Thinking about the future allows us to imagine what kind of future we want to live in and how we can get there. In 2018 we celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the founding of the Institute for the Future (IFTF). No other futures organization has survived for this long; we've actually survived our own forecasts! In these five decades we learned a lot, and we still believe--even more strongly than before--that systematic thinking about the future is absolutely essential for helping people make better choices today, whether you are an individual or a member of an educational institution or government organization. We view short-termism as the greatest threat not only to organizations but to society as a whole. In my twenty years at the Institute, I've developed five core principles for futures thinking: If somebody tells you they can predict the future, don't believe them. Nobody can predict large socio-technical transformations and what exactly these are going to look like. We are getting better at making point predictions.

Background. Recently, In Italy the vaccination coverage for key immunizations, as MMR, has been declining, with measles outbreaks. In 2017, the Italian Government expanded the number of mandatory immunizations establishing penalties for families of unvaccinated children. During the 2018 elections campaign, immunization policy entered the political debate, with the government accusing oppositions of fuelling vaccine scepticism. A new government established in 2018 temporarily relaxed penalties and announced the introduction of flexibility. Objectives and Methods. By a sentiment analysis on tweets posted in Italian during 2018, we aimed at (i) characterising the temporal flow of communication on vaccines, (ii) evaluating the usefulness of Twitter data for estimating vaccination parameters, and (iii) investigating whether the ambiguous political communication might have originated disorientation among the public. Results. The population appeared to be mostly composed by "serial twitterers" tweeting about everything including vaccines. Tweets favourable to vaccination accounted for 75% of retained tweets, undecided for 14% and unfavourable for 11%. Twitter activity of the Italian public health institutions was negligible. After smoothing the temporal pattern, an up-and-down trend in the favourable proportion emerged, synchronized with the switch between governments, providing clear evidence of disorientation. Conclusion. The reported evidence of disorientation documents that critical health topics, as immunization, should never be used for political consensus. This is especially true given the increasing role of online social media as information source, which might yield to social pressures eventually harmful for vaccine uptake, and is worsened by the lack of institutional presence on Twitter. This calls for efforts to contrast misinformation and the ensuing spread of hesitancy.

With the rapid growth of knowledge, it shows a steady trend of knowledge fragmentization. Knowledge fragmentization manifests as that the knowledge related to a specific topic in a course is scattered in isolated and autonomous knowledge sources. We term the knowledge of a facet in a specific topic as a knowledge fragment. The problem of knowledge fragmentization brings two challenges: First, knowledge is scattered in various knowledge sources, which exerts users' considerable efforts to search for the knowledge of their interested topics, thereby leading to information overload. Second, learning dependencies which refer to the precedence relationships between topics in the learning process are concealed by the isolation and autonomy of knowledge sources, thus causing learning disorientation. To solve the knowledge fragmentization problem, we propose a novel knowledge organization model, knowledge forest, which consists of facet trees and learning dependencies. Facet trees can organize knowledge fragments with facet hyponymy to alleviate information overload. Learning dependencies can organize disordered topics to cope with learning disorientation. We conduct extensive experiments on three manually constructed datasets from the Data Structure, Data Mining, and Computer Network courses, and the experimental results show that knowledge forest can effectively organize knowledge fragments, and alleviate information overload and learning disorientation.

WAI," short for "Where Am I." A well-educated 29-year-old man without any history of disease or trauma, it took him four tries to produce a semi-accurate map of the house he had lived in for 15 years.1 Another patient, Jennifer, from San Francisco, always feels like she is facing north, regardless of which direction she is actually facing. Judy Bentley had her memory of her physical surroundings suddenly vanish one day in high school. She suddenly had no idea what was beyond the classroom door. These are just some of the subjects that have been identified by a field that was kicked off with what might be called patient one, whom we'll call Alice.2 In 2007, Alice approached the neuroscientist Giuseppe Iaria with a peculiar and vexing problem: She had extraordinary difficulty finding her way around. Sometimes she would even get lost in her own house. She had to rely on standardized routes, going from door to door along a carefully memorized path. To get to work she knew when to get off ...