Sohn comments on the “Global Trends” report, the fourth installment of the NIC’s “effort to identify key drivers and developments likely to shape world events a decade or more in the future and to stimulate strategic thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that...

Concluding a section on How to Assess Forecastability (Foresight, Issue 13), Stephan Kolassa comments on papers by Peter Catt and John Boylan (in the same issue). Stephan contrasts Catt’s preferred metric, approximate entropy, with Boylan’s lowest achievable forecast error (lower bound),...

Goodwin and Fildes comment on the issue 14 Foresight article by Orrell and McSharry, A Systems Approach to Forecasting, part of a special feature entitled Rethinking the Ways We Forecast Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2009

Batchelor comments on the issue 14 Foresight article by David Orrell and Patrick McSharry, part of a special feature entitled Rethinking the Ways We Forecast. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2009

Yokum defines and explains sparklines, tells readers about the software that is available for producing them, writes about the embellishments that may be added, and evaluates the pros and cons of using sparklines. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2009

Sephton reviews Leonard Mlodinow’s recent book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2009

Spare parts generate high sales margins and improve customer loyalty by extending the useful life of base products. Forecasting and managing the spare-parts business is challenging, however, due in no small measure to short life cycles and long support life for the base products. At...

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) has become perhaps the most significant innovation of this generation for forecast process improvement, bringing demand people and supply people together in a structured series of steps. But the effective uses of S&OP are not widely understood, and while...

Pearson tells readers about the wealth of free information about current economics that the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) makes available online. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2009

While considerable attention has been paid to the measurement of forecast accuracy for individual items at particular points in time, issues around an aggregated forecast-accuracy metric and its tracking over time still present opportunities for discussion. Jim Hoover talks about why...