From an article by Mike Schneider and published by the Associated Press:

"U.S. population growth dipped to its lowest rate since the nation’s founding during the first year of the pandemic as the coronavirus curtailed immigration, delayed pregnancies and killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents, according to figures released Tuesday.

"The United States grew by only 0.1%, with an additional 392,665 added to the U.S. population from July 2020 to July 2021, bringing the nation’s count to 331.8 million people, according to population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

"The U.S. has been experiencing slow population growth for years but the pandemic exacerbated that trend. This past year was the first time since 1937 that the nation’s population grew by less than 1 million people.

“'I was expecting low growth but nothing this low,' said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s metropolitan policy program, Brookings Metro. 'It tells us that this pandemic has had a huge impact on us in all kinds of ways, and now demography.'”

You can read the rest of the article at: https://bit.ly/3svMbhT.

I would love to see the location of birth as recorded on the birth certificate:

A Philadelphia mother has given birth to what is believed to be the world’s first Tesla baby: an infant delivered in the front seat of an electric smart car while it was driving on autopilot.

The remarkable delivery, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, took place in September while Yiran Sherry, 33, and her husband Keating Sherry, 34, were taking their three-year-old son Rafa to pre-school.

Yiran Sherry’s waters broke while the family was stuck in traffic. With contractions increasing rapidly and traffic barely moving, the couple realized they were not going to make it in time.

Keating Sherry placed the vehicle on autopilot after setting the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli.

Details may be found in an article by Richard Luscombe and published in The Guardian at https://bit.ly/3Jbra1B.

As I wrote earlier today, I will be traveling later this week and into next week. Today, I obtained a new device to (hopefully) make my writing chores bit easier when traveling: an iPad Mini and External Keyboard.

When it comes to reading information, I love the compact size of the iPad Mini. It easily slips into a backpack or even into a large overcoat pocket. However, writing articles or even composing email messages with the "on-screen glass keyboard" is a pain. Therefore, when I ordered the iPad Mini, I also added a ProCase Detachable Wireless Keyboard to the order (Amazon item B09CTBY6N4).

I plan to write a review of the two devices in a week or two, telling how well (or how poorly) they worked for this traveling genealogist.

The first thing I noticed when I unpacked the keyboard is that it does not have a touchpad so it isn't an exact replacement for a laptop computer. However, my first 2 or 3 minutes of testing the keyboard demonstrates that it has an excellent "touch" typing capability.

Plaintiff lawyers hurled a personal attack on Blackstone Investment Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman in a proposed class action proceeding in federal court. 

Local counsel Gregory Shevlin pleaded that Schwarzman “has a notorious reputation for doing more harm to everyday consumers than good.” 

He cited as his sole source an article in Housing is a Human Right under headlines of “sins of Blackstone” and “modern day robber baron.” 

He and four colleagues claim Blackstone violated rights of Ancestry DNA customers in Illinois when it bought Ancestry DNA last year. 

They sued Blackstone for Carolyn Bridges of St. Clair County at circuit court in July. 

They propose a class action seeking statutory damages of $15,000 per person for reckless violation of the state’s Genetic Information Privacy Act. 

Further details are available at https://madisonrecord.com/stories/615083418-lawyers-in-ancestry-com-class-action-level-personal-attack-against-blackstone-ceo.

MyHeritage.com is celebrating a major milestone: the company just acquired its one-millionth customer!

The MyHeritage Blog has quite a lengthy article featuring the company's history and a recent surprise visit to the one millionth subscriber, Bénédicte Halpouter, at her home in Belgium. You can check it out at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2021/12/myheritage-surpasses-1-million-annual-subscribers/.

The following is a press release issued by the (U.S.) National Archives:

WASHINGTON, DC, December 14, 2021 — With the scheduled April 1, 2022, release of 1950 Census records a little more than three months away, the National Archives is completing efforts to digitize those records and using technology to make them more accessible than ever.

“Employees from across the agency have worked on digitizing and indexing the records and developing and testing a new, dedicated 1950 Census website,” said Project Manager Carol Lagundo, who leads the 1950 Census project at National Archives. “It’s taken innovation and creativity to keep this project on track throughout the pandemic and to continue to meet our project milestones. We hope the public will benefit from our hard work.”

The new website will include a name search function powered by an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology tool. This is important for genealogists and other researchers who rely on census records for new information about the nation’s past.

“The OCR being used to transcribe the handwritten names from the census rolls is about as good as the human eye,” said Project Management Director Rodney Payne. “Some of the pages are legible, and others are difficult to decipher. So, the National Archives developed a transcription tool to enable users to submit name updates. This will allow other users to find specific names more easily, and it provides an opportunity for the public to help the agency share these records with the world.”

National Archives officials are encouraging interested members of the public to use the transcription tool and assist the agency to make the records as accurate as possible.

“This is an exciting project for the National Archives, and we know it is important information for so many Americans. We are looking forward to collaborating with the public to refine and enhance the first draft of OCR-created names. This is a great example of automating as much as we can and then collaborating with the public to make access happen,” said Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright.

The website is currently in development and will undergo rigorous testing in the coming months to ensure a successful launch.

The National Archives is also working to provide bulk download access of the full 1950 Census dataset on launch day. This will be of interest to digital humanists, web developers, social scientists, and anyone wanting to explore aggregations of the records. Other organizations and companies will be able to use this functionality to provide 1950 Census data on their own websites.

When made available on the Amazon Web Services Registry of Open Data, the 1950 Census dataset—over 165 terabytes of data—will include the metadata index, the population schedules, the enumeration district maps, and the enumeration district descriptions for the 1950 Census records. This is approximately 10 times the size of the 1940 Census dataset.

