Robot futures: science fiction and futures studies methodologies in action

What would constitute a robot identity? Would a robot developing an identity be consciousness of the processes that could/would shape its identity? This essay explores these questions by considering images common to both, futures studies and science fiction—in particular, the now famous anti-capitalist demonstrations in Seattle in November 1999.     

Limited imagination: Depictions of computers in science fiction film

Are speculations about the future ever truly inventive, or are they overly limited by today's reality? Many scholars suggest the latter, and have so for millennia. If this is true, speculations about the future in science fiction film should be closely constrained by today's reality, and truly novel and accurate visions of the future in science fiction must be rare. This paper presents a comparison of how computer technologies have been depicted in popular science fiction films with actual computer technologies that existed when the films were made. The investigation included charting the occurrence of 11 trends in real-world computer technologies and types of computer interaction (e.g., mainframe computers, textual and vector graphic-based interfaces, keyboard and mice) in 10 popular science fiction films spanning four decades (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Minority Report). The investigation revealed that depictions of computers in science fiction films mirror, for the most part, real world trends in computer technology development. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some implications of this finding.     

Scientific eventuality or science fiction: The future of people with different abilities

Consider this, we are living in a future [in-part] imagined over 30 years ago- in science fiction film and books. We may envision that 30 years from now we could live in a future with technology developed from the concepts we see in science fiction today. In this paper, the concepts of disability are challenged in the future based on the technologies imagined in the science fiction genre of the present and past. Focused on the sub-genre, Cyberpunk, current mainstream, as well as new emerging technologies inspired by science fiction are reviewed. Future disability is reimagined dependent on continued support and acceptance of the emerging technology. If our past is any indication, our future may lie in the conceptual and slightly implausible figments of our science fiction-based imaginations. However, the cultural shift will significantly impact our laws, regulations, and policies, as well as introduce new societal concerns.     

Science and fiction: the good and the bad

When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the Moon, they said science had at last caught up with fiction. The event had long been foretold in the Promethean genre of science fiction. Indeed, NASA had paid tribute to the prophetic powers of this literature when it gave the name of Columbia to the space module of the Apollo 11 mission in memory of the Columbiad of Jules Verne's space story. As I.F. Clarke shows in this survey, science and fiction have always had the future in common. From the earliest days of the first industrial revolution the innumerable possibilities of a technological society have found their appropriate images in the many future worlds of science fiction. Thirty years before they started work on the Manhattan Project, H.G. Wells invented the term atomic bomb and described the first atomic war in The World Set Free.     

Island Goes Dark: Transparency, Fragmentation, and Regulation

Responding to a September 2002 regulatory enforcement, the Islandelectronic communications network stopped displaying its limitorder book in the three most active exchange-traded funds (ETFs)where it was the dominant venue. Island’s share of tradingactivity and price discovery fell, fragmenting the market. ETFprices adjust more slowly when Island goes dark, and there issubstantial price discovery movement from ETFs to the futuresmarket. Trading costs increase on Island and decrease off Island,with higher trading costs overall. When Island later redisplaysits orders, market quality improves, with transparency and thereduction in fragmentation both playing important roles.     

Proprietary trading: truth and fiction

Peter Muller, who has spent eight years buliding what he describes as a 'reasonably sucessful proprietary trading group', introduces some of the issues behind his strategies - without giving his game away.     

Social and temporal geographies of the near future: Music, fiction and youth culture

Cyberpunk has been widely acknowledged as a form of popular fiction, which has done much to establish the potential of information technology in the popular imagination. Commonly these extrapolations are predicated on the shared diegesis of a dark future, that is a setting of urban decay and oppressive corporate capital. British publishing has taken longer to develop this style of critical dystopian writing. The differences between the two groups of fiction can be understood as different responses to cultural change, which has taken place during the 1980s especially in the ways and means of imagining further social change and agency.     

Cities of the imagination: Science fiction, urban space, and community engagement in urban planning

Stories, dreams, histories and myths, Michel de Certeau argues, connect people to particular places and makes place concrete and inhabitable. These narratives generate an imaginary, poetic geography that haunts the abstract city of street maps and development plans, and makes it socially meaningful. This paper is concerned with one particular kind of story-telling - science fiction - and its relationship with the city, urban planning, and questions of community engagement. The paper argues that the ‘cities of the imagination’ generated by science fiction and other forms of narrative provide a powerful means of understanding, communicating and enriching the connections to place in urban communities. Moreover, science fiction is often characterised by its ability to explore the future of cities. This gives the genre a fascinating and potentially useful resonance with urban planning as a discourse and set of practices; and, in particular, strategies for engaging communities in the design process and, thus, designing for future social sustainability. These ideas will be tested through a reading of near-future urban spatiality in the cyberpunk stories of William Gibson. The theorisation of the relationship between urban space and narrative in the work of de Certeau and other theorists will be used to help frame this discussion.     

