Breitbart: Google blurs faces in street view map pictures

[I read this article with interest, as I have family member's whose faces apear in Google's Street Level View.]
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080514214733.2n13nqsx&show_article=1
Google blurs faces in street view map pictures

May 14 05:48 PM US/Eastern
Google said Wednesday it is blurring the faces of people in street scenes pictured at its free online mapping service.

The US Internet colossus said it was testing the technology in updated "Street View" pictures woven into its map of Manhattan and, if successful, would put it to work across its mapping website.

While blurring faces may reduce complaints that snapshots of street life posted with Google Maps results could violate people's privacy, that is not the motivation for applying the technology, a Google spokeswoman told AFP.

"It is something we have been looking into for quite some time," she said.
"The purpose of Street View isn't looking at people, it's looking at buildings and locations. Obviously, we want to take steps in protecting people's privacy, but from the beginning we've been committed to doing this."

Google has been working for a year on a way to automatically detect and blur faces in pictures, company software engineer Andrea Frome wrote in a Google blog post.

"Working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection," Frome wrote.

"We continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery."
Frome pointed out that Manhattan street view pictures were also modified to allow people to look up to admire skyscrapers and the cityscape.

Street View photos were added to Google online maps of major US cities a year ago.
Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium

Family History Experiences at the "Who Do You Think You Are Conference" in London, May 2008

We had some great family history moments at the Who Do You Think You Are conference in London on May 2-4, 2008. Many of the attendees to the conference were new to doing their family history research. Many of them were inspired by the Who Do You Think You Are TV show and wanted to know more about their own family histories. That TV show does a great job of showing that everyone has a rich family history and now everyone wants to know more about their own family history. I am looking forward to the American version of that TV show that is supposedly coming soon to our country.

You can see the look in someone’s eyes or in their expressions when you have found a major breakthrough in their family history. There were many experiences that I witnessed in our booth at the conference. It is so exciting when people have that “Ah-ha” moment and make a valuable connection with their past. I will recount a few of these that I got to see.

The first one is one of the more exciting break- throughs that I have seen first -hand. This was when a nice lady was inquiring about her grandfather. She knew her grandfather’s name and that was about it. I typed the name into the ‘global search box’ on the front page of WorldVitalRecors.com. Frequently I have no idea what the results will be, especially if the surname is rare. In this case there were not that many results for “John” and “Kyberd”. The UK census had great multi-generational information for the Kyberd family. However, the results from one of our great Quintin Publication databases showed the true power of the large and rapidly growing collection that we have on WorldVitalRecords.com. In the book titled “East Anglian Pedigrees” we hit the jackpot, so to speak. There was a type of pedigree chart on page 130 of that book that had the entire Kyberd family tree dating back to the 1500s. This chart had husband, wife, and children’s names along with birth, Baptism, Marriage, and Death dates along with geographic locations. This single search found information that would have taken a life time to discover any other way. The look in the eyes of this delighted family history research changed from shock and amazement to profound gratitude to whoever had worked the many hours to compile such a great resource for them.
(http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/SingleIndexIndView.aspx?ix=qcd521_EastAnglianPedigrees&hpp=1&rf=*,z*&qt=i&java=NO&highlight=kyberd,john&zpage=136#centerapplet)
Another example was of husband and wife and their teen-aged daughter that were trying to find out more about their family tree. The husband knew the name of his grandmother and her approximate birth location and birth year. After searching for her, we found once again the multi-generational family information available in the UK Census. To his delight and amazement, he found that his name “Jonathan” was also shared by his great-grandfather which he had never been told. For him to realize that he was named after his great-grandfather gave him a new connection with his past and the desire to know more about him.

Another curious example was by 2 sisters that wanted to learn more about their grandfather. He was a famous chef at a prestigious hotel in London. I guess that he was famous like a Wolfgang Puck and hat quite the reputation that the family enjoyed. However, he was born in Switzerland and I know that we have a very small (but growing) Swiss collection on our site. However, we typed his name into the global search box and found 2 instances of him in the Ellis Island collection. The sisters looked puzzled and said that can’t be him because he lived here in England. He did not immigrate to the US. So we clicked through to the links for more information. It turned out that as a young man their grand-father had been the chef on the 2nd largest passenger ship behind the Titanic. I guess that after the Titanic sunk, the ship that their grand-father worked on was the largest in the world. He had been the chef and had to register each time his ship dropped off passengers at Ellis Island and he went a-shore to look around. They then began discussing what it meant for him and his career that he had learned his art as a chef on a luxury ship.

One of the things that I learned at the conference in London is how much the world is really connected. We had some trepidation about how well our collection of billions of names and thousands of databases would be receive in the UK. Even though our non-US collection is growing rapidly it is still just a portion of our U.S. collection. U.S. Data is typically much easier to acquire that international data. However, almost every one of the hundreds that came to our booth had a reason to search for data in the UK and in the rest of the world especially the US, Canada, and Australia. To prove this point, a nice lady said that her entire extended family lives in the UK. She has done most of the genealogy for these relatives. However, she said “My grandfather had 2 brothers. One immigrated to Australia and one to America.” I know nothing about what became of them so I need your web service find about them and their families.

I love genealogy and family history. I love helping others find out more about their own family. This labor of love provides such great emotional pay off for those that feel the desire to learn more about their family history.

Catholic bishops told to withhold parish information from Mormons

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_9151351

Catholic bishops told to withhold parish information from Mormons
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:05/04/2008 02:50:56 PM MDT

The Roman Catholic Church recently directed dioceses worldwide not to give parish information to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The move is "an effort to block posthumous rebaptisms," according to an article reported Friday by Catholic News Service. CNS cites an April 5 letter from the Vatican Congregation for Clergy that directs all Catholic bishops "to keep the Latter-day Saints from microfilming and digitizing information contained" in parish registers.

A main tenet of LDS Church doctrine is to baptize posthumously, by proxy, all who have died without an LDS baptism, to enable them the opportunity to accept the faith in an afterlife. Baptisms for the dead are performed in LDS temples worldwide. The church collects birth, death, christening, marriage and other related information of deceased people, from archives and registers of churches and denominations, when access is permitted.

The Vatican letter calls LDS baptisms for the dead a "detrimental practice" and directs each Catholic diocesan bishop "not to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," CNS reported.

LDS Church spokesman Scott Trotter said today that he hasn't seen the Vatican letter. "It would really be premature for us to say anything," he said. Church leaders will obtain and review the letter Monday, he said.

"Who Do You Think You Are" initial report

The magnitude of the "Who Do You Think You Are" conference in London is hard to describe. By its sheer numbers it is 5 times as big as NGS or FGS in the United States. I have heard that there will be 15,000 attendees. Most of the conference attendees purchase a 1 day pass so each day there will be 5k.

There is a huge drive in the UK to better understand who you and your relatives are. This is drive in no small part by the very popular "Who Do You Think You Are" TV show.

The conference is held in a massive exhibition hall. I walked around the balcony to see the bird's eye view of the booths, exhibits, classes, and the attendees. I didn't count my steps around but it must have been between a quarter and half mile to walk around the balcony.

Being a huge history buff, I definitely appreciated many of the WWI and WWII exhibits. There was even the tank from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

There was a recurring humorous skit performed by 2 men in a WWI bi-plane.

Only a few of the attendees that visit our booth had heard of WorldVitalRecords.com or FamilyLink.com. However, of those that had heard about us a large percentage were members including this member, who I will have to ask his name again today.