The Spark

Professional and college football is preparing for the season, and that means legal wagers for those games. In May 2018, after a six-year-battle, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of New Jersey in Murphey v. NCAA and struck down a decades-old deferral law that prohibited the state from legalizing sports betting.

Richard McGarvey, Deputy Director of Communications for the PA Gaming Control Board says in November 2018, Pennsylvania began offering sports wagering.

“Sports wagering has evolved to where there are many different ways to bet on any particular sport. Football is a good example. They might bet on, when who's going to which team is going to have the next field goal, or which team is going to have the next touchdown, or what is the quarterback going to throw a touchdown on the next one or an interception? So, there's many options for sports wagering. And that's just football, baseball. You can actually, bet on the particular pitch. Will it be a strike? Will it be a ball. Will it be a home run. So, there's many options compared to what there used to be.”

Sports betting has become popular in Pennsylvania since it’s become legal. There’s currently 18 retail locations where you can walk into a casino or an off track betting facility and place wagers.

So you walk in, they'll have tote boards, in other words, telling you what all the wagers are on, on the board. You can look at them, fill out a card and make your wagers and also collect winnings there. But then the way most people do sports wagering is online.”

If you are someone you know has a gambling problem, please:

• Call 1-800-Gambler
• Text 1-800-522-4700

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Since the early 1900's the Walnut Street property has housed schools and now apartments. Jeb Stuart the President of the Board of Directors of the Historic Harrisburg Association says the building means so much to so many people.

"Well, it was a landmark, and, and had a lot of history. There are a lot of alumni from old tech, as it was called, and there was the Tech Golden Legion, which resolved the alumni association of a lot of folks and met in Harrisburg. They had gone there. So there was kind of, you know, a feeling about the history that was important. But above and beyond that, it was, a significant building architecturally, a sound building, and had a lot of architectural character."

The structured was a technical school for boys in Harrisburg around 1910, before the building became the Old City Hall building.

"There are two parts to it. The original part of the building was built around 19 four, 1905, which is the the back part, the brick part of the building and the main part of the building, which people see today along Walnut Street, was completed in 1911. And the English Collegiate style is really a cool building architecturally, and it served for many years as the technical high school, which was really the principal downtown high school for boys. And it was, fulfilled that role until the mid 1920s, actually until 1927, when John Harris High School, and the eastern end of the city and William Penn High School at the northern end of the city were completed, which kind of consolidated all what were schools in the downtown area and the new two new, very large campuses that we all know to this day. When that happened, old City Hall became, renovated as the site for city government and became city hall. And it served that purpose, starting in 1927, all the way up until the new city hall was completed on Market Square in the early 1980s."

Stuart even worked as a city clerk in the Old City Hall building when it was located on Walnut Street.

" I was city clerk to Harrisburg City Council at the time, and council chambers was on the second floor, and my office was on the second floor. And, I spent many interesting sessions with city council and, of course, the general public coming in, for one reason or another. And I knew, many of the folks in City Hall at the time I started in the city planning Bureau, which was on the second floor. And that's that that was the time that we started to, inventory and create the municipal historic districts in the downtown. So it was an interesting time, at least for me, and also for the city in general, and trying to to coordinate the value of historic preservation efforts through the historic district creation and also marry that with the goals of the Harristown Plan in terms of the development of the central business district. When word came out that the building was going to be vacated, for, the new building on Market Square. I think a lot of people accepted that, understood why that was happening. Understood it was part of a broader mission and a broader goal. But it was interesting in that there was the Harrisburg City Archives, all the documents, all the ledgers, everything, all the photography of the city's history was located in and the old City Hall building. And I remember when it was being cleaned out, for the move to the new one. The mayor at that time, Steve Reed, was very, aggressive in stopping the, removal of those archives because at that time they thought, well, it was just paper. And, you know, we have to get rid of all this stuff. Nope, nope. He was able to save that. And those archives, thankfully, have been preserved over the years and are now, part of the Pennsylvania State Archives headquarters facility on North sixth Street and can be accessed by the general public."

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Artificial Intelligence also known as A.I. for short is a set of technologies that enable computers to perform a variety of advanced functions, including the ability to see, understand and translate spoke and written language, analyze data, and make recommendations and more according to google cloud.

Many professions are utilizing this tool, and colleges are integrating it into their courseloads this fall. Professor Carrie Sipes is the Department Chair and Professor of the Communications, Journalism, and Media Department at Shippensburg University. She encourages her students to use A.I.

