Alternative futures for communities

Scenario building is an essential element for working on, and creating, alternative futures. This paper, based on the work at the Institute of Alternative Futures, discusses the use of scenarios in the context of community development and explores three basic types of scenarios—‘the official future', ‘hard times' and paradigm shift or visionary scenarios. With examples from Washington and elsewhere, the paper tries to show how communities can reinvent themselves and meet the challenges of the future with the aid of scenarios.     

Alternative possible urban futures

The twenty-first century will witness a considerable variety of urban forms in the West, in the socialist bloc and in developing countries. Multi-group, multi-valued societies should and will offer options in both societal and physical urban living. A spectrum of experimental urban types is developing all over the world and there is much to be learned from these types in their continuous refinement. The author surveys existing and emerging types: those which offer “more of the same” in a surprise-free future, the new towns or cities which provide innovative life styles, and the extreme and intriguing variants which may feed back into the more normal forms. At present the first type looks most likely to persist.     

Alternative space futures: The next quarter-century

Space developments do not exist in a vacuum! The shape of future space activities will depend on a combination of social, economic and political forces, creating the determinants for different patterns of space utilization. Forecasts of alternative space futures can therefore be explored by integrating different scenarios of world development and space trends. Here, alternative world trends are related to the underlying dynamics of space development, in terms of the economic, military and scientific utilization of space. The importance of space as a political issue is thus emphasized, in that the outcomes of policy choices to be made both now and in the future will help shape the social and economic contexts in which space technology will be used in the decades ahead.     

Alternative settlement methods and Australian individual share futures contracts

Individual share futures contracts have been introduced in Australia since 1994. Initially, the contracts were settled in cash. In 1996, cash settlement was gradually replaced by physical delivery. This study investigates the effects of the settlement method change on Australian individual stock and its futures markets. Specifically, we examine whether return and volatility of each market, correlation between the two markets, basis behavior, and hedging performance of futures markets differ across cash settlement period and physical delivery period. We find that, after the switch from cash settlement to physical delivery, the futures market, the spot market, and the basis all become more volatile. However, each individual share futures contract becomes a more effective hedging instrument. The improvement in hedging effectiveness is particularly impressive for the most recently established individual share futures contracts.     

Alternative futures: AmI scenarios and Minority Report

In the last few decades, scenarios have provided a way of analysing the implications of alternative futures, especially as they might be impacted by new technologies. This has been no less true of ambient intelligence (AmI), which may be embedded everywhere in the not so distant future. Most of the scenarios developed by AmI enthusiasts have been rather ‘sunny’, showing how the new technologies promise to make our lives more efficient, enjoyable, productive, enriching. A European project, called Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence (SWAMI), deliberately developed ‘dark scenarios’ to highlight the threats to privacy, identity, trust, security and inclusiveness posed by the new technologies. The SWAMI consortium also developed a methodological structure for deconstructing and analysing the dark scenarios. This paper takes that approach a step further by applying it to a cultural artefact, partly to test the validity, utility, applicability of the SWAMI methodology to a scenario not constructed by the consortium and partly to show how some cultural artefacts can be regarded as scenarios in their own right as well as warnings about future technologies. The cultural artefact chosen here was the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, because it features so many AmI technologies and draws attention to the issues that have been the focus of the SWAMI project.     

The ageing of Europe: Demographic scenarios of Europe's futures

This paper explores the demographic futures of Europe by presenting two scenarios. The ‘silver century’ scenario is based on the continuation of current demographic trends and policies. In this scenario, Europe's population will continue to age and immigration will be limited. As a result younger people will increasingly tend to concentrate in urban areas while the retirees, who are able, will settle in suburban and rural spaces. In the ‘open borders’ scenario, the EU and most of the member states will introduce an open and actively promoted immigration policy. Most immigrants will concentrate in large metropolitan areas. At the same time there will also be some countries and regions with very limited immigration from abroad. At the local scale immigration will contribute to social and spatial segregation. Hence, without the regulation or at least management of types and destinations of immigration, demographic imbalances will not be addressed at the regional level. Furthermore while the freedom of movement may have some macro-economic benefits and address population imbalances in some (mainly metropolitan) areas, pre-existent trends undermining both socio-economic cohesion and sustainable patterns of development are unlikely to be resolved.     