Psychology, meaning and the challenges of longevity

Humankind has begun to reap one of the most valued harvests of its scientific and technological pursuits: a significant increase in human longevity. We now live longer than ever before, due in large part to advances in medicine and health care that provide those who have the opportunity to afford them a lifespan that for many approaches or exceeds the 100-year mark. It is now within the realm of possibility that people will live lives of 125 years or more within the next century. However, our ability to increase physical longevity may have outstripped our ability to deal individually and socially with these new lives, these new existences that go well beyond what has traditionally been considered a “working life”. How well-prepared are we psychologically to cope with the meaning of a life that extends to as much as 150 years or more? In this new “age of longevity”, what are the challenges for psychology as a resource for humanity in its quest to give definition to the experience of being alive, as well as for managing the affairs of everyday life? Traditional developmental theories in psychology tend to articulate early stages of life in detail, but are generally mute on the matter of later life. Cognitive psychology has been inclined to view longevity as leading to a deterioration of mental faculties due to “aging”. This paper examines the psychological implications of increased lifespans from an optimistic perspective by reviewing current developments in research on cognition, emotion and aging. The review identifies trends in psychology that, if emphasized and strengthened, may lead to improved theoretical frameworks that cast longevity in a positive light, and that identify how people can find meaning and fulfillment throughout their whole lifespan.

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made.” Robert Browning “Rabbi Ben Ezra”

I first encountered Browning’s works as an undergraduate, and being a pre-engineering student at the time my tendencies toward poetry were stunted to say the best. Few of the great works of literature my teachers compelled me to read at that stage of my life and development made enough of an impact to last beyond the length of the course requiring their reading. Much has changed since then and my interests in literature and what literature has to say that is of value for our lives has deepened. But Browning’s enthusiastic call to join him in aging has always been a fascination. Indeed, what could be more of a contradiction to modern attitudes about becoming elderly than to claim “the best is yet to be”? What can be more of a challenge to how we approach the relationship between being young and being old than to claim that the last of life is “for which the first was meant”? What can the possible rewards of the golden years be that transcend the glorious enthusiasms, unfettered optimisms, and just pure physical conveniences of being young? Or, was Browning simply trying to sucker us all into a fait accompli, the hopeful outcome of which is the envy of the very youth that the aged often envy so much?There is little enough envy of the aged today. I approach these years with great caution, recognizing that how I look upon those who are two decades older than myself will, in turn, condition me to see myself in those years much in the way that I see them now. “Aging” is not something anyone really wants to do. We want to, at best, “grow older”, a perspective that carries with it a more positive spin: growing wiser, growing up, or simply “growing” with all of its new-age connotations of personal enlightenment and becoming. I am not “aging”, I am “becoming at one”.The language we have adopted to talk about the time-course of life, and particularly about the years in the latter third of that course, does much to frame both how we live those years and how we anticipate them in our youth. Our expectations are ones of decline, physical debilitation and mental infirmity. We “retire”, as in withdrawal into seclusion, away from the mainstream of life and into the backwater eddy of inaction. On the shelf.Much of this view has been reinforced by how humanity has approached examining this aspect of its own time course through science. We study aging with an eye to how its effects influence the abilities of those so afflicted to perform or operate compared to those who still have a grasp on their full faculties. And, of course, we find that as people grow older, they do not approach life in the same way as do younger people.Part of our view on life comes from the very way in which science is funded: those interested in the last of life often receive their support from the National Institute on Aging, not the National Institute on The Last of Life for Which the First Was Made. Research agendas often focus on identifying sources of infirmity and potential prostheses, either physical or social, that can ease the lives of the elderly on their way toward achieving the goal of successful aging. All too often, success in aging means imposing relatively few demands on social resources or on the lives of younger people, such as family members. In our “ageist” society, elderliness is not generally equated with status and stature. Less and less, the young “listen” to the old out of deep interest in their lives and their experiences. Wisdom is the providence of the freshly matured and recently educated.The shortcomings of life in the advancing years are many and well-documented in the research literature. Memory spans decrease, information retrieval becomes less reliable, and new information is less readily assimilated. As people become older, they appear to rely more and more on automatic processing of information, quick associations and the like, rather than deliberative and conscious reasoning [1]. For the older mind, intuition is at least moderately preferred over analysis. For example, younger people tend to interpret stories analytically, focusing on details, while older people tend to focus less on a story’s details and more on its “gist” and its underlying significance to things that are important to them [2], and tend to do better at grasping and dealing with information in terms of its holistic meaning [3 and 4].The effects of these differences in information processing between young and old can be seen in practical matters of everyday life, such as decision making and judgment. Johnson [5], for example, found that older adults use simplifying decision strategies more often than younger adults. These strategies, such as noncompensatory rules that consider only the positive or the negative aspects of a decision option but not both, relieve one of the psychological burden of making complex and effortful tradeoffs, at the possible expense of efficiency and accuracy. Chasseigne et al. [6] found that as people age, they become less consistent in their use of information in making judgments and predictions; even reducing the overall information load and demands on memory does little to improve the reliability of their judgments. ¹     

Behavioural normative economics: foundations,approaches and trends

This article summarises the theoretical foundations, main approaches and current trends in the field of behavioural normative economics. It identifies bounded rationality and bounded willpower as the two core concepts that have motivated the field. Since the concepts allow for individual preferences to be context-dependent and time-inconsistent, they pose an intricate problem for standard welfare analysis. The article discusses the ways in which two prominent approaches – the preference purification approach and the opportunity approach – have tackled the problem. It argues that shortcomings in each of these approaches motivate an agency-centric perspective. The article presents two concrete policy proposals of the agency-centric approach. While this approach is promising, the article argues for pluralism in normative economics since an exclusive focus on agency can likely not do justice to the multifarious concerns that citizens hold.     