“I love encouraging students to use AI during their brainstorming sessions of their projects, right? It can really streamline ideas. It can give you more ideas to consider. So if you put in a prompt and an AI software, you can come up with a lot of ideas for a project. And then you could use your brain to build out 1 or 2 of those ideas, to see which one is the one that you think is the best choice for you at this time.”

Jeff Ritchie is the Chair and Professor of Design, Media, and Technology at Lebanon Valley College. Ritchie says although it could be helpful, it could be utilized in an unethical manner.

“It also can be used to cheat and to misrepresent, as your own thought something. So again, I think is carried spoke to before. You know, a lot of our existing laws and practices are predicated on technologies. You know, the printing press brought about the idea of intellectual property rights. I don't know what these laws will look like, when AI is there, you know, do we share ownership or, you know, so much is up in the air right now about how we will decide to proceed, with these legal, ethical and just policy-based decisions.”

Professor Sipes teaches a course called Digital Tools, and A.I. related tools for photography and videography will be among the courseload.

“But it's more for a creative the creative process and creative outcomes for the work that they'll create in that course. Certainly, there's lots of conversations about, like I mentioned earlier, you know, what is plagiarism? What it you know, when it comes to AI, what is you know, if you're going to turn in work that's used AI, what's required for you to to do that in order to not, you know, fall into the plagiarism category or, have high scores on, ChatGPT or GPT zero, etc.. Kind of scan of work.”

However, even if A.I. is used to cheat on assignments, Professor Sipes says professors can always tell if the student has used A.I. to write an entire assignment.

“You can you can tell almost immediately by reading the first few sentences, if it's using words that people just don't use, it's it doesn't have that human element to it, even though it's based on, you know, the algorithms that are pulling all of this content together. So, we're definitely having conversations like that with students that I would rather see you as student submit work that has some errors in it. You're 18, 19, 20 years old. Like, that's what we're expecting to see. We're not expecting to see error free. But we also want it to see that we want you to show that human personality that you have. And so I think emphasizing those kinds of things and, and letting students know, like, look, we're watching for these things too, and we want you to use these things in an ethical way is, is a conversation we have pretty regularly.”

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Heading into the month of September, we are heading into the peak of hurricane season. The Central Pennsylvania region just experienced remnants of Hurricane Debbie in the past week. ABC 27’s Meteorologist Dan Tomaso, says hurricane season is roughly between August though September.

“Most of our impacts from any hurricane or tropical storm will be from heavy rain. And really, if you think about it, where these storms come from, thousands of miles away, it's the tropics. So that tropical air moves with the circulation. And unfortunately, if there is a tropical storm or a depression remnant, whatever, and it lingers over a certain period of time, it can lead to very heavy rain. Debby was unique in that it dropped a very narrow band of very heavy rain, and it didn't linger. It was only here for about 12 to 16 hours, but it was here long enough that parts of the Susquehanna River basin picked up 5 or 6in of rain, which can locally lead to problems. And as we saw, that can lead to flooding. It can also lead to, water table issues that unfortunately water supply can be affected. And I know residents of Mechanicsburg, parts of eastern Cumberland County, had water boil issues, that they had to boil their water first before using it. So all those things come with unfortunately, these storms and you know it for some people that may have just moved to this area, may not think is think of Pennsylvania as a state that could get affected, but absolutely it can be”

National Weather Service confirmed an EF1 tornado touched down in Dauphin County on Friday. The tornado had a peak wind speed of 105 per mile and was 300 yards wide. It touched down near Gibson Street around 4:33 a.m. traveling 3.48 miles north according to the National Weather Service.

“So Harrisburg, the surrounding area was on the eastern side. There tends to be a lot of spin and that moisture, that humidity actually can help some of these updrafts lift and create tornadoes. And so unfortunately, we do say Wednesday when the track seemed about final, that it was going to go west of the mid-state, that we could be in line for some brief tornadoes. And the timing was very unfortunate that it was 430 in the morning. We were standing by ready, but a warning was never issued. And the tornado did hit parts of Harrisburg, from about the Steelton area northward into Susquehanna Township.”

Tomaso suggested there will be more hurricanes coming to the East Coast region in the next couple of days.

