Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Extraordinary war pictures
A slideshow of extraordinary photographs, paintings or drawings from the First World War. Some are horrifying.

Silences of the Great War: all the things we cannot hear
Podcast of a lecture by Professor Jay Winter given on 18 March at the London School of Economics.

BIFHSGO Updates
On 20 March there was an update (various corrections) of the Middlemore Index available in Research section. An updated Women's Emigration database is also now available in the Research section.

OGS Conference Early Bird Discount Expires 31 March.

Canada's population
On Thursday Statistics Canada posted preliminary population estimates for 1 January 2019 population — 37,314,442, up 71,871 from October 1, 2018.
See Canada's real-time population clock

How Does Ancestry Search Work?
A preprint of an article Ranking In Genealogy: Search Results Fusion at Ancestry. If you wonder about Ancestry as a technology company read about coordinate ascent, stochastic search and normalized cumulative entropy.

Was Irish migration negative selection?
The Cream of the Crop? Geography, Networks, and Irish Migrant Selection in the Age of Mass Migration is an article in the Journal of Economic History; sadly it's behind a paywall but the abstract is available.

Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom
To what extent was innovation in the 17th century motivated by climate change in the form of the Little Ice Age? In this new book, Blom explains why the impact on innovation was major. Reviewers in the New York Times and BBC History Magazine comment he goes too far. The book is on order at the OPL although I'll have to wait to read it — I'm 15th on the hold list.

Data and the war on snow: How Ottawa could share plow information — but chooses not to
From the Ottawa Citizen, the sad story of how city snow clearing operations have failed to keep up with the times costing us time, money and excess greenhouse gas emissions. If Montreal and Syracuse can do it why not Ottawa?

Today is the last chance to visit Inspire555.ca to help inform how the new Ottawa Public Library and Library and Archives Canada joint facility will take shape on the site at 555 Albert Street.