Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges.
. . .
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.
It’s thanks to Nanex, the data services firm, that we know what their handiwork looks like at all. In the aftermath of the May 6 “flash crash,” which saw the Dow plunge nearly 1,000 points in just a few minutes, the company spent weeks digging into their market recordings, replaying the day’s trades and trying to understand what happened. Most stock charts show, at best, detail down to the one-minute scale, but Nanex’s data shows much finer slices of time. The company’s software engineer Jeffrey Donovan stared and stared at the data. He began to think that he could see odd patterns emerge from the numbers. He had a hunch that if he plotted the action around a stock sequentially at the millisecond range, he’d find something. When he tried it, he was blown away by the pattern. He called it “The Knife.” This is what he saw:
Lately I was intrigued by Quentin Stevens article on “Why Berlin´s Holocaust Memorial is such a popular playground?”. In the article he highlights the people´s need for proactive role in exploring landscapes and appropriating spaces to suit their varied desires. He argues that individuals´ needs and interests for remembrance (or self presentation?) are more varied and less understood and therefore harder to support or control through design. . .
Peter Eisenman´s Memorial to the Murdered Jews, opened 2005 in Berlin, is 2 hectare field of 2711 concrete pillars. There has been a lot talk about the politics of its creation, but less talk about how visitors have appropriated the setting for many unanticipated activities. The Memorial lacks clear symbolism and obvious function and therefore invites free interpretation.
The MMJE´s scale and omni-directionality reduces formality: unlike many memorials, there is no focal axis or “front”. Its pillars provide a multiplicity of audience seating and stages where people can meet their needs to see and be seen. Security staff only patrol the perimeter and act only to prevent dangerous uses, not uses which are merely undesirable. Eisenman intended this memorial to induce clautrophobia, disorientation, isolation, confinemet and unsteadiness. Without moral guidance such direct sensory arousal often instead stimulates play.
From Public is Claiming Space – Play at DesignShifter
A Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe gets used as a playground? There’s some photos below; you have to admit, it does look kind of fun. It’s beautiful, it’s got wabi sabi, it’s, erm, playful.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is perhaps similarly oblique. When the design was first made public:
Newspaper critics, politicians, and some veterans recoiled. Opponents blasted the design as “a black gash of shame,” “a scar,” even “a tribute to Jane Fonda.”
Some war memorials, such as the Animals in War memorial in London, are a lot less playful. It’s difficult to respond to this with a straight face. The memorial’s strapline, “They had no choice,” seems unintentionally and darkly humourous. Did all the people who died have a choice? Is the memorial a bitingly satirical comment on the way that the population were treated like livestock by their leaders?
by anosmia
People have played with more recent wars too. Death Mask leaves little room for the imagination. And there’s a simple binary, non-transformative choice involved in Boot Hill too; you’ll agree or disagree, just like you did before you saw it.
Death Mask
A webby equivalent of the memorial-as-art might be the interactive graphic. Or the newsgame. I have no idea whether the more enjoyable the graphic or game is, the more ‘effective’ it becomes. I’m fairly sure that the ones that aren’t will get ignored, though.
As designers it is often our responsibility to imagine the future possibilities of things. We rarely get to design independent of social and cultural contexts, and we never get to design independent of the perceptual capabilities of our users. You could design a marvelous interface that makes terrific use of “color” outside of the visible spectrum, but it is unlikely that a human would be able to see it. It would be rare indeed to find a visual designer who bemoans the shackles of human perception, which unfairly force her to work entirely within the visible light spectrum.
A neat analogy; early adopters always assume their Futurism is driven by a desire for betterment. But they’re as often unreasonable men asking us to look outside the visible light spectrum.
While this sentence makes sense today, in a scant few years it will probably be obsolete. It’s highly likely that the next generation of Augmented Reality-influenced designers will, indeed, make terrific use of colour outside the visible spectrum.
Launchlist is “your one stop website checklist,” a simple web app used for checking that a website’s standard-compliant and ready to go. Fill out your details, answer some Yes/No questions and away you go.
This is neat. Enter a bit of a simple bit of code and a placeholder image appears to order. Like this:
Or this:
It’s a kind of image lorem ipsum placeholder thing. One of the beautiful things about blogging is that you can describe things like this and then find them again using The Google later. Hey, where’s that link to the image lorem ipsum placeholder thing? Paving the Vannevar Bush trails.
