There are big stakes — big rewards — in being able to accurately forecast cultural trends.
As policy geeks, it's easy to forecast limited investment in supplemental learning because of cultural norms or the structure of U.S. public education.
As with insects, control of plant diseases and nematodes covers a broad spectrum of measures: use of chemicals, resistant varieties, quarantine, forecasting and warning, cultural practices, heat treatment, and others.
Climate change is not generally considered a source of amusement: in terms of comedic material, the forecast is an ongoing cultural drought.
In the course of that work, each of them had to sit through cultural trend forecasts, PDF or PowerPoint presentations juxtaposing cliched stock photography with Nathan Barley-ish neologisms predicting the future.
In a fall books forecast, Flavorpill, the online cultural guide, said that the season promised "to be a doozy, with September in particular filled with some serious literary heavy hitters, and enough great reads piled up through the autumn months to get you fat and happy just in time for winter".
They are forecasting that this erasure of cultural funding would reduce federal spending by $2.5 trillion over the next decade.
By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no dove, forecast that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction … [as] … the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size".
The Visigoths are always clamouring at the gates these days; the death of the publishing industry is forever being forecast, sometimes enthusiastically, by the bringers of cultural darkness.
But the forecasts are not very optimistic because of cultural traditions, economic constraints, the flexibility of road transport and geographic inequalities between regions.
