Midday Magazine on WAMC

Today is the final day of the University at Albany-hosted International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, which has brought experts and academics from around the world together. WAMC’s Alan Chartock recently spoke with several conference presenters, including Theresa Pardo, Director of the University at Albany Center for Technology in Government, and Dr. Nigel Shadbolt, professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton. Pardo began by describing the aims of the conference.

    Photographer Richard Morgenstein has lived in Pacific Heights since the late 1990s. Before that, he lived in Manhattan and enjoyed it. In many ways, Morgenstein is still very New York. He doesn’t have a car. He relies on public transportation to tote his camera bags around. But the new construction soaring above a growing San Francisco doesn’t really make him nostalgic for his former hometown. Rather, he’s inclined to give a Bronx cheer.

The race for New York's newly drawn 102nd Assembly district seat pits Republican Pete Lopez, seeking his fourth two-year term against Democratic challenger Jimmy Miller, who served for two decades as official spokesman for the Albany police department: Hudson Valley Bureau Chief Dave Lucas takes a closer look at the race.

This presidential campaign season is a time for clarification. If campaigns have any value over and above the megaphone effect of why one candidate is more desirable than the other, it is the chance to use a campaign as an educational forum. From my perspective, even silence or ambiguity can be revealing. In this season, President Obama has indicated the threat and direction of American foreign policy through ellipses.

The poet Frank Bidart’s “Inauguration Day,” composed for President Barak Obama’s first Inaugural, began with these lines: “Staring out across America I see, since Lincoln, gunmen nursing fantasies of purity betrayed, dreaming to restore the glories of their blood and state.”  These words projected a hope of return to earlier times of repression and the glory of purity restored.  It’s a hope that obviously lingers for some.

A collaboration of hospitals and health care systems is implementing a state-of-the-art, high-speed telemedicine network across New York State’s northern tier.

The Adirondack Champlain Telemedicine Information Network, known as ACTION, has been in the works for several years. It will link hospitals and health centers in New York and Vermont.  Plattsburgh’s CVPH Medical Center is the lead health care provider for the system, which President Stephens Mundy explained includes 8 hospitals and 40 primary care facilities across 8 counties.

New York state Senator Stephen Saland, a Republican running for reelection to the Poughkeepsie-area seat he has held since 1990, received a cross-party endorsement from Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo last week. One of four Republicans who broke ranks to vote for same-sex marriage last year, Saland faces Democrat Terry Gipson and conservative Neil Di Carlo – his primary opponent – in the general election. Saland spoke today with WAMC’s Alan Chartock.