Day 2 – #RootsTech – #NotAtRootsTech - Thu, 1 Mar 2018

Thursday.

1. Watched the Live Stream Keynote Speaker: Brandon Stanton. “I get to wake up in the morning and choose the work I want to do.” “Following your dreams, is nothing but hard work.”

2. Took a look at Randy Seaver’s Compendium for new posts I hadn’t seen.
3. Read Jill Ball’s post on Day 1 and watch Jill’s interview of Hannah Morden of Living DNA, who happens to be Australian.
4. Saw Blaine Bettinger’s post on Facebook about Jonny Perl’s win, which reminded me to join Jonny’s DNA Painter Facebook group. Once there, I watched a 5 minute video of Jonny’s presentation of DNA painter to the contest judges and a small crowd. If I can find a public link to that presentation, I’ll post it.
5. Watched a 6 minute video by Lara Diamond of an interview by several people of Brandon Stanton in the media hub, also on Facebook with no public link.
6. The great thing about the RootsTech Live Feed is that I can take a shower and then rewind the feed so that I don’t miss anything. That’s one advantage over being there in person. Of course, all the people at RootsTech can watch the live stuff from the feeds after they get home. But there’s nothing like the actual experience of being at RootsTech.
7. Read Thomas MacEntee’s article about Living DNA’s announcements. New to me were details of the Orion chip they use, that tests over 656,000 autosomal, 4,700 mitochondral and 22,000 Y-DNA SNPs.
8. Next was the live stream of Yaniv Erlich of MyHeritage DNA. It started with a very nice intro to DNA testing with a good description of how the chip determines each SNP using synthetic strings of DNA that finds the complementary strand of your DNA and joins with it. He explains the phasing they do and claims a 99% SNP accuracy. Then he explains imputation when comparing two individuals to fill in missing SNPs with “very good accuracy”. “You would not get bad results, but you would get better if they are from the same company.” They then “stitch” together identical sections that have a small split, e.g. due to an error in phasing.

   Very interesting and something I’ve never seen a DNA company explain before was how they do confidence classification, so as to include as many likely true matches as possible and exclude as many “child-only” matches as possible. This was a good DNA talk.

9. Read on the #RootsTech twitter feed that:
   
   

   Also, @MyHeritage announces that their 1-to-many chromosome browser will launch tomorrow! #rootstech #geneticgenealogy

   — Amy Johnson Crow (@AmyJohnsonCrow) March 1, 2018

10. Last year at RootsTech, my Fitbit told me I was averaging close to 14,000 steps per day. It’s 3 p.m. here in Winnipeg and I look and I’m at (ugh) only 1,400 steps. That means the #RootsTech is 10 times better than #NotAtRootsTech. I don’t use Google Photos and really don’t use Catholic Records, so the next two live streams were not of interest to me. What better time than to stretch my legs with a walk to Tim Hortons.
11. I always appreciate the sponsors of any conference. It’s amazing how many sponsors RootsTech has this year, including some interesting ones who you wouldn’t suspect, like WordPress and Dell EMC:
    

    

    

    

    

12. And Jason Hewlett tweeted his selfie from the screen cap that I made at the exact same time which I included in my blog post yesterday:
    
13. Read Carole Steer’s blog post about Brandon Stanton’s talk this morning.
14. Here’s Jill Ball’s 5 minute interview of Jonny Perl.
15. Finished off the day watching the final live stream by Deborah Abbott: “A Gift of Life. Who’s Writing YOUR Story?” She said: “The things that I’m going to talk about, you have to make it relate to you.” Here’s some of the things she told us to record: That first boyfriend. How was that kiss? Did they like their spouse right away when they met? What extraordinary things did they do?  “Before writing your ancestor’s story, write your own…. As you talk about yourself, you can pull those ancestors in. … Write your memoirs. Tell you descendants about things they know nothing about.”

    She said to record every bit of what you went through
    … and she told us her stories.
    
    Deborah Abbott received a standing ovation for her talk.

See today’s Live Stream here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnfpAwSNVJo&t=9s