SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) – The City Council in Sioux City is raising the stormwater fee by 50 percent but lowering the Sioux City property tax rate at the same time. The Sioux City Journal reports the council voted Thursday for the revenue adjustment. The city finance staff is still calculating what the impact. The tax levy is being lowered but a state-mandated increase is scheduled in the percentage of the assessed valuation subject to taxation.

Finance director Donna Forker told the council that residential and commercial property owners will save more on their property taxes than they’ll pay on the stormwater fee. Forker says that’s because the stormwater fee base is broader than the property tax base.

Religious organizations, charities and other nonprofits are exempted from property taxes but must pay the stormwater drainage fee.

The Creston Police Department says two people were arrested Thursday. At around 5:30-p.m., 42-year old Dustin Michael Davis, of Afton, was arrested on a warrant out of Indiana for Probation Violation. Davis was being held in the Union County jail pending extradition to Indiana. And, at around 4-p.m., 31-year old Ashley Marie Kessler, of Creston, was arrested on a Nebraska warrant for Driving While License Suspended. Kessler was being held in the Ringgold County Jail while awaiting extradition.

A researcher at Iowa State University is experimenting with eye-tracking technology as a way to help employers determine if someone applying for a job is lying. Professor Joey George says they’ve been studying they way people try to deceive others for many years. “One of the things that we know from past research is that when someone is being dishonest, they transmit certain cues about it,” George says. “There are certain things that we have learned over the years that tend to be pretty reliable indicators of when people are not telling you the truth.”

For example, he says a person’s pupils will dilate when they are lying. George says the dilation can sometimes be hard to see because of eye color and lighting. That’s where the eye-tracking technology can help. “What eye-tracking does is it follows people’s gaze throughout an entire episode. So, if someone is watching a video…we can follow exactly what they look at, in what order and how long they look at certain things. And we think by doing this — and by asking people to determine whether or not what they are watching is deceptive — we can actually focus in on the cues that people look for and the ones that they are comfortable with using when they are trying to find out if somebody is being dishonest,” George says.

The professor of information systems says eye-tracking could be particularly helpful for on-line interviews. He says many job interviews now start out online. “They may start out with a chat session, if that goes well they may eventually go up to Skype of some other form of video conferencing tool,” George says.

He says the online communication can increase the risk of deception. “It’s a pretty wide range, but anywhere between 40 percent and 70 percent of people have something on their resume that is not true,” George says. “So if you are a recruiter and you are sitting there with a resume, and you are interviewing somebody over Skype, we hope to be able to help you determine if the things they say in the interview are true or not true,” George says.

Iowa State’s College of Business is one of about a dozen in the world to have access to a neuroscience lab equipped with eye tracking technology and an E-E-G machine for research.

(Radio Iowa)