- it's what's leftover from predetermined cuts (like New York strip), recaptured to prevent it from going to waste, and then processed just like the plain old ground beef that it is. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the two-second sound bite ("pink slime") is enough to persuade a lot of people -- even though it would only take about eight seconds longer to recognize that it doesn't deserve such an awful and slanderous name. But if people are going to be lazy, then it's important for the industry to strike back with its own two-second counter-name (like "the cookie-dough cut") and at least demand a fighting chance in the marketplace.



Google Maps does April Fools' Day in 8-bit style


Volunteers are transcribing the newly-released 1940 Census details


Angel investors and the Midwestern economy


Is it legal to jailbreak an iPod?



Some people should lose their jobs for being stupid
An American woman who became a hooker in Mexico because she didn't want to go home "back to the claustrophobic suburbs [she] had worked so hard to escape" quit that line of work and became a teacher. But she kept on writing about the experience under her own name. And seems shocked (!) that she lost her job over that. This is another anecdotal case for what should be called the "judgment economy". Lots of people talk about the "knowledge economy", but it's probably a misnomer. Thanks to the Internet, there's massive access worlwide to vast troves of information and knowledge. But judgment can't be looked-up on Google. The kind of nutjob who would willingly pick prostitution over life in the suburbs and then pick some kind of imagined ethnographic fame over a teaching job doesn't have the judgment to leave a building on fire.

America's economy is growing
Not at a breakneck pace, but an annualized growth rate of 3.0% in the fourth quarter of last year and a 1.7% rate for the full year of 2011 is at least something positive. Britain's economy shrank in the fourth quarter, by an estimated 0.3%. It's not an economic collapse, but a contraction of any sort is unsettling. One further note on the US change: GDP should really be measured against population, since the important thing is that people become better off, on average. An economy can grow quickly, but if the population grows even faster, then the larger pie is offset by sharing a larger number of slices. In the US case, the Census Bureau estimates that we gain, on average, a person every 15 seconds, after births, deaths, and migration. That's four people per minute, or 5,760 per day, or 2.1 million per year. Considering that the population overall is about 313 million, then the population grows by something like 0.6% a year. So what really matters -- GDP per person -- grew by something less than that 1.7% rate.

Best Buy announces plans to close 50 stores
The company lost $1.2 billion last year

PowerPoint strikes again
FBI PowerPoint instructions told agents they could break the law. That is not the case. But the lazy way in which so many PowerPoint presentations are composed may have given a faulty instruction to unknown numbers of agents anyway.

What is it about the Internet that encourages racists to spout off?
The number of people who are apparently willing to say blatantly racist things in a thoroughly public forum like Twitter is downright amazing. Anything said in a public account on Twitter is archived by the Library of Congress. So any idiot that says something stupid on Twitter is saying it for the public record, forever.

Huge cuts coming to BBC News
They're going to get rid of 140 jobs in the venerable news organization. It's a large number of jobs -- though it's not as large a set of layoffs as, say, the ABC News layoffs of 300 people two years ago.

The big fight over university funding in Iowa




A visual display of the global economy
(Video) How the United States compares -- on several levels -- with the developing economies of Russia, Brazil, India, and China

The evolution of the Moon
(Video)

Bank acquisition just for the sake of acquisition
Acquisition for its own sake isn't a good plan

There's no useful debt deal. Why is anyone surprised?




Don't ever give away passwords to non-essential users
Employers shouldn't be asking for Facebook passwords, and employees shouldn't give them out. (Some exceptions prevail, of course: Certain occupations are highly sensitive and require that someone with the right knowledge can sweep up mistakes. But those are few and far between.) Facebook has come out with a light rebuke of the practice, but it's really not the kind of definitive statement they probably should have made. A real defense of user privacy might've come with a statement like, "Any organization or employer shown to be demanding the passwords of current or prospective employees without cause directly tied to a substantial public safety hazard shall be immediately suspended from any use of Facebook in any manner whatsoever."

Today's babies could have a 1-in-3 chance of living to 100
New figures are being used by the UK's government for future projections, and that new assumption of longevity is one of them. This is exactly why we need to think very, very differently about mandatory old-age savings programs.

Elected officials: Please stop tinkering with taxes
Dow's fight with the IRS over a research tax credit just goes to show why politicians should stop trying to manipulate behavior through the tax code

The PR campaign against "pink slime" has real, harmful consequences
Lots of people are going to be put out of work because the demand for the product is going to drop off so much. Moreover, where do people think the beef trimmings that went into the poorly-named "Lean Finely-Textured Beef" are going to go now? Anyone who's ever eaten a really good steak and gone back to salvage just a little bit more meat from around a piece of fat knows that there's nothing wrong with that meat. The "Beef is Beef" counter-campaign isn't a bad idea -- but it's probably too late to offset much of the damage that has been done. When given the opportunity to fear something they don't understand, people will default to whatever meaning is implied by a name like "pink slime", so it's imperative that people who sell products like LFTB actively get ahead of the parade long before it becomes an issue and actively promote shorthand names that sound good.

Forbes columnist argues for tighter controls on the Roth IRA
Suggesting that some people are using the investment vehicle to shelter investments in closely-held or even publicly-traded companies in which they are major investors, Deborah Jacobs suggests that new Roth IRAs be limited to a certain maximum amount, and that their tax-free transfer to heirs be limited as well. Perhaps more valuable would be to remove the restriction that keeps ordinary people from investing in their own companies via the Roth IRA. If the well-connected are already skirting the law on this matter, they shouldn't be getting an advantage over everyone else.

European politicians want Google censored


Jail time seems like a lot to risk for the chance to see Scarlett Johansson naked
A computer hacker went to a lot of trouble to try to get compromising pictures of celebrities. And he succeeded. But now he's headed to jail until he can be sentenced in July.

