| FCC Overhauls Universal Service Fund Government Technology Andy Huckaba, a city councilman from Lenexa, Kan., and chairman of the National ... Although Huckaba sees the FCC's order as a step in the right direction, ... |
ExecCoach Kansas – Leadership that starts where you are
ExecCoach Kansas is a one-on-one highly customized leadership development experience. You will have the opportunity to work with a civic leadership coach who will push you to be conscious, purposeful and intentional as you exercise leadership. This program is open to all Kansans, but might especially benefit those who are:
· Facing a difficult leadership challenge or opportunity,
· In the midst of a significant transition,
· Ready to build their leadership capacity, or
· Seeking greater impact and satisfaction at work or in the community.
Click here for more information about ExecCoach Kansas
Questions? Contact Keshia Ezerendu at kezerendu@kansasleadershipcenter.org or call 316-712-4961.
Your Leadership Edge – Innovative leadership to help you make progress
Your Leadership Edge is KLC’s signature short-format program designed to push you to the edge of your comfort and competence. Through provocative sessions, the intense Harvard Peer Consultation process and the KLC 360 Leadership Assessment, this program will help you make progress on the issues you care about most in civic life.
Your Leadership Edge is open to all Kansans but each location is capped at 45 participants. 2012, dates:
· June 21, 28-29 - Topeka
· September 12, 25-26 - Hays
The participation fee is $100, this includes meals and materials. Scholarships are available upon request.
Click here for more information about Your Leadership Edge.
Questions? Email Thomas Stanley at tstanley@kansasleadershipcenter.org or call 316-712-4958.
Leadership & Faith: Multi-Faith Teams
Click here for more information about Leadership & Faith Multi-Faith Teams
Questions? Contact Allie Denning at adenning@kansasleadershipcenter.org or call 316-712-4957.
One evening in 1929 two young men named William Lear and Elmer Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the Mississippi River town of Quincy , Illinois , to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.
Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios – Lear had served as a radio operator in the U. S. Navy during World War I – and it wasn’t long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.
SIGNING ON
One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago . There they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product called a “battery eliminator” a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios. Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.
Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin’s factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker’s Packard. Good idea, but it didn’t work – half an hour after the installation, the banker’s Packard caught on fire. (They didn’t get the loan.)
Galvin didn’t give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles toAtlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention. Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked – he got enough orders to put the radio into production.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier. In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix “ola” for their names – Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.
But even with the name change, the radio still had problems:
HIT THE ROAD
Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a brand-new car wouldn’t have been easy in the best of times, let alone during the Great Depression – Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that. But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorolas pre-installed at the factory. In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B. F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install them in its chain of tire stores. By then the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. (The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to “Motorola” in 1947.)
In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios. In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts. In 1940 he developed with the first handheld two-way radio – the Handie-Talkie – for the U. S. Army.
A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II. In 1947 they came out with the first television to sell under $200. In 1956 the company introduced the world’s first pager; in 1969 it supplied the radio and television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. In 1973 it invented the world’s first handheld cellular phone. Today Motorola is one of the second-largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. And it all started with the car radio.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO….
The two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin’s car, Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life. Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950’s he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.
Lear also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that. But what he’s really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world’s first mass-produced, affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)
by Lara Malakoff
John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee, and president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), kicked off the Infrastructure Conference, one of four concurrent conferences held during NLC’s Congress of Cities in Phoenix. His advice for city leaders: be selfish. More specifically, he urged city leaders to “always ask the question ‘What adds value for my community?’ and that will lead you in the right direction,” when it comes to local infrastructure planning. According to Norquist, infrastructure planning begins with the street, because “the street works in the interest of the city.” He emphasized the need for state and federal street design standards to also work in the interest of the community, by focusing not only on the movement of goods and services (i.e., highways), but also on the street’s function as a marketplace and gathering place. “Connectivity has a lot of value for municipal services and has positive effects for neighborhoods,” he noted.Results of a study on emergency response and street design in Charlotte, N.C., reveal that emergency responders — medical, fire and police — serve twice the number of residents in areas with connected street grids as they do in areas with culs-de-sac and large roads. There is a continued imperative to coordinate transportation, water infrastructure, housing and land use planning. For successful infrastructure initiatives, city leaders are encouraged to step back, look at the bigger picture, and ultimately make the smartest decisions for their communities. It falls on city leaders to advocate for their cities by challenging planning regulations — such as limits on mixed-use development, anti-urban development codes and universal emphasis on highway development — if they do not add value for their communities. Throughout the Infrastructure Conference, workshops, discussion sessions, films and other activities focused on practical strategies for financing and partnering to support land use and transportation planning, water infrastructure and technology that adds value. Practical strategies for financing infrastructure projects were highlighted throughout the conference. One session, specifically focused on creative local infrastructure financing mechanisms, discussed financing opportunities that not only funded highway projects in the metropolitan Phoenix region but accelerated the completion of the projects by several years. These mechanisms included loans from the state infrastructure bank, grant application notes and board funding obligation loans. The financing session also highlighted multimodal examples, which include strategies for financing new and improved freeways, new and expanded transit service, bike and pedestrian systems and safety and technology improvements. 
This past Friday in San Francisco at the NATOA Annual Conference, I was honored to receive the prestigious Jane E. Lawton Commemorative Award, which is presented annually by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA), to an “extraordinary champion of local government in communications.”
The Jane E. Lawton Award that has been given annually since 2008 (Jane passed away in late 2007) to an elected official who has demonstrated significant efforts to promote community interests in communications. Previous awardees are Montgomery County, MD council member Marilyn Praisner (posthumously 2008); Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX 2009); and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-WI 2010) A very nice award for me and great for Lenexa and our surrounding communities!
I led a bipartisan effort in sending a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski, asking him to take all necessary steps to protect the Global Positioning System (GPS) from interference that could cause interruptions. The letter comes after the International Bureau, a sub-organization within the FCC, granted a conditional waiver earlier this year to allow a company, LightSquared, to build 40,000 ground stations throughout the United States to enhance its satellite network. Those stations could cause widespread interference to nearby GPS receivers, because the spectrum used by LightSquared is adjacent to the spectrum used by GPS. Millions of Americans rely on GPS to get around safely every day. It is also critically important to aviation safety, first responders, civil engineers who monitor dams and bridges, and it is central to our national defense capabilities. GPS is an integral part of our national economy. Farmers rely on GPS for greater efficiency and environmental protection, and just about every industry from manufacturing to distribution has come to rely on this valuable national utility. Reliable GPS affects virtually every American. GPS is far too important to have anything interfere with it. I’ll keep you posted on the FCC’s response.GPS Dilemma
Beer #6 and last of the Samuel Adams Winter Classics Variety Pack.
I'm tasting the Samuel Adams Boston Lager. I've had this several times before. Decent, but not overly memorable. It has a nice rich amber appearance and starts out smooth and malty. Maybe even a little nutty. Then it hits the mid palette rather nicely with a rush of flavor that dies quickly as it moves through the mouth. All of this is great until the end which is rather unspectacular and leaves a small bit of bitter almost sour taste in the back of the mouth. The initial part of the taste is worth the drink, but the end certainly takes it down a notch in my flavor ratings. On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, I give this a 3 star rating!
