The techniques learned from the "scanning the environment" assignment is already coming to good play.    It now also makes sense to me why the scanning module had to be done first before this specific assignment.

It is actually amazing how much really good and reliable *1 content is available when you start to dig around.    I guess this might be true for research related information, but this will be dwarfed against the "inutile"*2 information floating in the web.

Update:

This assignment is much more difficult than what I anticipated it would be.   I have an idea how the prognosis should unfold, but to position it in the context of a scientific journal is really not easy.    There is so much research work that needs to be done to ensure that the statements and assumptions that I make are based on some fact and not just my perception of "something".

Well I am considering all of this as part of the learning experience, but its not easy at all.

• Note 1  Conforming to fact and therefore worthy of belief
• Note 2  Had to look this one up. Whether unusable or not might be debateable. LoL

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...

'The world's warming climate is forcing trees and the plant life around them into new territories where the environment is more like the areas where they normally thrive, scientists report from a new global survey.

Some forests and groups of vegetation have begun moving upward to higher elevations, or northward to higher latitudes to meet the climate change, while others in areas that are drying are shifting southward toward greater sources of moisture, the researchers say.

In California, for example, a detailed forest census along the west side of the Sierra in the Tahoe National Forest by UC Berkeley scientists found that the warming climate is shifting growth patterns uphill among many species of shrubs, oaks, firs and pines that for hundreds of years have been thriving at lower elevations.

Similar forest changes are being found on every continent by biologists working around the world, according to a report published this week in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. '...

...'In their survey of observed changes in vegetation reported by other scientists around the world, Gonzalez and his colleagues noted that trees and shrubs in northern Africa's Sahel region have been dying where drought has increased as the climate warms, and have moved further south where rainfall is more abundant.'...   [36%]

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.  :)

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.

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.

'Nicholas Carr achieved notoriety after a July 2008 article in The Atlantic, in which he asked, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?”   ...the Internet may actually be a diseducating force, gradually and invisibly rendering the surfing public incapable of reflective thought or sustained attention, argued Carr.
As our reliance on ever brighter and faster Internet content increases, a new force is taking hold across the culture of the Web-connected world, leading to changes in reading habits and even in human brains. The Internet trends of today foreshadow the surfing, the teaching, learning, and thinking of tomorrow.
Studies show that constant exposure to highspeed Internet is making us quicker in our ability to make connections and more adept at finding what we’re looking for online using search engines. But we’re losing something of great value in the trade: the literary mind-set.
The Internet has many virtues...; however, the effect that the Web has on the brain is rather distinct from that of books and more traditional literary activity. If sitting and reading a piece of static text for long periods of time feels “less natural” or “less intuitive” than zipping through the various pages, applications, and comments of a Web page, that’s because it is. The patience and focus required for sustained engagement with static text must be cultivated, a primary benefit of reading. Our most significant achievements as a species — the discovery of the scientific method, the recognition of universal human rights, and the exploration of space — would have been impossible without the rigorous, stubborn, disciplined, and unnatural literary mind-set; brains, in other words, capable of understanding and analyzing extremely complex narrative and dialogic arguments.
The traits of the informed intellect are essential to the furtherance of scholarship, particularly in difficult and abstract domains like science or philosophy, but the educated mindset isn’t characteristic of the brain’s natural state.   ...the Internet, in the speed and randomness with which it presents new information to the user, encourages a return to the feral mode of information gathering.
 “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. 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.” Herein lies an explanation for why so many of us feel challenged to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers.  Every day, every hour that we submit to the furtherance of Internet culture, we are creating a new type of civilization. Its schools and offices shall be populated with individuals who lack the mental circuitry required to read beyond a few sentences.  The postliterate being whom Carr conjures up is a subtle sort of monster.  
He is incapable of reflection or contemplation and doesn’t care to remember much. He is limited in terms of his capacity for original thought,  He communicates constantly but only in sparse bursts. He can think with great speed but cannot know anything with certainty. He cannot conceive of hard-won knowledge yet is isolated in his hastily reached convictions.'...  [53%]

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.

...'USHI OKUSHIMA is the oldest resident of Ogimi, the most elderly community in Japan - the country where the average age is higher than anywhere else in the world. At 108, she still takes to the floor for traditional Japanese dances. Afterwards she dabs a little French perfume behind her ears and sips the local firewater.

The land of the rising sun has become the land of the setting sun with staggering speed. As recently as 1984, Japan had the youngest population in the developed world, but by 2005 it had become the world's most elderly country. Soon it will become the first country where most people are over 50 years old.

This is partly because Japanese people live longest: men can expect to reach 79 and women 86. It is also partly because the Japanese have almost given up having babies.

Homo sapiens is ageing fast, and the implications of this may overwhelm all other factors shaping the species over the coming decades... The longevity revolution affects every country, every community and almost every household. It promises to restructure the economy, reshape the family, redefine politics and even rearrange the geopolitical order over the coming century.

