THE PARTIAL OBSERVER by ERNA MORGAN MCREYNOLDS Be Afraid, But Do It Anyway Why did I say yes? How could I have let myself be persuaded to compete to be the guest conductor of the Catskill Symphony Orchestra? Especially for the Cabaret concert, which is the symphony’s biggest fundraiser. Thinking back to my experience in the late 1990s, I can’t help but reflect and recall that without the extra money from this annual event, the symphony would have folded and…
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Opinion - Page 78
Editorial Let’s Chat Last November OpenAI, a not-so-big (albeit associated, through a $1 billion investment, with Microsoft and co-founded, in 2015, by Elon Musk), artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco, introduced a newly developed chatbot—ChatGPT—that has made impressive inroads into our understanding of the challenges of artificial intelligence. The company first coded a chatbot in 2020, GPT-3, which is one of the first AI tools that responds to prompts in viable human-like text, for the most part both grammatically and,…
The Dog Charmer Tackling One Dog’s Need for Attention, Another’s Need To Explore Dear Tom When you look at the picture, it’s hard to believe that this dog can be so frustrating for me. He is good when we are here alone, but when guests come, he becomes so hard to manage. He wants to be the center of attention and won’t leave people alone. I filled a hollow bone with meat today when a friend stopped by and that…
Hawthorne Hill by Richard DeRosa Desert Dispatch #2: Remembering and Re-remembering Every spring up on the hill a process of re-remembering inevitably takes place. Bird calls and songs lain dormant all winter need to work their way back to conscious memory. And as the world greens up and comes to life, memory needs to do a few tricks as well. Can’t remember how many times I have been on a walk, noticed a spring flower and then spent a good…
Citizen Science No. 1 by Jamie Zvirzdin Introduction to Citizen Science: Finding Intellectual Security Imagine you’re sitting in science class. On the paper before you, there’s a homework problem you don’t understand. You raise your hand to seek clarity, but the teacher responds, “Oh, that problem is easy! Just use your intuition.” The teacher then rattles off a bunch of specialized words—science jargon—you just learned. “Thanks,” you say out loud, but your muddied thoughts are joined by the cold chill…
News from the Noteworthy City of the Hills: Out With the Old and in With the New Welcome to Oneonta. Welcome new businesses and new members of our community. We’ve been waiting for you, and we are so glad you’re here. Welcome to the Apple Express, which finally fills the empty space that was Friendly’s. The ice cream shop was an anchor for the neighborhood, and the Apple Express is a terrific candidate to fill that role for the future.…
The Partial Observer Key Factors May Help Decide Next President Discussion about the next presidential election no longer begins a year or so before Election Day. It begins four years before the election! Because of this, it might be appropriate—21 months before the next election—to highlight the six factors regularly cited by political scientists and historians in gauging the performance of a president. An appreciation of these factors should be helpful to citizens as they discuss the fitness of 2024…
A Partial Observer Town of Columbia Residents Wary of Project The Town of Columbia is being pitched a 350 megawatt solar and 20 MW battery storage project by French owned, and San Diego based EDF Renewables. The project outreach to local landowners began quietly in 2019 and will require approximately 2,200 usable, contiguous acres—equal to 10 percent of the land in the Town of Columbia, which is known to have some of the most fertile farmland in the state. The…
Life in the time of COVID Current Concepts and Constant Change Things in the world of COVID are rapidly and constantly changing. This week’s column is a brief compendium of some of these changes. The alphabet soup of COVID variants and subvariants grows daily. Four weeks ago, we were talking about the new Omicron variant XBB. Now we are reading about the subvariant daily. A month ago, we were starting to discuss the properties of the original XBB. Now XBB.1.5…
Editorial This Is for the Birds Last year, more than 57 million birds, including poultry, perished in the U.S. from a surge of avian influenza (H5N1), a killer disease that has been increasingly effective in attacking wild birds, especially migrating waterfowl. Mallards and Canada geese seem to be the most susceptible. The disease, which has flared up sporadically since its discovery, as fowl plague, in 1878, is caused by infections that occur naturally in wild aquatic birds. These infections are…