Fed funds futures variance futures

We develop a novel contract design, the fed funds futures (FFF) variance futures, which reflects the expected realized basis point variance of an underlying FFF rate. The valuation of short-term FFF variance futures is completely model-independent in a general setting that includes the cases where the underlying FFF rate exhibits jumps and where the realized variance is computed by sampling the FFF rate discretely. The valuation of longer-term FFF variance futures is subject to an approximation error which we quantify and show is negligible. We also provide an illustrative example of the practical valuation and use of the FFF variance futures contract.     

Design futures in action: Documenting experiential futures for participatory audiences

The futures field demonstrates a willing openness in embracing methodologies, approaches, and influences from a diversity of disciplines and perspectives. This plurality of practice is evidenced in a growing body of work that increasingly embodies futures thinking in the design of everyday material and networked experiences. The intersection of design and futures produces artifacts, applications and interactions created to provoke dialog in an accessible manner. As part of the Futures special issue on the Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future event, this article describes the documentation and public representation of the creative outcomes from nine Emerge design futures workshops. These workshops provided a rich opportunity to study how designers and futurists collaboratively engage, implement and communicate alternative futures. The goal of the documentation effort described is to capture the experience of creating experiential futures and extend the capacity for developing social foresight through a participatory exhibit and online social platform.     

New challenges for futures studies

Challenges coming from futures studies to other disciplines because of the rapidity and inter-relatedness of changes for which no discipline on its own can face the different correlated and global challenges, will be examined mainly in relation to social sciences. social sciences on the other hand reflect the need to overcome fragmentation within each discipline and between the various social sciences, in an effort at least of interdisciplinarity to face the growing uncertainty in decision making at every level: local, national and international. Social sciences are also slowly realising that a future oriented perspective is needed to empower analysis and actually reflect society in its continuous dynamicity. Citizens need the possibility to live within the rapidity of changes in the Information Society through the availability of futures studies in different forms as well as social analysis that is dynamic and interdisciplinary. The special link between society and ecological issues in a future oriented perspective will be the specific area to express the relevancy of the correlation between futures studies and social sciences.     

Near-future landscapes as a futures tool

Insights created within futures studies (FS) and written up in the futures literature may be too abstract and diverse to fulfil the goal of FS to provide clear ‘maps’ to non-specialists of the near-term future. However, graphics and images may help to make futures concepts and emerging insights easier to grasp. The paper surveys a little used and under-studied approach: that of near-future landscapes (NFLs). Several examples are considered. Useful as they may be, they are viewed as transitional forms that will be improved upon by greater interest in futures imaging processes and further developments in the technologies of graphic representation.     

Setting the futures margin with price limits: the case for single-stock futures

Price limits are artificial boundaries established by regulators to establish the maximum price movement permitted in a single day. We propose using a new censoring method that incorporates the effect of price limits on the futures price distribution and investigates how to set an appropriate daily margin level using single-stock futures in Taiwan. We compare our estimations with those obtained using the method in Longin (J Bus 69:383–408, 1999). The results show that (1) the margin levels derived from the Longin method, which ignore price limits in the estimation, are lower than those in our censoring method; and (2) the legal margin for single-stock futures set at 13.5 % by the Taiwan Futures Exchange to avoid default risk appears to be too high.     

The nature and value of futures studies or do futures have a future?

The paper discusses the necessity for futures studies and argues the need for methods giving explicable understandings of future possibilities so that decisions and policies can be as future-proof as possible. A taxonomy for futures methodologies based on their passive, preventive or anticipatory characteristics is proposed. The anticipatory methodologies are further categorised into subjective and numerical approaches. The paper goes on to review some of the principal numerical approaches such as system dynamics and econometric methods. The subjective approaches, such as the extended scenario, Delphi and Field Anomaly Relaxation are considered and it is concluded that, in general, they, and especially Field Anomaly Relaxation, are the more fruitful line of attack on the futures problem. Some directions for further research are suggested.     

股指期货会计处理

股指期货作为衍生金融工具,其确认和计量的具体账务处理,涉及新的《金融工具确认和计量》、《金融资产转移》、《套期保值》和《金融工具列报》等几个准则及其应用指南,以及应用指南所附＂会计科目和主要账务处理”的“衍生工具”、“套期工具”等若干会计科目的使用说明。