Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines, and Wired Markets

10.6. Monitoring Web Activity: No GUI, No Glory

Chapters 9 and 10 describe some of the many examples of how and why investors and traders would want to collect, aggregate, and evaluate many flavors of content from the Web—news, pre-news, SEC filings, and messages are a small sample, and the molecular search filters to decide what is interesting are some of the simpler varieties. Turning these ideas into software was the idea behind Codexa. Unlike many dot-coms, the firm had actual paying customers and millions in revenue, but became a casualty of the bursting of the bubble just the same.

The most requested item of my cumulative efforts in financial technology is the piece about butter in Bangladesh and the S&P 500 (Chapter 6, "Stupid Data Miner Tricks"). The runner-up for most requested item is the Codexa system. Now that we've covered the motivations for gathering Web information, I'll close this chapter with those golden oldies.

Ben Schneiderman is the godfather of interactive computer graphics as an interface for modern computing systems. He founded the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland^[] in 1983, and wrote the standard text in the field, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (Addison-Wesley, 4th ed., 2004). Anyone remotely interested in this area should spend some quality time on the HCIL web site; it is full of video examples spanning 25 years, which have inspired visual interfaces from the Map ...