GETTING INFORMATION...SLOWLY

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

A University of Arizona researcher has concluded there's an inequity when it comes to accessing health information via the Internet. UA Communications Department Assistant Professor Steve Rains' research is published in the national Communications Research Journal.

Rains says some people who use dial-up modems are too impatient to wait for the information to load on their computer screens, while broadband users don't have to waste too much time. You can read more about the study here.

I was surprised to learn that so many people still use dial-up. I know it costs more to go high-speed, but with broadband widely available at workplaces and all libraries, I find it odd that people would have health concerns, but don't care enough to wait a few seconds (or minutes) to check them out.

Perhaps you're on dial-up as you read this. Maybe you aren't downloading our schedules, videos and audio podcasts, because you don't feel like waiting. At least AZPM still offers programs the old fashioned way...on your TV and radio.

THE WEEK AHEAD...

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

It's the summer slowdown, but there are a couple of things of note that should be transpiring this week. The Arizona Legislature loses a veteran and Tucson may make another change downtown.

Republican Jake Flake of Snowflake died of an apparent heart attack over the weekend . He was 72. Flake was running for re-election next fall, but had no opposition. It's now up to the Navajo County Board of Supervisors to name a replacement.

Closer to home, The Tucson City Council Tuesday will listen to City Manager Mike Hein's reasons for opposing a renovation of Hotel Arizona downtown, in favor of spending all the the money on a new 700-room Sheraton Hotel near the TCC. The estimated cost of that is $17 million. If anything is constant with the Rio Nuevo project, it's change.

WELCOME!

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

At last, a place to talk about what goes on behind the scenes of the new Arizona Public Media. I'll be focusing on news topics and what's going on with our website. The tech-guys have their own blog, so I'll focus on the content, which is a new area of responsibility for me. Among other things, I prepare the radio podcasts for the website, found on the KUAZ side.

Today is a great place to start, since a big meltdown occurred this morning (a couple of times) and odds are you probably didn't even notice...or maybe you did.

Shortly before the 9:06 a.m. live newscast, our computer (which plays the audio), died. I had to replace slightly more than two minutes of the newscast that I no longer had available and I had less than ten seconds to prepare for that. It's a good thing I can read with one eye and edit copy and prioritize with the other.

INSIDE THE IMPOSSIBLE

posted to Delivering the Impossible by Joseph Leingang

In the coming few weeks we're going to add several additional features to blogs.azpm.org/b/.

Comments

This is going to be pretty cool because we'll finally have real time user feedback!

Feeds

We'll probably start with RSS feeds so people can subscribe to blogs

Searching

There's such a tremendous demand for searching!

Which brings me to the second topic of this post: searching

Everyone wants to search everything -- and we totally get that. We're working really hard to bring searching to the schedules portion of our website; unfortunately the data behind that comes from a database whose software was last update in 1995. It's a unique challenge, but hey, we deliver the impossible. As far as I can tell, we're the only people who have an entirely in-house schedules application in the first place!

FIRST POST

posted to Delivering the Impossible by Jason Katterhenry

So, we've launched blogs. No time like the present to bring AZPM in to the interblagosphere. Those of you who read James' Cue Sheet will be happy to know that its archive has been imported in its entirety for your perusal. In the future more blogs will appear from various departments to keep you up to date and more connected with what goes on around here.

We hope to use this blog to keep you up to date on new features and content that AZPM.org has to offer, as well as code snippets for those of you curious to see the magic that Joey cooks up on a weekly basis.

SMILE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Some of us in the radio biz already know this, but it comes as a surprise to a lot of people: You can actually hear a smile in someone’s voice. Now there’s a study to prove it. The conclusion, according to one of the researchers: “When we listen to speech we hear the general pitch, and people associate a  rise in pitch with more smiley sounding voices," she said, adding that "we might also be picking up on more subtle cues, like the spread of frequencies within the voice, and how intense the voice is." You can find a news account here.