Media Announcements

April 19, 2013: Intention to Transfer Ownership of UCM’s KTBG to Public Broadcaster KCPT

December 6, 2012: Congratulations Joyce DiDonato and Kansas City Symphony for the Grammy Nomination

November 13, 2012: “Makers: Women Who Make America” – a national effort brought to Kansas City

November 2, 2012: Imagine KC Takes a Look Back

October 4, 2012: PBS Statement Regarding October 3 Presidential Debate

September 27, 2012: Shane Guiter Named New VP of Digital Media for KCPT

September 24, 2012: KCPT Wins Two EMMY Awards

September 11, 2012: Healthcare Reform – The Local Show Special

August 29, 2012: “Art Tasting with Julián” – a new KCPT series

August 23, 2012: KCPT to Film Sold-Out TEDxKC

August 23, 2012: A Day With P. Allen Smith, September 8, 2012

August 14, 2012: KCPT Announces Second Season of Community Cinema

August 1, 2012: KCPT Earns Nine Emmy Nominations

July 13, 2012: Homeland: Immigration in America

July 3, 2012: KCPT Presents Homecoming: The Kansas City Symphony Presents Joyce DiDonato

May 21, 2012: Imagine KC: Transit Oriented Development for May 24, 2012

May 9, 2012: PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger speaks at KC Chamber Insight KC meeting

May 1, 2012: Putting Down Roots: Roxy Paine’s Ferment

April 20, 2012: KCPT President & CEO, Kliff Kuehl named in KC Magazines “Top 100″ Kansas Citians

April 12, 2012: Christopher B. Leinberger: The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

March 7, 2012: The Local Show Special, “Mental Health Awareness”

February 20, 2012: In Performance at the White House: Red, White and Blues

February 15, 2012: CLINTON: American Experience

January 18, 2012: Check, Please! KC New Season

January 4, 2012: KCPT_PBS Arts Summer Festival Release 2012 will include KCPT produced performance documentary about the Kansas City Symphony

October 24, 2011: performARTS, a partnership with Townsend Communications and KCPT

October 22, 2011: KCPT Receives Two Emmy® Awards

October 11, 2011: Imagine KC: Natural Resource Conservation

September 27, 2011: Generation XL: Eating Healthy on ANY Budget

September 27, 2011: Kauffman Center and KCPT Celebrate Virgil Thomson

September 15, 2011: The Local Show Special: Not in Our Town

September 7, 2011: Raise The Roof

September 1, 2011: KCPT Emmy Nominations 2011

July 12, 2011:  Generation XL: Making the Grade with Physical Education

June 28, 2011:  ImagineKC: Building Local, Healthy Food Systems

June 21, 2011:  Missouri Broadcasters Association Awards

March 18, 2011: Imagine KC: Exploring Vibrant Centers

March 9, 2011: Mayoral Race Special Editions of RUCKUS and Kansas City Week in Review

March 2, 2011: Local Partnerships and Familiar Faces on KCPT This March During Spring Member Drive

February 22, 2011: Roxy Paine Dendroid Story on The Local Show

  • Famuliner

    I was planning on watching Fons & Porter this morning, Saturday, at 8 am and it was not on and was looking online for the schedule and don’t see them listed.  Please tell me they are still on KCPT!

  • Karen

    Fons & Porter return to their regular time slot – 8am – this Saturday, August 20, 2011. You can also see Fons & Porter on KCPT Create on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

April 2013 Letter from Kliff Kuehl, President & CEO

Learn more about KCPT as a leading provider of educational services in our community.

Every week some 95,000 area students bring their studies to life with KCPT’s digital learning services. Our PBS LearningMedia™ is a great resource for students and educators and brings together the best of pubic media digital content from award-winning programs like NOVA, Nature, FRONTLINE, American Experience, and Sid the Science Kid. KCPT acts as the connector between this outstanding innovative digital content service and the educators and students at area schools.

Gary Brock, KCPT’s Director of Education, represented KCPT at the PBS LearningMedia™ Summit at PBS in Arlington Virginia last month. Sarah Hayden, second grade teacher from the Longfellow Elementary School in the Kansas City Public School District accompanied Gary. Sarah will work with KCPT to create workshops throughout the metro to promote the service to other schools.

