PATTERN LANGUAGE (English) Edwin Gardner
PRELUDE From Chapter 12: People in control: human factors in control room design, Paragraph 12.3: Impact of increasing automation on control room operation. "At first sight there are attractions to automating most of the functions, leaving the operator free to undertake 'more worthwhile' activities. Unfortunately the downside to such a solution is that lightly loaded operators are prone to get bored and even falling a sleep – it's in our nature to do this." JN2011
GLOSSARY
I -mancy, -mancer, -mantic, -mantical (Greek: used as a suffix; “divination, prophecy, fortune telling”; to interpret signs so “practical” decisions can be made [related to mania]) WI2011
written about geomantic divination, but there are no references to an instrument such as this. One Arabic term for geomancy is 'ilm al-raml (“the science of sand”); originally, the patterns were created when the geomancer traced dots with a stylus across a board of sand or dust. e geomancer then inspected and interpreted the dots, deriving further patterns, and eventually producing a result or forecast for his customer. is instrument provides a mechanical means of tracing the dots and developing further patterns. e rectangular tablet features a series of sixteen dials, each turning to display a domino-like pattern in the small window above. To use the device, the customer or the geomancer turns the first series of four dials, creating four dot patterns for interpretation. From these four, the geomancer then derives a further twelve patterns, using the following dials to record each stage. e semicircular panel at the bottom provides 'meanings' for the final derived pattern, and the customer receives an answer to his question (‘Should I marry X?’; ‘Will my business venture succeed?’, etc.). BM2011 VI Two Poems in Naskh calligraphy can be found on the
II Geomancy (Greek: “earth divination”) is a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand. e most prevalent form of divinatory geomancy involves interpreting a series of 16 figures formed by a randomized process that involves recursion followed by analyzing them, often augmented with astrological interpretations. WP2011 III Geomancer is a person who performs geomancy IV Neuromancer is one of the characters in William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Neuromancer is an artificial intelligence (AI). Its most notable feature in the story is its ability to copy minds and run them as random-access memory (RAM) (not read-only memory (ROM) like the Flatline construct), allowing the stored personalities to grow and develop. Gibson defines Neuromancer as a portmanteau of the words Neuro, Romancer and Necromancer, "Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead." William Gibson also coined and popularized the term “cyberspace”. WP2011 V Brass geomantic instrument (Figure 1), made by Muhammad ibn Khutlukh al-Mawsili, possibly from Damascus (Syria), AD 1241-42. is unique instrument 'calculates' patterns of dots with different ascribed meanings, related to the planets, four elements, signs of the zodiac and parts of the body. Many scholars have
face of the brass geomantic instrument: Which translates as: I am the possessor of eloquence and the silent speaker and through my speech [arise] desires and fears. e judicious one hides his secret thoughts, but I disclose them, just as if hearts were created as my parts.* I am the revealer of secrets; in me are marvels of wisdom and strange and hidden things. But I have spread out the surface of my face out of humility, and have prepared it as a substitute for earth. *
e idea apparently being, just as if the device's internal parts were hearts – i.e., as if the tablet were a living and hence perceptive being.
SS1980
VII Eye Movement and Vision (English edition) was a book published in 1967 by Soviet psychologist Alfred Lukjanovic Yarbus. In it, he presented the results of the research he had undertaken at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission in Moscow. While others had done research on eye-movement, Yarbus' study was remarkable in its accuracy and in that the eye itself wrote its movement into a photo-emulsion with a little beam of light. To accomplish this amazing feat he had developed the 'cap' (Figure 2 ). “e cap consisted of a rubber disc punctured by a tiny pinhole and fastened directly on the eyeball. Substantially heavier and bulkier than a contact lens but similar in concept, the cap’s rim was affixed to a small angled mirror. A tiny suction cup kept the apparatus tightly pressed against the cornea. In Yarbus’s basic study, a beam of light was directed towards the mirror, which moved in perfect concert with the cornea. As light reflected off the mirror, its movement was recorded on photosensitive paper, yielding a stunning result: a map of vision itself.” - Sasha Archibald Yarbus' study shows something remarkable. For instance, when the subject was instructed to look at a stationary point, the eye drifted with erratic, involuntary movements, as if searching for something, trying to make 'sense' of what it is looking at. ese small movements of the eye (known as saccades) are even essential to sight itself. If one would artificially lock the eye in place, blindness would be the result. Interestingly enough, many of those who are really blind still move their eyes, despite the fact that there is nothing to see. “Eye movements reflect the human thought process,” Yarbus wrote. Whether it is hard to say anything about the content of our thoughts, it is significant to remark that the eye needs to move in order to see; and more often than not, we need to see in order to complete or develop our thoughts. WP2011/SA2008/AY1967 VIII Nystagmus is a form of involuntary eye movement. It is characterized by alternating smooth pursuit in one direction and saccadic movement in the other direction (Figure 3). When nystagmus occurs without fulfilling its normal function, it is pathologic (deviating from the healthy or normal condition). Pathological nystagmus generally causes a degree of vision impairment, although the severity of such impairment varies widely. Also, many blind people have nystagmus, which is one reason that some wear dark glasses. WP2011 X