国际资本流动的原因、路径和趋势

20世纪90年代以来,国际资本流动速度进一步加快,通过促进国际贸易发展和提高国际市场效率两个方面,推动了世界经济的快速增长。文章介绍了近年来国际资本的流动规模,各类国际资本（如国际直接投资、证券投资）的流动形式及国际资本流向格局,指出国际资本流动既使世界经济失衡表现为一种动态均衡,也推动了世界产业结构的调整。     

打开内部评级法的黑箱:假设、模拟与监管实践

内部评级法的风险权重模型实质上是建立在单一系统性风险因子假设基础上的条件违约概率。内部评级法有两个主要特点:一是单一风险因子假设,假设信用风险的系统风险由单个共同因子控制;二是组合不变性,组合具有良好的分散性以使所有特殊风险充分多样化。这些假设在促成内部评级法成为简单易行、具有一定的可比性资本监管工具的同时,也对监管当局自身形成了挑战:一是如何针对不同银行的组合粒度补提"剩余"的监管资本,二是如何选择与本经济体相称的资产相关系数。在中国,由于政府主导经济,体制相关性较高,后一个问题尤显重要。     

Performance measures,consensus on strategy implementation,and performance: Evidence from the operational-level of organizations

In this article, we examine how consensus between operational-level managers and employees on strategy implementation affects the effectiveness of performance measures and employee performance. We use field-based surveys and proprietary archival data from a Taiwanese financial services company to answer our research questions. Consistent with the predictions of person–organization fit theory, we find that consensus on the implementation of the customer-oriented strategy is positively associated with frontline employees’ performance. Our results also indicate that the incentive effect of using performance measures in performance evaluation and promotion is stronger for employees with a higher level of consensus. Our findings suggest that consensus is critical to the success of an organization’s strategy implementation and the effectiveness of performance measures.     

Technical Analysis,Investment Psychology,and Liquidity Provision: Evidence from the Taiwan Stock Market

We set out to empirically identify the effects on technical signals attributable to psychological biases, adopting a set of specific liquidity provision proxies for a sample of firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The main findings of our empirical analysis are that the "disposition," "information cascade," and "anchoring" effects each have significant impacts on trading signals. Our results should help to shed further light on the asymmetric market responses to technical buy and sell signals, while also providing some potential clarification of the different attitudes of traders toward big-cap and small-cap firms.     

决策科学:过去、现在与将来

现代决策科学，是自然科学与管理科学相互渗透、相互融合而产生的一门归一化的科学。自然科学驾驭着自然，管理科学驾驭着社会，两者紧密结合起来，就产生了重大的变革。这场变革的结果，使我们获得更加科学的决策，以适应社会的需要，实现对未来更为有效的控制。     

Mediating instruments and making markets: Capital budgeting, science and the economy

We examine in this paper how certain instruments link science and the economy through acting on capital budgeting decisions, and in doing so how they contribute to the process of making markets. We use the term “mediating instruments” to refer to those practices that frame the capital spending decisions of individual firms and agencies, and that help to align them with investments made by other firms and agencies in the same or related industries. Our substantive focus is on the microprocessor industry, and the roles of “Moore’s Law” and “technology roadmaps”. We examine the ways in which these instruments envision a future, and how they link a multitude of actors and domains in such a way that the making of future markets for microprocessors and related devices can continue. The paper begins with a discussion of existing literatures on capital budgeting, science studies, and recent economic sociology, together with the reasoning behind the notion of “mediating instruments”. We then address the substantive issues in three stages. Firstly, we consider the role of “Moore’s Law” in shaping the fundamental expectations of an entire set of industries about rates of increase in the power and complexity of semiconductor devices, and the timing of those increases. Secondly, we examine the roles of “technology roadmaps” in translating the simplified imperatives of Moore’s Law into a framework that can guide and encourage the myriad of highly uncertain and confidential investment decisions of firms and other agencies. Thirdly, we explore one particular and recent example of major capital investment, that of post-optical lithography. The paper seeks to help remedy the empirical deficit in studies of capital budgeting practices, and to demonstrate that investment is much more than a matter of valuation techniques. We argue, through the case of the microprocessor industry, for greater attention to investment as an inter-firm and inter-agency process, thus lessening the fixation in studies of capital budgeting on the traditional hierarchical and bounded organization. In addition, we seek to extend and illustrate empirically the richness of the notion of “mediating instruments” for researchers in accounting, science studies, and economic sociology.