27 December 2020

Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Poll finds a majority of Canadians are optimistic about 2021
Report from Radio Canada International — https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2020/12/24/poll-finds-a-majority-of-canadians-are-optimistic-about-2021/. With a switch of leadership in the US from celebrity to substance why not be optimistic? The challenges of 2020 were accompanied, even stimulated, massive progress - from vaccines, and not just for the Coronavirus but also malaria. There's progress in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, evermore affordable green energy, remote working and conferencing.

Festive brain food: Irish history - videos and podcasts
From Claire Santry's Irish Genealogy News, a list of recent videos and podcasts, all freely available online, covering Irish history topics that genealogists may find of interest. 
https://www.irishgenealogynews.com/2020/12/festive-brain-food-irish-history-videos.html

What Was Accomplished During Lockdown?
According to the sage Google, in one study "those working from home were 13% more productive than their office counterparts."A post on the London Historian's Blog mentions one project with which staff of the London Metropolitan Archives were engaged during the lockdown.

In March, with the advent of the first lockdown, a project was put together by the LMA’s Digital Services team, when it became obvious that the archives would need to close for some time. It was primarily for staff but included volunteers.

The project involves checking, refining and expanding the information attached to the LCC photographs in the LPA. The original descriptions of the images, compiled for office purposes, and containing only addresses, are inadequate for online historical research. New expanded descriptions, which will be fully searchable online, are already making the archive much more useful for researchers.

About 40 staff members from different teams at LMA worked on it on a full-time or part-time basis during the first period of closure.

Would it be too much to ask the management of other organizations, especially the ones we fund through our taxes, to let us know what alternate projects their staff accomplished while we were paying them to remain at home?

5 Mind-Boggling AI Photo Editors to Transform Pictures Without Knowing Image Editing
From MakeUseof: https://www.makeuseof.com/ai-photo-editors-transform-pictures-without-knowing-image-editing/

What does Alice Believe?

Thanks to this week's contributors: Anonymous, astlemarilyn, Barbara T, carol-anne.hamilton, Daniel Horowitz, egalib, Gail, Gail B, jon ackroyd, Judith Hilliker, Rick Roberts, Teresa, Unknown

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