Another educational initiative of KCPT is Raising Readers. The Martha Speaks Reading Buddies program now includes six high needs elementary schools in the greater Kansas City Metropolitan area.  Currently 700 children are involved with the mentoring program. Fourth and fifth graders become Big Buddies and kindergartners and first graders become Little Buddies. During the ten sessions the Big Buddies mentor their Little Buddies by watching special Martha Speaks programs, playing games, writing in journals, and reading books together. The Little Buddies get to take the 10 books home allowing these high needs children to begin building a library and a love of reading.

KCPT hosted an early childhood workshop for area teachers last month. The Family Conservancy trained the teachers in advanced skills to be used to address the high needs children they work with on a daily basis. KCPT hosts four of these workshops each year and has over 40 in attendance at each workshop.

As you can see, KCPT is more than just television. We have a broad reach in the community to help inside and outside of the classroom.  Great content plus great teachers plus great training equals life long success!

If you would like more information about our educational services, please visit our website at kcpt.org.

Click here to join me as a proud member of KCPT.

Kliff Kuehl signature

 

“Heart Disease is a serial killer that has stalked humans for 4000 years”

“In our previous study, we discovered heart disease as old as Moses, now we can say we have found heart disease as old as Abraham,” said Thompson.
CT scan of a mummy

CT Scan of a “bundled” Peruvian mummy

(Kansas City, MO – Sunday, March 10, 2013)

Don’t stop exercising or dieting just because a recent study reveals that atherosclerosis  – a hardening and narrowing of the arteries – may have been much more common among ancient peoples than previously thought.

This is according to Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute cardiologist Randall Thompson, M.D. and his team of international researchers who published their findings in the prestigious journal The Lancet, and presented them at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Session conference in San Francisco.

Atherosclerosis – the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes – is usually considered to be a disease of modern human beings, related to contemporary risk factors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise. Dr. Thompson’s research suggests, however, that heart disease may be mankind’s oldest health nemesis.

“In a previous study, we discovered heart disease in mummies as old as Moses. Now we can say we have found heart disease as old as Abraham,” said Dr. Thompson.

His team’s most recent findings also discovered that heart disease may have been more common across cultures and across disparate global regions.

An international group of researchers, including a paleopathologist, Egyptologists and an expert on aging, used CT scans to look for the characteristic signs of atherosclerosis in 137 mummies from ancient Egypt, Peru, Southwest America, and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. In mummies where arterial structure had survived, the researchers were able to attribute a definite case of atherosclerosis where they found signs of vascular calcification. In other cases, though the arteries had not survived the mummification process, calcified plaque could still be seen, which the researchers attributed to a probable case of atherosclerosis.

“The fact that we found similar levels of atherosclerosis in all of the different cultures we studied, all of whom had very different lifestyles and diets, suggests that atherosclerosis may have been far more common in the ancient world than previously thought, and not unique to an elite group of people selected for mummification in ancient Egypt,” Dr. Thompson said.

Egyptian Mummy on CT Scanner

Egyptian Mummy on CT Scanner

In 2010, Thompson’s Horus Study released initial findings of atherosclerosis after performing CT scans on mummies found in the Egyptian Antiquities Museum in Cairo, Egypt.  Some of the mummies used in their research dated back 3500 years and had been found in tombs and pyramids.

“Looking at their scans, you could see calcium deposits on artery walls and along the course where the arteries should be,” Thompson said. “When you see calcium build up, it’s a sign of heart disease, the same red flags we see in our patients today.”

Their study caused quite a stir among the medical community and even caught the attention of the main stream press, including David Letterman. However, the team also had its detractors.

“After the release of our first paper, we had critiques stating that the research was skewed because mummified Egyptians represented the wealthier class. They ate fattier, richer foods than the working class,” said Dr. Thompson.

Since 2010, Thompson’s international team expanded their research to include thousand year-old Peruvian mummies, Ancient Puebloan mummies (a.d. 400-700) and Aleutians mummified as recently as the 1860s.