Included in the dataset are approximately:

• • 6.5 million digital TIFF images and corresponding JPEG derivative images of the microfilmed “1950 Census of Population and Housing” forms for U.S. states and territories
  • 33,215 TIFF images and corresponding JPEG derivative images of the original paper “1950 Census of Population and Housing: Indian Reservation Schedule” forms
  • 9,600 digitized images of the 1950 Census Enumeration District Maps, which are annotated maps of counties, cities, and other minor civil divisions that show enumeration districts, census tract, and related boundaries and numbers used for each census
  • 63,000 digitized images of the 1950 Census Enumeration District Descriptions, which are written descriptions of geographic areas included within enumeration districts
  • 232,000 1950 Census Enumeration District Descriptions, which were produced by generating OCR output of the Enumeration District Description images. More than 25 NARA staff reviewed and cleaned up the OCR output.

For more information see, NARA’s 1950 Census blog posts on History Hub.

Resources for earlier censuses as well as tips for searching these records are available on Archives.gov.

Reports and statistics from the 1950 census are available through the U.S. Census Bureau.

Today’s parents are the first to raise children alongside social media and this generation of children is the first to grow up constantly “shared” online. Stacey Steinberg, a professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law is an expert on “sharenting” and the intersection of parents’ and children’s rights in the online world. In this episode, Steinberg shares her thoughts on how these rights can collide and roles of parents, tech companies and government in keeping children safe. She also offers parents tips on what to consider as they and their children navigate social media.

You can read an interview with Stacey Steinberg at https://news.ufl.edu/2021/12/from-florida-episode-14/.

James Vlahos lost his father to cancer in 2017, but still chats with him all the time. John tells his son stories about his childhood crush on the girl across the street and about Papa Demoskopoulos, the pet rabbit he had as a kid. He tells him about singing in Gilbert and Sullivan operas and becoming a lawyer. Sometimes he'll drop one of his signature insults: "Well, hot dribbling spit."

The elder Vlahos talks with his child via a conversational chatbot called Dadbot his son created after his father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. For months, Vlahos recorded his dying dad's life stories, then turned them into an interactive AI that speaks in his father's voice.

Dadbot "was a transformational experience for me because it gave me great solace. It gave my family great solace," says Vlahos, a former tech journalist and author of Talk To Me, a book on conversational AI. "It didn't replace my dad, but it gave us this really rich way to remember him."

Now Vlahos is bringing his Dadbot technology to HereAfter AI.

You can read more about HereAfter at: https://www.hereafter.ai/.

The records of thousands of British Indian Army soldiers from united Punjab have been made available to the public by UK-based citizen historians for the first time after around a century.

The ‘Punjab Records’, as they have been named, which so far lay neglected in an archive in the basements of Lahore Museum, have been accessed and digitised by the London-based UK Punjab Heritage Association (UKPHA) in collaboration with the University of Greenwich to offer an insight into the contribution of Punjabi soldiers to the allied war effort, and uploaded to a website launched to mark Remembrance Day, the day World War I ended, across the world on Nov 11.

Comprising some 26,000 pages listing more than 300,000 individual names, the registers provide village-by-village data on the war service and pensions of recruits from the undivided Punjab, as well as information on their family background, rank and regiment. Un-researched for about a century, these registers were compiled by the Punjab government in 1919 after the war had concluded.

They also offer a detailed breakdown of the recruiting practices of the British Indian Army a century ago and information about individual soldiers revealing insights into their occupational, social, political and faith backgrounds.

Details may be found at https://www.dawn.com/news/1657266.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Microsoft Office consists of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Depending upon the version of Microsoft Office you purchase, it also might include OneNote, Outlook, Microsoft Publisher, or Skype. First launched in 1988, Microsoft Office has become the de facto word processing and office management software standard of the computer industry. Softpedia reported (at http://goo.gl/bGu7Dl) that Office is used by more than a billion people worldwide. As popular as the Microsoft Office suite has become, it still is not "the best" office suite of programs for everyone. In fact, Microsoft Office has some very good competitors.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Microsoft's dominance isn't pricing, however. I find that Microsoft Office is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Microsoft Office has added many new features over the years, but its primary use hasn't changed much in its thirty-three year history. The computing world is changing rapidly, and yet Microsoft hasn't kept up.

Since its introduction in 1988, Microsoft Office has become bloated as more and more features were added by various teams of programmers. It also has become slower, despite the fact that today's computers are much, much faster than those of 33 years ago. Perhaps the biggest drawback, however, is the price. Unlike most other computer software, Microsoft Office remains as a very expensive product. The lowest-priced version, Office Home & Student, retails for $149.99 while Office Professional will set you back $439.99. You can also subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium for $69.99 per year. If you shop around, you can find discounts from those prices; but the bottom-line price will still be much higher than any of several excellent alternative programs.

I used Microsoft Office for years and even paid for upgrades every time a new version was released. I eventually discovered free and open source software that did most of the same functions as Microsoft Office. The free programs have matured over the years and are now easy to install, easier to use than the Microsoft product, and generally faster in operation. My current favorite is LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/) although Apache OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) is also an excellent choice. Both are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Kingsoft Office is also an excellent alternative, available in two versions: a free version and a Pro version. Kingsoft Office Office-Free Office suite for Word, PDF, Excel, is an all-in-one office suite combines Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Forms, Cloud Storage, Template Library and Sharing. Details may be found at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/wps-office-suite-pdf-word-spreadsheet-slide-view-edit/9nsgm705mqwc?activetab=pivot:overviewtab.

That being said, I am now using these Windows and Macintosh Office alternatives less and less.

A few million people, myself included, have found that tablet computers provide much of the functionality of desktop and laptop computers, but they are far more convenient to use. These are excellent devices for reading and writing email messages, surfing the web, and reading ebooks, wherever you are.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/12199471.

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077.