Futures Studies in the Interactive Society

This book consists of papers which were prepared within the framework of the research project (No. T 048539) entitled Futures Studies in the Interactive Society (project leader: Éva Hideg) and funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) between 2005 and 2009. Some discuss the theoretical and methodological questions of futures studies and foresight; others present new approaches to or procedures of certain questions which are very important and topical from the perspective of forecast and foresight practice. Each study was conducted in pursuit of improvement in futures fields

The potential benefit of improving the dissemination of agricultural weather information to the Mississippi cotton farmer

The author has identified the following significant results. The potential benefit of improved dissemination of weather information to the Mississippi cotton farmer was estimated at $36,000 per 1000 acres. This is 16% of production cost of cotton in 1976. On a statewide basis, the total potential savings exceeds 100 million dollars

Multi-agent knowledge integration mechanism using particle swarm optimization

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V.Unstructured group decision-making is burdened with several central difficulties: unifying the knowledge of multiple experts in an unbiased manner and computational inefficiencies. In addition, a proper means of storing such unified knowledge for later use has not yet been established. Storage difficulties stem from of the integration of the logic underlying multiple experts' decision-making processes and the structured quantification of the impact of each opinion on the final product. To address these difficulties, this paper proposes a novel approach called the multiple agent-based knowledge integration mechanism (MAKIM), in which a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is used as a knowledge representation and storage vehicle. In this approach, we use particle swarm optimization (PSO) to adjust causal relationships and causality coefficients from the perspective of global optimization. Once an optimized FCM is constructed an agent based model (ABM) is applied to the inference of the FCM to solve real world problem. The final aggregate knowledge is stored in FCM form and is used to produce proper inference results for other target problems. To test the validity of our approach, we applied MAKIM to a real-world group decision-making problem, an IT project risk assessment, and found MAKIM to be statistically robust.Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea

Economic impact of large public programs: The NASA experience

The economic impact of NASA programs on weather forecasting and the computer and semiconductor industries is discussed. Contributions to the advancement of the science of astronomy are also considered

Using queuing theory to analyse completion times in accident and emergency departments in the light of the government 4-hour target

This paper uses a queuing model to evaluate completion times in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in the light of the Government target of completing and discharging 98% of patients inside 4 hours. It illustrates how flows though an A&E can be very accurately represented as a queuing process, how the outputs of a queuing model can be used to visualise and interpret the 4-hour hours Government target in a simple way and how queuing models can be used to assess the practical achievability of A&E targets in the future. The paper finds that A&E targets have resulted in significant improvements in completion times and thus deal with a major source of complaint by users of the National Health Service. It finds that whilst some of this improvement is attributable to better management, some is also due to the way some patients in A&E are designated and therefore counted. It finds for example that the current target would not have been possible without some form of patient re-designation or re-labelling taking place. Further it finds that the current target is so demanding that the integrity of reported performance is open to question and that a different approach is needed. Related incentives and demand management issues resulting from this Government target are also briefly discussed