Google recently introduced what I believe is a revolutionary feature: Magic Eraser. However, it is powerful enough to cause some questionable "damage" to older family photographs.

Sometimes things get in the way of the perfect photo — like an accidental photobomb or power lines you didn’t notice. They can distract from the photo, pulling attention from what you were really trying to capture. 

Removing distractions from photos isn’t an impossible task, but it typically requires sophisticated editing tools, know-how and time.

However, Google has released software that automates the task, called Magic Eraser. It helps you remove those distractions in just a few taps right in Google Photos. And you’re not limited to newly captured photos — you can clean up all your photos, even those taken years ago and laster saved as digital images. 

Magic Eraser can detect distractions in your photos, like people in the background, power lines and power poles, and suggest what you might want to remove. Then, you can choose whether to erase them all at once or tap to remove them one by one.

HOWEVER, Rebecca Onion has published an article that suggests you should use this new-found power with great caution. She uses photographs taken in the 1980s (long before digital photos came on the scene) to illustrate her concerns.

Rebecca writes, "People’s relationship to photographs, and to strangers, is not the same as it was when I was young. Because we have smartphones, and thousands of jpegs taken at each individual event to pick from, why wouldn’t we pick the frames with no randos in them for our albums, before even considering Magic Eraser?"

I am not sure I agree with Rebecca Onion’s views but her comments will make me pause and consider her comments before deleting the images of people who “photobombed” my older photos. 

You can read her article at: https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/05/magic-eraser-google-photos-family-album.html

The following is a press release from the U.S. Census Bureau:

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released the 2020 Census Demographic Profile and Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (DHC). These products provide the next round of data available from the 2020 Census, adding more detail to the population counts and basic demographic and housing statistics previously released for the purposes of congressional apportionmentand legislative redistricting.

“These statistics belong to the American people. Thank you for your participation in the census and encouraging your friends, neighbors and community to respond. We’re giving these data back to you now to understand and benefit your community,” Census Bureau Director Robert L. Santos said. “2020 Census data will serve as an important baseline for years to come for our annual surveys and population estimates, and in the community planning and funding decisions taking place around the nation.”

The newly released 2020 Census data products go beyond the data already available on the total population, the voting-age (age 18 and older) population, race, Hispanic origin and housing occupancy. This release contains more detailed age groups, the first data available on sex from the 2020 Census, information on families and households, and more detail on housing. They also show the intersection of many of these topics by race and Hispanic origin.

The Demographic Profile provides an overview of the topics covered in the 2020 Census in one, easy-to-reference table for geographies down to the tract level. The DHC provides more detailed tables, many down to the block level. The Demographic Profile and many of the DHC tables are also available for ZIP Code Tabulation Areas — generalized representations of U.S. Postal Service ZIP Code service routes.

Data Highlights by Topic

Age and Sex

The 2020 Census shows the following about the nation’s age and sex composition:

• • Between 2010 and 2020, median age in the U.S. grew older due to an increase in the older population.
• • In 2020, there were 55.8 million people age 65 and over in the United States (16.8% of the total population), up 38.6% from 40.3 million in 2010. This growth primarily reflected the aging baby boom cohort.
  • Centenarians grew 50% since 2010, the fastest recent census-to-census percent change for that age group.
  • For people age 70 and over, the male population experienced a larger growth rate between 2010 and 2020 (42.2%) than females (29.5%).
• • In 1970, after all the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) had been born, half of the population was younger than 28.1 years old. By 2020, the median age was 38.8, an increase of more than 10 years over the past five decades.
• • In 2020, the population age 45 and over accounted for 42% of the total population, up from 27% in 1940, the census before the Baby Boom began.
  • The share of the population age 65 and over more than doubled between 1940 and 2020, from less than 7% to nearly 17%.
• • In 2020, there were over 73.1 million children under age 18 (22.1% of the total U.S. population), down 1.4% from 74.2 million in 2010. The biggest decline was among the under-5 age group, whose share of the population dropped by 8.9% or 1.8 million. This finding is consistent with the decline in the total number of births and the birth rate for the United States since 2015.
  • Among the states in 2020:
• • Fourteen states had a median age over 40, twice as many as in 2010.
  • Twenty-five states had higher shares of population age 65 and older than Florida had in 2010 (17.3%), when it had the highest share of any state. In 2020, Maine had the highest share at 21.8%, followed by Florida (21.2%) and Vermont (20.6%).
• • Utah and Maine were the youngest and oldest states (as they were in 2010). Nearly half of Utah’s population was under age 31 while more than half of Maine’s population was over age 45.
  • In 2020, females continued to comprise a slightly larger share (50.9%) of the total U.S. population — 168.8 million compared with almost 162.7 million males (49.1%). Females have outnumbered males since the 1950 Census. Before that, males outnumbered females from the nation’s earliest colonial times.
  • Alaska had the highest sex ratio of any state in 2020, with 108.4 males per 100 females, followed by North Dakota with 104.5 males per 100 females.
• • The five states with the lowest sex ratios in 2020 were Delaware (with 92.9 males per 100 females), Maryland (92.9), Mississippi (93.4), Alabama (93.4), and South Carolina (93.5).
  • In 2020, no state in the South or Northeast had a sex ratio above 100; all these states had more females than males.
• • In 2020, the total dependency ratio in the United States was 63.6 children under age 18 and adults age 65 and older for every 100 working-age people ages 18 to 64. The total dependency ratio provides a rough approximation of economic dependency in a population by dividing the dependent-age populations (children and adults age 65 and older, who are not generally expected to work) by the working-age population (ages 18 to 64).
  • Ten of the 12 states with the highest total dependency ratios in 2020 were in the West and Midwest. South Dakota and Idaho had the nation’s highest total dependency ratios of any state (73.0 and 72.4, respectively).