The revolution has two aspects. First, we are not producing babies like we used to. In just a generation, world fertility has halved to just 2.6 babies per woman. In most of Europe and much of east Asia, fertility is closer to one child per woman than two, way below long-term replacement levels. The notion that the populations of places such as Brazil and India will go on expanding looks misplaced: in fact, they could soon be contracting. Meanwhile, except in a handful of AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa, people are living longer everywhere.

This is frightening, even for rich nations. In Germany, France and Japan, there are fewer than two taxpaying workers to support each retired pensioner. In Italy, the figure is already fewer than 1.3. Some predict that the world will face a wave of "ageing recessions".

But could there be an upside? I believe so.

Non-celebrities also remain active, assertive and independent as they age. They fill library and seminar halls once crammed with callow youths. They run picket lines - or marathons. Far from being a weight round society's neck, many of them look like a new human resource waiting to be tapped. Millions of the middle-class retired continue working at everything from lucrative consultancies to teaching literacy or finally finishing that PhD. They are often more valuable than the young workers the demographers imagine are supporting them.

In future, old people will be expected to stay in the formal economy for longer.

Some worry that an older workforce will be less innovative and adaptable, but there is evidence that companies with a decent proportion of older workers are more productive than those addicted to youth. This is sometimes called the Horndal effect... Age brings experience and wisdom. Think what it could mean when the Edisons and Einsteins of the future, the doctors and technicians, the artists and engineers, have 20 or 30 more years to give us.

Of course, many older people do need healthcare, but many others are fit, competent and self-sustaining. Across Europe, typically only one retired person in 20 lives in a care home. In the UK, of 10 million over-65s, just 300,000 live in care homes (that's about 3 per cent). So the majority of Europe's elderly resemble Okushima in Japan. They are the councillors and counsellors, the social secretaries and neighbourhood wardens, the carers of other elderly people, and even the political and social campaigners and agitators - the glue that holds busy societies together.

The older we are, the less likely we are to be hooked on the latest gizmos and the more we should appreciate things that last. We may even reduce pressure on the world's resources by consuming less, and by conserving our environment more.

The 20th century did great things. We should be proud that for the first time most children reach adulthood and most adults grow old. But after our exertions, perhaps we need to slow down a bit. Take a breather. Learn to be older, wiser and greener. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Here's to Ushi Okushima.'...    [48%]

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.

"Synthesizing information requires a student to process and interact with information rather than simply copying and pasting information. Students are actively engaged with information when they categorize, analyze, combine, extract details, re-assess the value of the collected information, look for bias, omissions, etc. Finally, they related this new understanding to their own knowledge and experiences and develop new meaning or solution."

Prof A. Roux from USB also stated that one of the challenges with the "Scanning" assignment will not be to find relevant articles, but to decide what to include/exclude.

Well I have information overload and it is difficult to synthesize as well as decide what to include/exclude to make the Environmental Scan meaningful.

So, I am still enjoying the assignment, but its not an easy assignment at all.  :)

:(

There is a workaround to use FreeMyFeed, but that did not work to well either. 

double :(

I then tried a few RSS client readers only to discovered some time later that these specific RSS feeds do not conform to the latest XML required layouts.  

tripple :(

Now its back to creating these feeds and reading them within its own created environment and application.

Update:

To make in even worse, it appears as if the feeds generated are "raw" and not really feeds just yet.   It needs some .net components to make it work.    Come on.....   This is bad.    We are not all using Windows you know.

Update2:

...so eventually figured out that the best workaround for me is to:

1. Identify the relevant journals of interest to me and store the direct EBSCOhost URL in Scrapbook
2. Setup an alert in EBSCOhost to notify me via email when new journal articles are added
3. Use the direct URL to then view the complete article list in EBSCOhost.   I make a note in Scrapbook on the latest article in the list.   This is just to make sure that no articles are missed
4. Work through the article list and mark the relevant ones with "Add to folder" if it is "potentially news worthy"
5. When the exercise is done, go into the folder and then "save" the articles making sure that the citation information is also saved
6. When the "save" page is displayed, screencapture and file it into Scrapbook.   In Scrapbook it can then be futher trimmed if necessary.    If Scrapbook is not used, then the article list can also be emailed from within EBSCOhost.

The above might sound like a long workaround, but in reality it does not take much longer than reading through a RSS feed.    A lot of time is however saved by capturing the articles into Scrapbook for further editing.

• Research databases
• E-journals
• E-newspapers

The E-Journals specifically contain to many journals to mention and it is a real battle to chose the appropriate ones to read without drowning as a result of information overload.

In the Research database section it is "EBSCOhost" that intrigues me the most.    The databases in EBSCOhost contains a huge amount of information and I have a new respect for RSS feeds to assist with the scanning process.  :)