NEW RESOURCES

The Georgia Straight: Move the Movement builds a healing database of cannabis experiences. “‘Each and every person who has found relief in cannabis has a part to play in this movement,’ says Bianca, a 33-year-old single mom living in North Vancouver. ‘It can be as simple and as powerful as just sharing your story.’ Bianca is sitting on a couch in her local dispensary, Weeds (on Marine Drive), to talk about how she became one of the faces of Move the Movement (MTM)—a Vancouver-based nonprofit society building a digital database of patient experiences with cannabis.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Enhanced description of Georgia town films and home movies digitized by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection now available. “The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is pleased to announce the availability of Georgia town films and home movies digitized by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection (BMA).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Wikipedia goes dark in Spanish, Italian ahead of key EU vote on copyright . “Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.” Key vote July 5.

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Trends: The best mind-mapping software. “Brainstorming sessions are great, but sometimes you can drown in a thicket of ideas, half-concepts, and free-floating words. If that sound familiar, you might want to consider a mind-mapping tool. Mind maps are digital flow charts that can be used to describe ideas and list possibilities.” Free and paid options here.

Ask Leo: How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?. “It’s been hard to avoid hearing about cryptocurrencies lately, especially Bitcoin. Opinions run the gamut from it being ‘worthless, artificial gold”’ to the wave of the future and next universal currency we’ll all be using someday. Regardless of what you think about its future, the underlying technology is fascinating to people like me. Recent reports once again question the (unverified) excessive amount of electricity being used to power Bitcoin mining operations. The question is, of course, how does mining something that exists only as bits and bytes in a computer use so much electricity? Heck, just what is ‘mining’ in this context, anyway? To understand that a little better while sidestepping some of the complexity, we’ll play a game.”

USA Today: Ready to ditch your old flash drive? Don’t just erase and recycle. “When it’s time to donate or ditch an old flash drive, deleting your data isn’t enough. The safest way to wipe the slate clean is actually to encrypt it — and that’s not as hard as it sounds.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Noted (New Zealand): The Govt is making big moves on foreign speculators and Google’s low tax payment. “Although unofficial, last week was Let’s Stick it to Johnny Foreigner week. Legislation to curtail foreign investment in property headed towards the finish line, and a new net to catch the elusive big-game trophy known as Google tax was enacted unanimously.”

BBC: Social media apps are ‘deliberately’ addictive to users. “Social media companies are deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain, Silicon Valley insiders have told the BBC’s Panorama programme. ‘It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back’, said former Mozilla and Jawbone employee Aza Raskin.”

The Register: US Declaration of Independence labeled hate speech by Facebook bots. “The Liberty County Vindicator, a newspaper serving Liberty, Texas, posted “small bites” from the Declaration on its Facebook page in the leadup to the USA’s July 4th Independence Day, ‘To make it a little easier to digest that short but formidable historic document’. But as the paper detailed on July 2nd, ‘The first nine parts posted as scheduled, but part 10, consisting of paragraphs 27-31 of the Declaration, did not appear.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Business Insider: Silicon Valley made a big deal about obeying GDPR, but a study shows the policies of firms like Facebook are ‘vague’ and ‘insufficient’. “Remember all those endless emails and app notifications about how important your privacy is to tech firms? That was all about those firms having to obey new European privacy rules, officially known as the GDPR. But a new study from a European consumer group has found that most popular tech companies are falling short of properly obeying the rules.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: It’s Time for a Chemistry Lesson. Put on Your Virtual Reality Goggles.. “There was a time when biochemists had a lot in common with sculptors. Scientists who had devoted their lives to studying a molecule would building a model, using metal and a forest of rods to hold up the structure of thousands of atoms. ‘Slow work, but at the end you really know the molecule,’ said Michael Levitt, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013. These days simulations on screens have replaced such models, sacrificing some of their tactile value while gaining the ability to show movement. But what if you could enter a virtual reality environment where the molecules lie before you, obeying all the laws of molecular physics as calculated by supercomputers, and move them around in three dimensions?”

Phys .org: TV coverage of cycling races can help document the effects of climate change. “Analysing nearly four decades of archive footage from the Tour of Flanders, researchers from Ghent University have been able to detect climate change impacts on trees. Their findings were published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.” Good morning, Internet…

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