Making Sense of the Future integrates the latest thinking in Future Studies with the author’s expertise in world history, economics, interdisciplinary studies, knowledge organization, and political ...activism. The book takes a systems approach that recognizes the complexity of our world. It begins by suggesting a set of goals for human societies and identifying innovative strategies for achieving these goals that could gain broad support. Each chapter begins with a “How to” section that discusses how we can identify goals, strategies, trends, surprises, or implementation strategies and concludes with an integrative analysis that draws connections across the preceding discussions. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, Szostak explores key trends and how these interact so that he can develop strategies to guide trends towards desirable futures. He discusses the ways in which we can best prepare for surprises such as epidemics and natural disasters, enabling us to react to them in beneficial ways. Supported by a list of guiding questions and suggestions for class projects, this is an accessible textbook for students of Future Studies and Future Studies courses.
Futures consciousness (FC), considered to be the basis for human anticipation, is important for its role in facing uncertainties and delineating alternative courses of action. This is especially so ...for emerging adults, who are traversing a life stage fraught with uncertainty and complexity. The COVID-19 pandemic as a high-impact event may trigger modes of engaging with the future to become more explicit. Through critical engagement with the 5-dimensional FC model (Ahvenharju, Minkkinen, & Lalot, 2018), we develop a methodology for qualitatively assessing FC. We analyze how emerging Dutch and Greek adults narrate FC dimensions (time perspective, agency beliefs, openness to alternatives, systemic awareness, concern for others) in letters written from the perspective of a desired post-Corona future. Results show that emerging adults, although caught-up in a subjective timeframe in which the pandemic is enduring, think beyond immediate concerns. They do so in a way that conveys some attribution of agency and systemic awareness. Openness to alternatives is shown using several sophisticated linguistic devices. When further developed, the methodology will enable educators and futurists to support individual’s imagination of possible and preferred futures. This may contribute to resilient people and societies in and beyond times of economic, health, and environmental crises.
•Proposes a novel, qualitative methodology for eliciting and analysing futures consciousness based on Letters from the Future.•Considers Futures Consciousness as a situated, sense-making capacity.•Based on a unique international study on emerging adult’s imaginations of a desired post-covid19 future.•Captures individual variation and patterns in how the five dimensions of Futures Consciousness are used.
Improving the prediction accuracy of agricultural product futures prices is important for investors, agricultural producers, and policymakers. This is to evade risks and enable government departments ...to formulate appropriate agricultural regulations and policies. This study employs the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) technique to decompose six different categories of agricultural futures prices. Subsequently, three models—support vector machine (SVM), neural network (NN), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)—are used to predict the decomposition components. The final hybrid model is then constructed by comparing the prediction performance of the decomposition components. The predicting performance of the combination model is then compared with the benchmark individual models: SVM, NN, and ARIMA. Our main interest in this study is on short‐term forecasting, and thus we only consider 1‐day and 3‐day forecast horizons. The results indicate that the prediction performance of the EEMD combined model is better than that of individual models, especially for the 3‐day forecasting horizon. The study also concluded that the machine learning methods outperform the statistical methods in forecasting high‐frequency volatile components. However, there is no obvious difference between individual models in predicting low‐frequency components.
ABSTRACT
Since 2009, blockchain has served as a potentially transformative information technology expected to be as revolutionary as the Internet. Originally developed as a methodology to record ...cryptocurrency transactions, blockchain's functionality has evolved into a large number of applications, such as banking, financial markets, insurance, voting systems, leasing contracts, and government service. Despite such advancements, the application of blockchain to accounting and assurance remains under-explored. This paper aims to provide an initial discussion on how blockchain could enable a real-time, verifiable, and transparent accounting ecosystem. Additionally, blockchain has the potential to transform current auditing practices, resulting in a more precise and timely automatic assurance system.
Endothelial injury and microvascular/macrovascular thrombosis are common pathophysiological features of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). However, the optimal thromboprophylactic regimens remain ...unknown across the spectrum of illness severity of COVID-19. A variety of antithrombotic agents, doses, and durations of therapy are being assessed in ongoing randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that focus on outpatients, hospitalized patients in medical wards, and patients critically ill with COVID-19. This paper provides a perspective of the ongoing or completed RCTs related to antithrombotic strategies used in COVID-19, the opportunities and challenges for the clinical trial enterprise, and areas of existing knowledge, as well as data gaps that may motivate the design of future RCTs.
Is the future simply open or can it be made more or less open? The awareness of the uncontrollable impact of present action on the future has recently raised a debate about the risks of innovation ...and rational planning. Relying on Luhmann’s concept of defuturization, the article confronts the two approaches of future-making and preparedness and proposes to combine them with reference to the management of innovation. This adds a purposeful dimension to the discourse about preparedness, aimed so far only at confronting damaging events: one can also be prepared to seize and exploit novel opportunities.
To investigate whether severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)–induced myocarditis constitutes an important mechanism of cardiac injury, a review was conducted of the published ...data and the authors’ experience was added from autopsy examination of 16 patients dying of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Myocarditis is an uncommon pathologic diagnosis occurring in 4.5% of highly selected cases undergoing autopsy or endomyocardial biopsy. Although polymerase chain reaction–detectable virus could be found in the lungs of most coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19)–infected subjects in our own autopsy registry, in only 2 cases was the virus detected in the heart. It should be appreciated that myocardial inflammation alone by macrophages and T cells can be seen in noninfectious deaths and COVID-19 cases, but the extent of each is different, and in neither case do such findings represent clinically relevant myocarditis. Given its extremely low frequency and unclear therapeutic implications, the authors do not advocate use of endomyocardial biopsy to diagnose myocarditis in the setting of COVID-19.
The future of social media in marketing Appel, Gil; Grewal, Lauren; Hadi, Rhonda ...
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
01/2020, Volume:
48, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Social media allows people to freely interact with others and offers multiple ways for marketers to reach and engage with consumers. Considering the numerous ways social media affects individuals and ...businesses alike, in this article, the authors focus on where they believe the future of social media lies when considering marketing-related topics and issues. Drawing on academic research, discussions with industry leaders, and popular discourse, the authors identify nine themes, organized by predicted imminence (i.e., the immediate, near, and far futures), that they believe will meaningfully shape the future of social media through three lenses: consumer, industry, and public policy. Within each theme, the authors describe the digital landscape, present and discuss their predictions, and identify relevant future research directions for academics and practitioners.
En este escrito se discute la cualidad imaginaria del futuro; se analizan los imaginarios de futuro dominantes, residuales y emergentes, así como su función en tanto dispositivo de control ...interiorizado. Se reflexiona en torno a esa configuración a la luz de novedosas formas de entender el impacto que tiene el futuro sobre el presente y el pasado. Asimismo, aporta elementos para profundizar la comprensión de los alcances del imaginario/dispositivo sobre nuestras vidas, y la coexistencia de diversos imaginarios de futuro que dan forma no solo a nuestro porvenir, sino también a nuestro presente y la configuración del pasado. Su relevancia reside en la necesidad de pensar el futuro desde categorías socioculturales que nos permitan comprender su vinculación con el presente.
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