(Radio Iowa) – State Treasurer Roby Smith says it may be time to raise the amount of money that can be deposited in College Savings Iowa accounts each year. “Obviously I have to have the legislature and the governor sign off on that, but that’s something that we’re going to be looking at next session,” Smith says. “We wanted to get in office, do a deep dive January through December and then we’ll introduce a bill that’s going to take some of these recommendations that we have and then we’ll leave it up to the legislature to make that decision.”

Smith was elected state treasurer last November and has been in office nearly six months. His office oversees the College Savings Iowa program which lets individuals make deposits in an account for a future or current student and withdrawals are not taxed at the federal level. If you’re an Iowa resident, withdrawals aren’t subject to the Iowa income tax either. The current limit on yearly contributions is 37-hundred-85 dollars. “It’s always moving because every year it indexes to inflation,” Smith says. “What I want to do is look to take a jump up from that. I don’t have an amount right now, but let’s just say maybe we shoot for $5000 and then start indexing it from there, but college has gone up much that it’s outpaced inflation.”

Lawmakers established College Savings Iowa in 1998 when the average cost for tuition and fees at a public university in the U-S was 32-hundred dollars. It’s now more than nine-thousand dollars a year. State records indicate there are more than 100-thousand College Savings Iowa accounts.

(Radio Iowa) – An expert at the University of Iowa’s Driving Safety Research Institute says automated driving will work the best when the strengths of humans and automation are used together. Institute deputy director, Omar Ahmad, says tasks that are redundant are one example. “Humans are our not great at doing the same thing over and over, over a very long time period. Our minds wander, we tend to get distracted, we tend to get bored. We tend to want to do multiple things such as, for instance, use our phones to get something else done while we’re driving,” he says.

He says automation is best at these types of tasks. “Automation and sort of computers in general they are they don’t get tired, they can do the same thing over and over, and they’re not going to take a nap, and they’re not going to get bored,” Ahmad says. Humans are better at making decisions about new things they encounter. “Taking a situation that is very unique. And even a situation that perhaps you barely encounter, or that they haven’t encountered, and more or less figuring out how to deal with it. Humans are really good at that,” he says.

Automation has to rely on what has been programmed into it, so those unique situations cause problems. “Automation and computers and software is terrible at that, because it will only do what is programmed to do. And so anytime it sees a situation that has never seen before, it’s not going to know what to do,” Ahmad says. He says if you were to put the strengths of both the human and the automation together, then you have something that’s very compelling. “What we want to see is really a greater recognition of where things are working well, and where things are not working well. And then to remind everybody that look for a driverless type of solution, we’re going to need to be able to do to really deal with these very unique scenarios,” Ahmad says.

He recently completed work on a study of using of how to make an automated vehicle safely navigate on Iowa’s rural roads. Ahmad says it will take some time to work out automated travel on the country’s roadways.

(LaPlatte, NE) – An eight-year old boy from Glenwood, Iowa, died in a crash that took place last week, in Nebraska. Investigators in Sarpy County, NE., on Monday, said Paxton Parker died in a three-vehicle crash that occurred at around 8-a.m., on June 29^th. A 9-year-old passenger and the vehicle’s driver survived, but suffered serious injuries.

Authorities say Elizabeth Sprunger, of Glenwood, was driving a 2009 Hyundai Sonata westbound east of LaPlatte, NE., on Highway 34, just west of Harlan Lewis Road. She lost control of the vehicle, which crossed into the eastbound lanes, and collided with an eastbound, 2015 Dodge Ram. Sprunger’s vehicle was then struck a second time by a semi-truck.

The drivers of the pickup and the semi-truck were not injured. The Sarpy County Sheriff’s Office said weather conditions at the time of the crash were “poor due to heavy rain in the area.”