Technology

Google Engineer Uses AI to Identify Faces in Holocaust-era Photographs

From Numbers to Names is a website created by Daniel Patt, a software engineer at Google, that uses artificial intelligence to help identify Holocaust victims and survivors in historical photographs. The platform searches through roughly 500,000 images from institutions such as Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Visitors can upload a photograph of a Holocaust victim or survivor, and the site’s facial recognition technology will compare it to its vast archives, returning the ten most likely matches.

Patt’s motivation is deeply personal: all four of his grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. His initial goal was to help his grandmother recover photographs of her family members who were murdered during the Holocaust. When the war began, she was nine years old and fled her hometown of Zamość with her father and siblings. Her mother — Patt’s great-grandmother — remained behind and was shot and killed during the Nazi invasion. Later, her brother was killed when he attempted to return to rescue her. The rest of the family survived and eventually emigrated to New York City after the war.

Sources: The Times of Israel (2024) | The Times of Israel (2022) | The Washington Post | National Public Radio | ABC The View | Photo Detective Podcast Episode 205

Pan Am ‘First Moon Flights’ Club

Between 1968 and 1971, Pan American World Airways issued over 93,000 “First Moon Flights” Club cards to those eager to make a reservation for the first commercial flight to the Moon. The cards were free. I was a proud member.

The Club originated from a waiting list that is said to have started in 1964, when Gerhard Pistor, an Austrian journalist, went to a Viennese travel agency requesting a flight to the Moon. The agency forwarded his request to Pan Am, which accepted the reservation two weeks later and replied that the first flight was expected to depart in 2000.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on the moon.

“First Man on the Moon” stamp depicting Neil Armstrong stepping from the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle.

On September 9, 1969, the United States Postal Service issued a 10 cent postage stamp showing an astronaut walking on the surface of the moon. It was called the “First Man on the Moon” postage stamp. According to the National Postal Museum, the stamp was made from the same master die that the astronauts took with them to the moon. Additionally, it was the largest stamp the United States had issued up to that point.

Pan Am sent members of the “First Moon Flights” Club “First Day of Issue” envelopes. I was excited to get mine and have kept it all this time. I now doubt I will make it to the moon. But it was an exciting thought.

Unfortunately, Pan Am did not survive. It went bankrupt in 1991.

Why Creating Links to Open New Browser Windows is Probably Not a Good Practice

I want to thank Sven Dahlstrand for taking the time to explain to me why opening external links in a new tab is probably not a good practice. Sven helpfully referred me to a page written by usability experts  Jakob Nielsen and Anna Kaley explaining:

Since 1999, it’s been a firm web-usability guideline to refrain from opening new browser windows for several reasons. All of these also apply to opening new browser tabs and are still valid today:

  • More windows or tabs increase the clutter of the user’s information space and require more effort to manage.
  • New windows or tabs can cause disorientation, with users often not realizing that a new window or tab has opened. This problem is exacerbated on mobile, where the old window is never visible.
  • Less-technical users struggle to manage multiple windows and tabs, especially on mobile. (On tablets, where users can have both multiple windows and tabs for the browser, it’s even more confusing.)
  • New windows or tabs prevent the use of the Back button for returning to the previous page and force the user to spend effort to find their way back to the previous content.
  • New windows or tabs are not inclusive for blind or low-vision users — especially when they open outside of the area that’s magnified.

I had been opening external links in a new tab in the hope of keeping visitors on my site but I had not thought about the confusion this can cause, especially on mobile:

Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the _Back _button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed-out _Back _button.

Jakob Nielsen