TREES SHIFT UPWARDS AS CLIMATE WARMS, DATA SHOW by D Perlman. SFGate, 12 June 2010 : Link

What I find amazing about this is that I often think it takes long for nature to adapt to change.   According to this article it actually happens a lot quicker than we think.    It is faster than the pace companies sometimes take to adapt to a changing business environment.    ....well maybe its because at least the trees know that their environment is changing...

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I have submitted my "Scanning the Environment" assignment today.    It took a LOT more time than what I estimated it would take in the offset of the assignment.    To quote myself "...It surely cannot take THAT long to read a few articles, select a few interesting ones and then write a small editorial....."    I was wrong with this one.  :)

In the end it was a very good assignment to complete and I learned a lot.    I enjoyed it so much that I am actually contemplating writing one every 3+ months.    It would then also serve as a record for myself on the most interesting articles that crossed my virtual desk.   

The next assignment needs to be complete in +- 2 months and it is going to be a challenge as well.    It will cover a "surprise free prognosis for Tanzania".     I also need to spend some time researching free alternatives for plagiarism checkers.

Well that is surely going to be another topic.  :)

I managed to find the articles (60 in total) that I wanted for the assignment and these have already been reduced and placed in the deliverable format.

The outstanding tasks that I still need to complete:

• Write the Editorial
• Confirm all the Journals that I scanned are documented and highlight the ones that I eventually used in the assignment
• Double check the format used
• Ask 1 or 2 people to review the document

Big chunk of work would now be to re-read the articles to get the general 'storyline' again and write the Editorial.

WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS by P Tucker. The Futurist, Jul/Aug 2010 : Vol 44 Issue 4, p61-62

Some food for thought in here especially since I can identify with "The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted, to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention".   I do think there are some fundamental differences if I compare the mental activity of "working through a complex analysis problem" vs "doing research scanning the web".

Maybe the important thing is to learn how to do both and not let the one completely dominate the other.

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THE COMING AGE OF THE ELDERLY by F Pearce. New Scientist, 4 October 2010 : Vol. 205 Issue 2755, p26-27

Interesting article discussing the aging world population and the impact of that on the world and national economies as well as the family and geopolitical order.

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Well I decided to buy a "Genius F350" Tablet pen to help with the annotation of PDFs.    I bought it on bidorbuy from "shopandship" and must say it was a smooth transaction.    I have bought odds and ends on the web, but nothing yet from bidorbuy so this was a new experience for me.

I have done research beforehand to make sure that the F350 will work on an Ubuntu (10.04) workstation.      Anyevent, I plugged it in and voila the tablet worked from the beginning in the following areas:

• screen calibration in place
• sensitivity sensor working
• the pen tip working and button nr2 working on the pen

There are some issues with:

• cursor not moving after an event.   Get resolved when the pen is moved away from the pad or another event is triggered.   (...this is slightly irritating...)
• the 22 "fast paths" on the pad is not operational.  (...not really an issue...)
• button nr1 not working   (...also a slight irritation...)

I would have been very happy if button nr2 was also functional, but I suppose "c'est la vie".  Did some basic research on xmodmap and eventually came accross the following that basically stated "...If {{xev}} does not display an event if you press an extra key, than - bad luck. This HowTo won't help you...."

At this point that is where my knowledge of Linux gets challenged, so I will live without button nr 1.

Biggest challenge is however getting used to working with a Tablet!   It is a LOT different than working with a mouse, but the more I work with it the more I like it.    Very very useful with the annotation of documents.