Entertainment newspaper "Variety" is up for sale


The Des Moines Public Schools superintendent sure seems to want to leave town


The influence of architect Mies Van Der Rohe


Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - March 25, 2012



The President's nominee to head the World Bank


How to research mutual-fund leverage


Fund flows
Americans are yanking money out of the stock market and pouring it into bonds

To fight alcoholism, Britain's going to make it more expensive to drink
Minimum drink prices will be part of a new government initiative there. The new rules would make Two-Buck Chuck cost about $5.



Iowa does better than average, but not well, on the government-integrity index


Why we invest in science and basic research


Tax breaks, once given, live on forever


Regents approve program changes at UNI


An alternative analysis of American manufacturing


The cyberhacking threat to the nation's infrastructure


Southwest Airlines branches out...into a bigger Boeing 737




Politicians and their Twitter accounts: Who owns the name of the job?


The tragedy that brought the stink to natural gas


What should be done about Syria?


Firefighters in drag -- fighting a fire


Seeing around corners...in 3D
(Video)

Job applicants may be asked by some employers to turn over their Facebook passwords




Dallas area will pilot test a $500,000 low-level radar system mounted to cell phone towers
Low-altitude radar will be a huge benefit to severe weather forecasters and observers

UK plans lower minimum wage for young workers than for adults
It makes sense; younger workers have less to offer due to their lack of experience -- so making their labor more affordable helps them get the experience they need

The Exxon Valdez has sailed its last
The infamous oil tanker has been sold for scrap

Rethinking the Des Moines Partnership building


A senior toll collector on the Illinois Tollway makes $52,000 a year
Just a curious little factoid



Recycling the beautiful old Omaha Federal building

Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - March 17, 2012

Take two minutes for a self-exam today
Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives. There's lots of misinformation about cancer that finds its way around the Internet, largely because we've been trained to wait expectantly for some sort of magic-bullet solution to cancer. But cancer risks can be significantly reduced through a balanced diet, exercise, and early detection and treatment. Meanwhile, science is making great progress towards improving genetic detection, which holds great promise for some types of cancer. Instead of forwarding hoax-ridden e-mails about "cancer cures" and false threats, people should instead remind their friends and family to assess their health once a month.



More cell printing by inkjet printer
This is going to be one of the key breakthrough medical technologies of the next 10 to 15 years, and if our lawmakers don't know their science, we could face some bad unintended consequences

Chicago Tribune endorses Mitt Romney

US Senator pushes "Startup Act"
Things to like about the proposed law: Efforts to reduce regulatory burdens, an increase in the immigration limits for people with advanced degrees in science and technology, and reforms to Sarbanes-Oxley. Things not to love so much: Lots of special tax breaks for startup businesses. We all want our taxes to be lower than they are, but cutting special deals is what gets us into the absurdly-complex and utterly stupid tax code that we have today. Nobody deserves a special break; just make the corporate tax code simple and fair for all. One other worry: That people will get the idea that startups all have to be Internet-based service companies. Sure, there are lots of great ideas that make sense to deliver online, but we need a lot of other non-Web businesses, too.

The Milky Way over a thunderstorm
It's too easy to forget to look up into the night sky sometimes

South Korean scientists are going to try to clone a wooly mammoth
There's some leftover bone marrow from a long-dead mammoth that's been recovered in Russia

Self-diagnosis depends on how the symptoms are listed
People turn to the Internet for a lot of help with self-diagnosis of medical conditions. If it means they go in to get serious problems checked, then it's a good thing. If they're only using it to feed paranoia, then it's harmful. Some research by psychologists at Arizona State University finds that the best way to list symptoms alternates between specific ones and broader ones -- the specific ones help winnow out people who are too quick to think they're dying of something awful; the broad ones give people who are too casual about their health cause to think again and check into their health.



The Goldman Sachs resignation letter
"[W]ill people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client's goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact."

What you're being called behind your back

Cedar Rapids wind-turbine manufacturer for sale
It was purchased by a larger company just a couple of years ago, and now they want to cut it loose

North Korea plans a satellite launch -- or missile test
It depends on how one wants to look at it.



The trouble with unemployment dropping too low
It may sound like a foreign problem elsewhere, but in the Midwest, there's an unemployment problem -- that the rate of unemployment may be too low. The lack of available workers could be stifling growth at companies that are ready to expand. There's also a serious problem with a labor mismatch -- the open jobs out there require skills that the potential employees don't have. This is why it's so important to have a system for building the job skills of the unemployed -- otherwise, they just stay unemployed. Others have observed -- and they're probably right -- that the solutions aren't likely to be found in big, aggregate macroeconomic measures. There are too many economic problems that people try to address with esoteric "solutions" like stimulus packages and incentive deals. Specific problems often require specific solutions.

Departing Goldman Sachs executive gives exit interview...to the New York Times


Pinterest promises site upgrades -- right away




Outsourcing innovation
How companies are using venture-capital projects to find innovation without developing it through internal research and development. On one hand, it probably isn't the worst idea -- there may very well be good ideas and potential companies looking for venture-capital funding. But on the other hand, it sounds like an admission by the companies doing the funding that they're either too bureaucratic or hide-bound or simply un-creative to get the job done from the inside. Organic growth -- endogenous growth, if you will -- is attractive because it suggests a certain sustainability.

Iowa unemployment rate falls again
It's never gotten anywhere close to as high as in other parts of the country, and it's recovering well

Stop the incentives madness!
A developer wants $2.5 million from Iowa City to subsidize the construction of a new high-rise

Depressing social steps backward in Russia
Bans on "homosexual propaganda" are just thinly-veiled bias

Yahoo sues Facebook


How the Washington Post may be positioning itself to outlive the New York Times






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