When groups of consumers share information or express their opinions about products and services, their attitudes or behavior sometime align without centralized coordination, a phenomenon known as herding. Building on pattern-based explanations of herding from the cognitive science literature, we propose a framework to elucidate herding behavior based on three dimensions: the speed of contagion, i.e., the extent to which the behavior spreads in a given time, the number of individuals, i.e., the proportion of the whole population expressing the behavior, and the uniformity of direction, i.e., the extent to which the mass behavior is increasingly uniform with one variant becoming dominant. Based on these dimensions, we differentiate eight patterns of herding behavior from slowly diffusing, small and disparate groups through to rapidly spreading, massive herds expressing a convergent behavior. We explore these herding patterns in an online setting, measuring their prevalence using over four thousand streams of data from the online micro-blogging application, Twitter. We find that all eight patterns occur in the empirical data set although some patterns are rare, particularly those where a convergent behavior rapidly spreads through the population. Importantly, those occurrences that develop into the pattern we call “stampeding,” i.e., the rapid spread of a dominant opinion expressed by many people, generally follow a consistent development path. The proposed framework can help managers to identify such noteworthy herds in real time, and represents a first step in anticipating this form of group behavior.

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ICT has the potential to enable a low carbon economy, as pointed out by many studies. One example of the energy (and CO2) saving potential of ICT is illustrated in this chapter: how much energy (and emissions) can be saved if the invoicing process is redesigned? Although there is a net positive effect, the way the actual process is implemented can make a large difference. This led to the question of how to evaluate different projects or different designs, when it comes to the net sustainability effects. Then a framework is introduced to compare the combined sustainability effects of all the steps in a work process compared to alternative processes. The authors then describe existing indicators and metrics that can be used to fill the framework.

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Security is becoming an important topic in distribution automation systems. Connecting these systems to enterprise IT networks for data sharing, has made them vulnerable to hackers from around the internet, as a recent incident in Ukraine has shown. To make current and future distribution automation systems sufficiently secure against cyber-attacks, it is important to have good security requirements for procurement. Equipment is often procured in tenders, in which the requirements for security must be written down at the start. Mistakes in the requirements can lead to high costs or mismatches with the functionality actually needed. To address this problem, several grid operators have worked together within the community of the European Network for Cyber-Security (ENCS) to develop a harmonized set of security requirements for procuring distribution automation RTUs. This paper discusses how the requirements were developed, and what the benefits were of harmonizing them between grid operators. The paper also discusses the use of the requirements in a tender for RTUs conducted by Dutch DSO Enexis in 2015. Enexis found that by using the requirements they obtained RTUs with much better security compared to tenders in the years before, while the selected RTUs selected were not significantly more expensive.