The public can explore these age and sex statistics in two data visualizations:

A series of downloadable ranking tables related to each visualization is also available.

More information about age and sex is also available in the America Counts stories: An Aging U.S. Population With Fewer Children in 2020 and 2020 Census: 1 in 6 People in the United States Were 65 and Over, and two briefs: Age and Sex Composition: 2020 and The Older Population: 2020.

The full press release is much longer. You can read ther entire thing at: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/2020-census-demographic-profile-and-dhc.html. 

The following announcement was written by the folks at Fold3:

We have some exciting news to share. Ancestry^® and the National Genealogical Society^® have recently finalized a contract with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to resume digitization of the War of 1812 Pension Files. Like so many other things, this ongoing project came to a screeching halt during the closure of NARA due to COVID‑19.

This massive undertaking to digitize some 7.2 million pages in this collection began in 2010. So far, we’ve completed 83% of these records. We’re just finishing up the final files for surnames beginning with ‘R’ and will move on to files with surnames beginning with the letters ‘Sj to U’ next. These digitized records are available to view for free on Fold3^®.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:     

From the MyHeritage Blog:

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Wisconsin is celebrating its 175th anniversary Monday, a day that will feature modest celebrations and an official acknowledgement of the state’s “countless contributions to the fabric of the nation and the world” in agriculture, industry, art and culture.

A proclamation signed by Gov. Tony Evers honors the state’s admission to the Union May 29, 1848, while celebrating the Indigenous tribes that have occupied the land “since time immemorial.”

“Through times of adversity and prosperity, Wisconsinites are helpers by nature, often going above and beyond to serve their communities, look out for their neighbors, and exemplify the state’s shared values of kindness, empathy, respect, and compassion, earning them the ‘Midwest Nice’ reputation that is cherished by visitors and residents alike,” Evers said in the proclamation.

Little else is planned to celebrate the anniversary. Perhaps that’s what you get when you’re celebrating a demisemiseptcentennial — a fancy term for a 175th anniversary — and not a more commonly recognized birthday like a centennial or a sesquicentennial.

The Wisconsin Historical Society has launched a new website celebrating a list of Wisconsin “visionaries, changemakers and storytellers.” And the first territorial capital of Wisconsin in Belmont, where legislators gathered for 47 days in 1836.

You can read more in an article by Alexander Shur published in the madison.com web site at: https://tinyurl.com/5n7un65n.

A bid to save a collection of almost 1,000 historic newspapers has succeeded after raising more than £115,000 ($141980 US dollars) in six months.

The National Library of Scotland launched the ‘Save Our Stories’ campaign, backed by The Scotsman, after warning around two-thirds of the newspapers in its archives risked being lost unless “essential conservation and preservation work” was carried out.

The collection, which dates from as early as 1641, comprises 961 titles from all over Scotland and features rare editions such as the first copy of The Scotsman, pictured, from 1817.

The required work will now be carried out following the successful fundraising drive.

You can read more in an article by David Sharman published in the holdthefrontpage.co.uk web site at: https://tinyurl.com/48c49r4f.

From an article by John O'Brien published in the LegalNewsline.com web site:

A Chicago federal judge won't second-guess herself for tossing a proposed class action lawsuit that accused Ancestry.com of violating the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.

The suit concerned old yearbook photos the company used when advertising its pay service. In September, Judge Virginia Kendall granted summary judgment to Ancestry, finding plaintiff lawyers failed to work around the IRPA's one-year statute of limitations.

They tried to argue each payment Ancestry made to a company that licenses yearbook names and images started the statute over. Lawyers at Clifford Law Offices, Morgan and Morgan and Bursor & Fisher filed a motion for reconsideration that was rejected May 23.

They said the Illinois Supreme Court's recent ruling in Tims v. Black Horse Carriers, which denied a one-year statute of limitation on cases brought under the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act.

The full article may be found at: https://legalnewsline.com/stories/642699029-judge-ill-supreme-court-s-biometrics-decision-doesn-t-apply-to-class-action-over-yearbook-photos. 

A new article published in the nature.com web site explores ancestry-related differences in the genetics of African Americans, Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans. Here is the abstract of the article:

We explored ancestry-related differences in the genetic architecture of whole-blood gene expression using whole-genome and RNA sequencing data from 2,733 African Americans, Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans. We found that heritability of gene expression significantly increased with greater proportions of African genetic ancestry and decreased with higher proportions of Indigenous American ancestry, reflecting the relationship between heterozygosity and genetic variance. Among heritable protein-coding genes, the prevalence of ancestry-specific expression quantitative trait loci (anc-eQTLs) was 30% in African ancestry and 8% for Indigenous American ancestry segments. Most anc-eQTLs (89%) were driven by population differences in allele frequency. Transcriptome-wide association analyses of multi-ancestry summary statistics for 28 traits identified 79% more gene–trait associations using transcriptome prediction models trained in our admixed population than models trained using data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression project. Our study highlights the importance of measuring gene expression across large and ancestrally diverse populations for enabling new discoveries and reducing disparities.

You can read the full article at: https://rdcu.be/dc4hm.