“We widened the net and still found heart disease – even in the hunter-gatherer societies,” Dr. Thompson said.

Dr. Thompson also says his research is beginning to cast doubt that atherosclerosis is life-style related and questions the common assumption that humans must emulate pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural lifestyles in order to avoid heart disease.

“Our understanding of the causes of atherosclerosis is incomplete, and instead may be somehow inherent to the process of human aging,” admits Dr. Thompson.

woman holding a video camera standing next to a mummy on a CT scanner

KCPT Senior Producer/Writer Pam James on Mummy Duty

Watch this:In May 2010, KCPT’s Senior Producer/Writer Pam James went to Cairo with the Horus Study team to document their second attempt to CT scan fifty mummies in one week. (Approx. 10 minutes into The Local Show.)

Forty-Eight Hour Event Produces Innovative Ideas

Two new service prototypes emerge from local Kansas City event.

On Sunday, March 3rd, the Kansas City Service Jam presented two services that were designed in just forty-eight hours at the Google Fiber Space in Westport. The local event launched on Friday evening at Red Nova Labs before moving over to Google Fiber for Saturday and Sunday sessions.

The event focuses on collaboration and designing services related to a shared theme, which was simply presented as “Grow ^”, or as interpreted by the participants, “Grow Up”. The Kansas City Service Jam divided into two smaller groups to design prototypes of two entirely new services.

One KC team tackled the problem of financial acumen among children. They decided to focus on parents who are fiscally responsible and have the desire to facilitate a conversation about finances with their 6-10 year old children.

“We see a lot of solutions that ‘gamify’ or abstract the use of money, our mission was to get these children involved in real world finances.” said David Rondeau, one of the group’s team members.

The group created a prototype application that allows children to utilize their parent’s device in the grocery store aisles for comparison shopping. The app, called “Eenie-Meenie”, centers around the use of cartoon monsters to guide the children by using a barcode scanner to gather information on quantity and price, enabling them to understand the financial aspects of a purchase.

The other KC team prototyped a service related to personal growth, with a particular focus on the problem of procrastination. Team member Rachel Lin said of their project, “Using a co-creative process, we developed the concept of a fun game to help a user break a negative behavior pattern (procrastination) and then guide them through the process of finishing their task.”

Near the final hours of the event, team member Justin Ruggieri said, “It’s pretty amazing that by Sunday we created a viable service which we had no awareness for on Friday.”

The Kansas City Service Jam was one of over one-hundred locations in roughly forty-eight different countries to participate in the 48-hour Global Service Jam.

Team Photo

2013 Local Service Jam team photo

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Study Finds Proposed Startup Visa Could Create Half Million Jobs

New report suggests that passing legislation to offer Startup Visas has the potential to add between 500,000 and 1.6 million new jobs over the next 10 years.

A new report issued by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation suggests that passing legislation to offer Startup Visas has the potential to add between 500,000 and 1.6 million new jobs over the next 10 years.

The visas, included in the Startup Act 3.0 bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate, would be available to a fixed pool of 75,000 foreign-born individuals who already hold H-1B visas or F-1 student visas and who start companies in the United States.

In the first year of business, these entrepreneurs would be required to employ at least two full-time, non-family workers and to invest or raise an investment of $100,000 or more.

By meeting the first-year requirements, recipients would be granted a three-year visa extension. If, over that three-year period, the business owner has hired, on average, one additional employee each year, he or she may apply for permanent status.

“There’s hope that 2013 finally may be the year the United States implements comprehensive immigration reform,” said Dane Stangler, director of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. “However, that legislation would fall short if it fails to create a new visa for the thousands of potential foreign-born entrepreneurs who are already in the country, particularly those who are likely to start technology and engineering firms. Increasing their numbers would accelerate U.S. economic and job growth and help offset the steadily declining numbers of native entrepreneurs.”

Previous research has shown that immigrant-founded technology and engineering startups employ an average of 21.37 people per firm.

A National Foundation for American Policy analysis of the top 50 venture capital¬backed companies in 2011 revealed that 24 were founded or co-founded by immigrants.


 

 

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