444 research outputs found

    How to recognize opportunities: Heterarchical search in a Wall Street trading room

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    Our task in this paper is to analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance. To do so, we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we argue, arbitrage involves an art of association - the construction of equivalence (comparability) of properties across different assets. In place of essential or relationa l characteristics, the peculiar valuation that takes place in arbitrage is based on an operation that makes something the measure of something else - associating securities to each other. The process of recognizing opportunities and the practices of making novel associations are shaped by the specific socio-spatial and socio-technical configurations of the trading room. Calculation is distributed across persons and instruments as the trading room organizes interaction among diverse principles of valuation.Arbitrage, trading, heterarchy

    Architecture and space for thought

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    This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 21/11/1988.This thesis is concerned with the description of individual experiences of (architectural) space in a social milieu. Architecture, while considered to be primarily concerned with space as its medium, has a very impoverished (or occasionally, very contorted) verbal language in which to discuss space. The author, as a beginner teacher, noted this in attempts to explore spatial experience with students of architecture, and resolved with their help to generate an appropriate verbal vehicle. The main body of the thesis relates this attempt and accounts for its failure. The Thesis, thus, follows three intertwined streams. 1) A scientific investigation into means for the description of human experience of (architectural) space, using methods developed from Kelly's Personal Construct Theory Repertory Grids. 2) A partially developed spatial analytic language, my personal response to 1) above, which is to be seen as the start of a new research programme that may last many years (the future of which is outlined). 3) An account of a personal learning experience both from, around and through each of these. These streams are organised into three parts. Part 1: Background Studies - into work in associated areas and fields, with an assessment of their relevance to the undertaking presented here. Part 2: The Experiments - attempting (and failing) to create a language, and the transition from verbal to visual, with critical arguments and observations. Part 3: A New Beginning - learning from the failure of Part 2, and the argument for and commencement of a new research programme

    Cultural narrative identities and the entanglement of value systems

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    From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville: Death, World Renewal, and the Sacred in the Mississippian Social World of the Late Prehistoric Eastern Woodlands

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    https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_newfound-ebooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

    Robustness - a challenge also for the 21st century: A review of robustness phenomena in technical, biological and social systems as well as robust approaches in engineering, computer science, operations research and decision aiding

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    Notions on robustness exist in many facets. They come from different disciplines and reflect different worldviews. Consequently, they contradict each other very often, which makes the term less applicable in a general context. Robustness approaches are often limited to specific problems for which they have been developed. This means, notions and definitions might reveal to be wrong if put into another domain of validity, i.e. context. A definition might be correct in a specific context but need not hold in another. Therefore, in order to be able to speak of robustness we need to specify the domain of validity, i.e. system, property and uncertainty of interest. As proofed by Ho et al. in an optimization context with finite and discrete domains, without prior knowledge about the problem there exists no solution what so ever which is more robust than any other. Similar to the results of the No Free Lunch Theorems of Optimization (NLFTs) we have to exploit the problem structure in order to make a solution more robust. This optimization problem is directly linked to a robustness/fragility tradeoff which has been observed in many contexts, e.g. 'robust, yet fragile' property of HOT (Highly Optimized Tolerance) systems. Another issue is that robustness is tightly bounded to other phenomena like complexity for which themselves exist no clear definition or theoretical framework. Consequently, this review rather tries to find common aspects within many different approaches and phenomena than to build a general theorem for robustness, which anyhow might not exist because complex phenomena often need to be described from a pluralistic view to address as many aspects of a phenomenon as possible. First, many different robustness problems have been reviewed from many different disciplines. Second, different common aspects will be discussed, in particular the relationship of functional and structural properties. This paper argues that robustness phenomena are also a challenge for the 21st century. It is a useful quality of a model or system in terms of the 'maintenance of some desired system characteristics despite fluctuations in the behaviour of its component parts or its environment' (s. [Carlson and Doyle, 2002], p. 2). We define robustness phenomena as solution with balanced tradeoffs and robust design principles and robustness measures as means to balance tradeoffs. --

    Investigating the Information Systems Heterarchy

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    This article assesses how one IS organization is changing in response to the increased globalization of software development and posits the emergence of a new form of multi-national enterprise (MNE)—the heterarchy. Data from two projects create new insights into the structures and behaviors of ISMNEs as they adapt to global systems development. The article identifies four primary dimensions of impact—cultural, economic, operational, and organizational—and suggests how such organizations are evolvin
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