Cyberspace Interviewer: But it's not just the word, it's the idea of a virtual reality inside a computer network, where did that come from? William Gibson: My input for doing that was my experience of the very first Sony Walkman as a really intimate interface device that I could carry around. My observation of the body-language of kids playing those early plywood sided arcade games. I saw those kids playing those games, and I knew they wanted to reach right through the screen and get with what they were playing with there, and I thought, well, there is a space behind the screen and everybody's got these things at some level, maybe only metaphorically, those spaces are the same space, and as soon as I thought that I had it! MN2000
XI Algorithmic trading or automated trading (also known as algo trading, black-box trading or robo trading) is the use of computer programs on electronic financial markets for entering trading orders with the computer algorithm deciding on aspects of the order. Such as the timing, price, or quantity of the order, or in many cases initiating the order without human intervention. Currently about seventy percent of all trading on exchanges happens like this. High-frequency trading (HFT) is a special class of algorithmic trading in which computers make elaborate decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe. e trades that algorithms do happen in a split second, often (work ing with small margins but in large volumes. But, in general, these algorithms work in such a way that their operations are largely invisible in the market. In practice this means that these algorithms break down large transactions of a 1000 shares into, for example, 100 transactions of 10 shares, so it is not likely that other traders will spot the transaction in the market—it’s simply too small. In turn, there are other algorithms that try to discover these ‘invisible’ algorithms. ere are three critical factors in this form of trading: the quality of the algorithm, the speed of the computer it runs on, and latency—the delay caused by the distance a signal has to travel through the network. Latency has become the most critical factor in algorithmic trading; since the speed of the signal is absolute (limited by the speed of light) one can only shave off milliseconds, resulting in a huge competitive advantage when you are trading in split-seconds, by moving closer to the actual stock exchange mainframes. WP2011/KS2011
XII
Crop Circle of the Day is a webpage where Nanex - a company providing live market data for electronic trading – collects strange market behavior on the scale of miliseconds; in other words, it shows HFT algorithms at work. For an example, see Figure 4. NA2011 XIII e Flash Crash (also known as e Crash of 2:45, the 2010 Flash Crash, or just simply the Flash Crash) was a United States stock market crash on 6 May, 2010, in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged about 1000 points—or about nine percent—only to recover those losses within minutes. It was the second largest point swing—1,010.14 points—and the biggest one-day point decline—998.5 points—on an intraday basis in Dow Jones Industrial Average history. Many suspect that high-frequency algorithmic trading played a significant role in this. WP2011 XIV 60 Hudson Street is a major telecommunications facility and an historic landmark (Figure 5) located in Lower Manhattan, New York City, not far from the World Trade Center. It served as the headquarters of the Western Union company until 1973. During the heyday of the telegraph, 60 Hudson, then known as the Western Union Building, was a premier nexus of worldwide communications. After Western Union moved its headquarters to New Jersey, the building was converted into a carrier hotel where over one hundred telecommunications companies now have offices and can interchange internet traffic through a meet-me-room and individual fiber optic lines —making the building once again a nexus of worldwide communications. To be clear, a ‘meet-me-room’ is not a place where people meet, but where companies can directly connect to each others’ servers so they have the highest communication speed possible and can exchange data without paying fees to internet providers. 60 Hudson Street provides the lowest latency connection to the internet in Manhattan because it is directly on top of where a bundle of internet cables come above ground, making it a prime location for algorithmic high-frequency trading. us it is here where the algorithms run, where they are present. It is on these floors packed with buzzing servers where more than half of all electronic financial trading in the world is connected and hosted. WP2011/KS2011
SOURCES WP2011 Wikipedia.org , accessed 25 October 2011 WI2011 Wordinfo, URL: http://wordinfo.info/unit/
2725/ip:1/il:M , accessed 25 October 2011 BM2011 British Museum, URL: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/ highlight_objects/me/b/ brass_geomantic_instrument.aspx , accessed 25 October 2011 SS1980 E. Savage-Smith and M.B. Smith, Islamic Geomancy and A irteenth Century Divinatory Device: Another Look (Malibu, Undena Publications, 1980) SA2008 Sasha Archibald, Ways of Seeing, Cabinet #30 (New York, 2008) URL: http:// www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/archibald.php , accessed 25 October 2011 AY1967 Alfred L. Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision, trans. Basil Haigh (New York: Plenum Press, 1967) MN2000 Mark Neale (director), No Maps For ese Territories, documentary, 89min (2000) KS2011 Kevin Slavin, “ose Algorithms that govern our lives”, Lift Conference 2011 URL: http:// videos.liftconference.com/video/1177435/kevin-slavinthose-algorithms , accessed 25 October 2011 NA2011 Nanex, Crop Circle of the Day, URL: http:// www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/CCircleDay.html , accessed 25 October 2011 JN2011 Jan Noyes, Matthew Bransby (eds.), People in control: human factors in control room design (London, e Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001)
Figure 1. Brass geomantic instrument, made by Muhammad ibn Khutlukh alMawsili, possibly from Damascus (Syria), AD 1241-42.
Figure 2. One of the suction caps developed by Alfred Yarbus (P6) that was placed on the eye-ball to track eye movement.
Figure 3. Eye movements of different types of nystagmus. e image shows how the eyes attempt to fixate on a point, which is recorded by a strip of photosensitive paper moving vertically.
Figure 4. High-frequency trading algorithm spotted by Nanex on 23 September 2010 and posted on their webpage Crop Circle of the Day: NASDAQ "From Above". Spectacular askprice climber from NSDQ, running at rates from 800 to 1,500 quotes per second. e lower half of the image is a zoomed-in version of the upper half.
Figure 5. 60 Hudson Street Carrier Hotel, Manhattan, New York.