Paper 5: A shocking experiment: alternative approaches for discontinuity-oriented scenario development P. van Notten

People copy each other’s behaviour. From kids playing marbles in the playground to grown ups wearing neckties. As a matter of fact it is very hard to think of behaviour that you did not copy from somebody. The recently developed theory of memetics describes how behaviour evolves whereby some behaviours become more suited to their human environment than other, competing, behaviours. This evolution can occur rapidly within a population creating hypes like particular fashions, Rubic’s cube, SMS, etc.). On the other hand some behaviour persists in a population over a long period (the necktie example). This paper describes the application of memetics to the adoption of innovations. The extent to which a product or service invites copying behaviour might very well be an excellent predictor of the market adoption of that product or service. Memetics was used to develop an instrument called SUMI (Service User Matching Instrument), which predicts the adoption of innovations. The instrument calculates the likelihood that behaviour related to the innovation will be copied by a certain target group. The development of the instrument is described in this paper as well as a number

Abstract: This article demonstrates that the business improvement district (BID) is a model for urban revitalization that policy entrepreneurs have deliberately transferred, both intra-and inter-nationally. Data collected via personal interviews and organizational surveys reveal the origins of the BID model, why and how it was successfully transferred to eight different countries, and the types of conditions that prevent its adoption. Special attention is given to the application of the BID model in the United States and the Republic of South Africa for the purpose of illustrating how entrepreneurs apply new policies in contexts with divergent histories, and political and socio-economic conditions. This study does not test or expand policy transfer theory. However, through a detailed description of the work done by urban revitalization policy entrepreneurs, it seeks to make a modest contribution to the policy transfer literature. It also intends to augment the burgeoning BID literature by identifying key policy agents, documenting their successes, examining their failures, and considering their motivations. Keywords: business improvement districts, history, policy transfer Property and business owners in urban contexts around the globe are using state authority to create a new form of government to protect their interests. With the power to impose taxes and provide collective services, business improvement districts (BIDs) supplement publicly funded efforts to attract visitors and investors, enhance the pedestrian experience, and improve the city's ability to compete with regional office parks, shopping malls, and suburban living. The BID, I argue, is a relatively new urban revitalization model that policy entrepreneurs have deliberately transferred, both intra-and internationally.

Mobile agents are programs, typically written in a script language, which may be dispatched from a client computer and transported to a remote server computer for execution. Several authors have suggested that mobile agents offer an important new method of performing transactions and information

Disconnected operation is a mode of operation that enables a client to continue accessing critical data during temporary failures of a shared data repository. An important, though not exclusive, application of disconnected operation is in supporting portable computers. In this paper, we show

observers view price stability as a worthy objective because they think that inflation is costly. Some of these costs involve the average rate of inflation, and others relate to the variability and uncertainty of inflation. But the general idea is that businesses and households are thought to perform poorly

. Internal estimates are also used to measure variable importance. These ideas are also applicable to regression.

It is increasingly important to structure signal processing algorithms and systems to allow for trading off between the accuracy of results and the utilization of resources in their implementation. In any particular context, there are typically a variety of heuristic approaches to managing

Articial intelligence researchers attempting to create engaging apparently living creatures may nd important insight in the work of artists who have explored the idea of believable character In particular appropriately timed and clearly expressed emotion is a central requirement for believable

The fact that objects in the world appear in different ways depending on the scale of observation has important implications if one aims at describing them. It shows that the notion of scale is of utmost importance when processing unknown measurement data by automatic methods. In their seminal