By William Poundstone
John von Neumann invented the electronic computing device, performed a key function within the improvement of the atom bomb, built a department of arithmetic referred to as video game conception, and have become a defender of a circulation to bomb the Russians sooner than they can bomb us. Now comes a biography of this arguable genius and an exploration of his maximum idea--one that just about caused a nuclear warfare in 1950. photos.
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Here we encounter an aspect of agencement that the social studies of finance (with the exception of Lépinay 2004) has so far largely ignored: the ‘back-office’ infrastructure of trading. When the trader has struck a deal, he writes down its parameters on paper on a ‘trade blotter’ in a folder that lies on the desk between him and partner D. On one of her screens is the electronic ‘blotter’ of a trade-capture and portfolio-management system the fund leases. Like other such systems, it contains ‘security masters’, accessible on-screen via pull-down menus, which contain automatically updated electronic characterizations of all the securities their users are likely to trade.
Callon’s approach is rooted in the ‘actor-network theory’ that he developed with Bruno Latour (Callon and Latour 1981; Callon 1986; Latour 1987; 2005) and with others such as Madeleine Akrich, John Law, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. The theory is currently perhaps the single most prominent form 20 / The Social Studies of Finance of what in Chapter 1 I called ‘material sociology’. Its most distinctive feature is its agnosticism as to the nature of agents or actors, which are taken as potentially including non-human entities as well as human beings.
It trades bonds, currencies, and derivatives originating in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. The world it spans is infinitely complex, and even the attenuated information that flows into the room via the computer networks is in practice unlimited in quantity. For their fund to be an economic actor, these five people, along with their physical and conceptual equipment, have to turn this complexity into patterns that are simple enough to grasp, and then take appropriate action.