So unfortunately, there's already another storm that will likely become a hurricane here in the coming days. That's her nest. So it is currently a tropical storm and strengthening over the Caribbean that will likely head out to open water. And then unfortunately, it could its path could take it in the direction of Bermuda and possibly eastern Canada. So that's the next storm. But as I mentioned earlier in the interview, we are now moving into the peak part of the season, and all indications are this is going to be an extremely active season already. We can see signs of that with Debbie in Nest. So for instance, so the East Coast still could see another storm or two that comes up through or possibly even more. We're hoping it doesn't get to that point because as we just saw the heavy rain that comes with these things. Yes, it's a good thing when you have a drought, but if you had repeated storms like this, it is not a good thing. So it is something that is actively on our mind that we're going to be tracking every single storm that develops. And you may say, where do they develop? Well, well, east of the Caribbean sometimes. So over the central antic ocean again, where there's no human being anywhere in sight. And so we track them from that spot onward. And so, for instance, we were tracking Debbie for about ten days. And so by the time day five, day six came about, that's when we started to really pick up on the trends that this is going to be a Pennsylvania problem, too.

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During the Paris Olympics, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif faced difficulty when she tested higher for testosterone in her system. Khelif was assigned female at birth, and it says so on her birth certificate. Dr. Frederika Schmitt Associate Professor of Sociology at Millersville university says the word sex is a noun.

“ Well, first, when we talk about sex, the noun is and we're talking about sex assigned at birth. That is, a term that we use to refer to one's, physiological makeup, one's physical makeup, such as one's, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomal makeup. And we typically refer to these groups as female, male and intersex.”

She also says there is some variability with groups as female, male, and intersex when it comes to different levels of hormones.

“Females have different levels of, testosterone, naturally occurring testosterone in their bodies throughout their lives and different levels of estrogen and progesterone, in their bodies throughout their lives. That is naturally occurring. And additionally, in rare cases, women have, XY chromosomal makeup that we typically associate with men. Some women have that chromosomal makeup. And I think that was part of the issue, in the, with some of the Olympic boxers that are under scrutiny.”

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Dr. John Sygielski, seventh president of Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC) announced he will be retiring in July 2025. He’s held the position since 2011 and holds the title of HACC’s longest running president.

HACC’s reputation is what lead Sygielski to Central Pennsylvania, and how valuable this institution is to the community.

“I have come to realize how generous our communities are to support our mission, especially our students. I like to say that we are the on ramp to higher education, and so many of the students who come to us, may be in need of financial assistance. And thanks to the generosity of so many in our communities. Our foundation has 300 scholarships that we are able to offer our students. And so we just are grateful for the love that we get from our community to the college.”

Some of the accomplishments includes increasing student retention rates and graduation, and raising $28,803,886 for the HACC Foundation, a nonprofit providing financial support for the college.

“I would say the other thing that I am most happy about is to hire a very diverse and capable team of senior leaders who, in my mind, have been the best senior leaders as a team that I have ever worked for and worked with because they are so committed to the success of our students.”

HACC will conduct a national search for Dr. Sygielski’s successor.

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Lancaster County’s Casey Kaufhold made her dreams come true after winning a mixed-team archery bronze medal in the Paris Olympics. Her journey began at the Lancaster Archery Academy in Easter Lampeter Township.

Kaufhold’s archery coach, Heather Pfeil, was with her in Paris as she was living her dreams as an Olympic athlete. Pfeil says watching Kaufold win in real time felt like an out of body experience.

“It was so exciting. There was a large group of us and, you know, just a lot of people from the US there at the event just supporting just the athletes in general in watching other sports, and people chanting USA. And, you know, it was it was very, very cool.”

Pfeil’s discovered her love for archery as a young child in Buffalo, New York. At the Lancaster Archery Academy, she serves as a coach and program coordinator. She’s been coaching Casey for over a decade.

“She was originally, competing at a relatively high level for, for gymnastics. And then decided that she was wanted to do archery. And so, from there, her recreational archery went into a competitive and now a professional level.”

Preparation for the Olympics takes a lot of dedication, passion, and hard work. According to Pfeil, it takes about six trails to qualify for the archery competition in the Olympics. Then the archers’ points are accumulated on performance at those events.

“Then it was, you know, down really to the last event in May of this past year where they name the team. But there's a good bit that goes into that as well, because they have to qualify the spots to have a team in Paris. So, we had to you can either qualify one spot or three spots for the Olympics or men's team. We had one and our women, we had one that Casey had earned at World Championships of last year, which then evolved into the team earning additional two spots. So, they were able to field a full team for the Paris game.”

Pfeil’s dream was to participate in the Olympics, and the Paris Olympics turned her dreams into reality.

