Editorial Help Wanted First, a heartfelt thanks to our many readers who have reached out to us with praise and appreciation for the steps we have been taking to make our print and digital publications a more informative and engaging community resource. Now we are asking for your help in the next phase of our improvement efforts; please respond to a new survey designed to help us get a better sense of how our readers interact with our newspapers and…
Online home of The Freeman's Journal and Hometown Oneonta
Advertisement
Editorial - Page 20
Editorial On Thin Ice An unusual thing happened during this past weekend’s severe cold snap: Between 6:30 p.m. on Friday and 8 a.m. Saturday, Otsego Lake, the largest lake in Otsego County, froze over completely. With this week’s warmer weather forecast, it may well thaw again and, if it does, it will follow a somewhat disturbing trend that could spell trouble in the years ahead. Records of ice cover on Otsego Lake have been kept since 1842 and, with the…
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,…
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…
Editorial Tread Lightly, Care and Think Every year the growth, and non-growth, of a variety of areas of interest—such as the economy, the population, bird migrations, immigration, wildfires, utilities, stocks, violence, college rankings, China and the like—are subject to intense research and interpretation. Inevitably, the results are published far and wide just after the last drop of the New Year’s ball. One such fast-developing aspect of our life is our carbon footprint (CO2e), the total greenhouse gas emissions that trap…
Editorial Everything Old Is New Again It has been 20 years or so since the names Tara Barnwell, Michael Moffat, Elinor Vincent and Darla Youngs have appeared together on the masthead of “The Freeman’s Journal.” A confluence of events perhaps regarded by some as a perfect storm—or an imperfect storm, by others—has brought us all together again. “The Freeman’s Journal” is arguably one of the oldest weekly newspapers in the nation. Founded by Judge William Cooper, it began as the…
Editorial Resolutionary Thinking With the New Year comes the tradition of setting resolutions. About 40 percent of U.S. adults set New Year’s resolutions every year. The largest demographic, at 59 percent, is young adults aged 18-34. Research shows that 95 percent of our New Year’s resolutions are fitness-related, inspired by the desire to “look better.” Despite those good intentions, after one month 43 percent will have given up their goal; after three months only 10 percent are still at it.…
Is There a Santa Claus? In 1897, “The Sun,” a New York newspaper, published one of the most famous editorials in journalism. Written by Francis Pharcellus Church, it was in answer to a letter written by an 8-year-old girl who was not satisfied by answers given her by her family and friends to her question—one that remains to this day on the inquisitive minds of many children—Is there a Santa Claus? “We take pleasure in answering at once and thus…
Editorial The 101st Year Since 1921, “The Freeman’s Journal” has sponsored a Christmas Fund drive to help our local families in need, assisting them in putting clothes on their children, food on their tables and presents under their trees at a time when it seemed the holiday season would leave them bereft and out of the festive swirl of things. The fund was created by Rowan D. Spraker, Sr., then the editor and publisher of “The Freeman’s Journal,” and it…
Editorial Baby Eagles Look to Their Future Last Saturday, much to our collective surprise and dismay, the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team lost to the Netherlands in the first game of the knockout round of the FIFA [International Federation of Association Football] 2022 World Cup, in Qatar. In many and obvious ways it was a very sad day for the young team; in other ways it was the beginning of a four-year campaign to bring the sport to the attention…