“it's very cool is very, a very humbling process. My goal myself was always to be in the Olympics as an athlete, but I naturally found myself, coaching and helping people. So be able to, you know, still be a part of that, that dream and that movement, but in a way that I'm very passionate about and helping others achieve theirs. This is the best combination.”

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The Franklin County Visitors Bureau will be hosting on Aug. 17 "Frederick Douglass in Chambersburg:  More Than A Speech". The presentation will include lunch, a bus tour to showcase Douglass' visit, and the major meeting between Douglass and John Brown. Janet Pollard, Executive Director of the Franklin County Visitors Bureau, says the speech that was made August 17,1859 was really to conceal the true reason he was in Franklin County.

"He was getting off of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, one of the trains of the Cumberland Valley Railroad in Chambersburg. And he was supposed to be there secretly, that so that he could meet with John Brown about Brown's planned raid of Harpers Ferry in the arsenal there. But as soon as he got off that that train, the public recognized him, and they queried him about why he was in Chambersburg. And so there had to be some fast thinking. And it was like, I'm here to give a speech. I'm here to give a speech. And at the Franklin Hall. So, that's really he is one of the most photographed men of his day in his lifetime. And just to think about that in 1859, that he would be that recognized is is really an amazing, an amazing place to be in his life considering how his life started. And so that's why we called it Frederick Douglass in Chambersburg more than a speech, because the speech was actually actually a way to conceal the fact that he had a definite purpose to be in Chambersburg."

When Douglass made the speech Saturday, Aug. 17, 1859 at Franklin Hall to deliver a speech about the inhumanity of slavery and the emancipation. Just like Douglass, John Brown was an abolitionist.

"They may they may have had different perspectives, perspectives on how that abolishing would take place. But they were partners in wanting to move America of 1859 beyond the place it was on with slavery. And, you know, that was John Brown. Many people look at what occurred at in Harpers Ferry as the precursor to the Civil War. It was kind of, a fuze that ignited the reality that we were not going to be able to legislate out of slavery, that we were going to have to more directly confront the issue. And so they both recognized it. I don't know that they necessarily thought the path would be the same."

The event will run  from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and including lunch. You can purchase tickets in person at Franklin County 11/30 Visitors Center, 15 S. Main St., Chambersburg. Contact Franklin County Visitors Bureau at 71-552-2977.

CLICK HERE to purchase tickets.

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Coming up on this week's edition of The Spark Weekly:

Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Among those who had been in consideration was Pennsylvania Governor, Josh Shapiro. Berwood Yost, Director for the Center of Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, and Stephen Caruso, journalist with Spotlight PA shared their general reactions to Harris’ choice, and more on the journalist roundtable.

Boar's Head recalled seven million more pounds of deli meat due to a listeria outbreak. That outbreak follows an earlier recall of more than 200 thousand pounds of deli meat by the same company. Those outbreaks have been reported in Pennsylvania and 12 other states. Martin Bucknavage, Senior Extension Program Specialist with the Penn State Department of Food Science says if this product is in your refrigerator, it should be a concern.

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Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges served in the military for 38 years. He has been making appearances in Pennsylvania including the Midtown Scholar Bookstore and the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle.  Hodges most recently published a book called Future War and the Defense of Europe.

“I wanted to write a book that would help wake people up about what needed to be done. And to be honest, as a, somewhat of an amateur historian myself, I mean, that's part of your professional education is looking at, past wars. And how did we get where we got. I never wanted to be accused at some point of somebody saying, hey, you were the commander, and you never told us that we were unprepared, or you never told us that we were not ready.”

He started and ended his career in Germany. In 1981, he was a lieutenant during the height of the Cold war in West Germany.

“My last three years in the Army, I was the commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. So bookended in Europe. I served one year in Korea as a young officer. I did, two tours in Iraq, first as a brigade commander and 101st Airborne Division, and then second time as a staff officer, the chief of operations, for Multinational Corps Iraq in Baghdad. And then I did, a 15-month tour in Afghanistan in 2009 and ten, where I was director of operations. But I also served in the Pentagon three different times, as working in what we call Army congressional liaison, helping explain, the Army's requirements to the Congress, to our oversight committees, as well as answering questions from, members of Congress on constituent issues or from oversight committees.”

His last assignment was as Commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. A big threat he believes Europe is facing is complacency.

You know, since the end of World War Two and with the creation of NATO, there had not been any land war in Europe except for in the 90s with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. And then you had conflict between Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia. And NATO was able to step in and help implement the Dayton peace accord. So, except for that, there hadn't been a conflict in Europe. So, people became complacent.”

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