01 — Markets, risk & the research engine
How not to fool yourself with a backtest
The honest‑research engine and the risk stack are built on the people who made quantitative finance rigorous — and skeptical of itself.
Advances in Financial Machine Learning — Marcos López de Prado
What we took: the deflated Sharpe ratio, walk‑forward and combinatorial cross‑validation, and the whole "your backtest is probably overfit" ethos behind the research engine.
The Sharpe Ratio — William F. Sharpe (1966, 1994)
What we took: risk‑adjusted return as the number that actually matters — the metric we lead with everywhere instead of raw % gains.
Fortune's Formula — William Poundstone
What we took: the Kelly criterion and position sizing — bet size from edge and risk, never gut feel. (Kelly & Shannon, told as a story.)
Fooled by Randomness / The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What we took: survivorship bias, tail risk, and why "roughly break‑even, published in full" beats a shiny backtest. The reason we publish the graveyard.
A Man for All Markets — Edward O. Thorp
What we took: that a real, tested edge — proven before you risk capital — beats a story. The whole "prove it live in paper first" discipline.
02 — Warning & intelligence
Seeing it coming
Aquilla, The Wire, and the Early Warning layer are built on the discipline of strategic warning and honest analysis.
Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning — Cynthia M. Grabo
What we took: the canonical indications‑and‑warning (I&W) method — indicators, warning thresholds, and the ladder behind our info → watch → warning → critical.
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis — Richards J. Heuer Jr.
What we took: analysis‑of‑competing‑hypotheses and cognitive‑bias discipline — why the engine states its own false‑positive rate out loud.
Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy — Sherman Kent
What we took: the intelligence cycle and "words of estimative probability" — the BLUF/precedence structure of The Wire.
03 — Situational awareness & decision
Getting inside the loop
The console, the operator assistant, and the "suggest, human decides" rule come from the science of decision‑making under pressure.
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War — Robert Coram
What we took: John Boyd's OODA loop — observe, orient, decide, act — the shape of the whole console: get the picture fast, decide, act, human‑in‑the‑loop.
Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness — Mica R. Endsley (1995)
What we took: the three levels of situation awareness — perception, comprehension, projection — the model behind a single shared picture.
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions — Gary Klein
What we took: naturalistic decision‑making — why the tools surface the situation and let the human decide, rather than deciding for them.
04 — Emergency management & field comms
When the infrastructure fails
Consilium's PACE plan, the incident structure, and the map/comms stack stand on public emergency‑management doctrine and open field standards.
CIMS — Coordinated Incident Management System — NEMA (New Zealand)
What we took: NZ's national incident structure and common terminology — the frame the console's roles and reporting follow.
Incident Command System (ICS) — FEMA / US Emergency Management
What we took: span‑of‑control and a common operating picture — proven structure for coordinating people across sites.
PACE — Primary · Alternate · Contingency · Emergency — US Army signal doctrine
What we took: the layered communications plan the AI operator walks you through when a link drops.
TAK / ATAK & Cursor‑on‑Target — TAK Product Center (tak.gov)
What we took: the open CoT standard our Aquilla and drone bridges emit, and the ATAK ecosystem our field maps target.
Meshtastic & OpenMANET — open‑source mesh radio projects
What we took: the two‑tier off‑grid mesh — LoRa beacon + Wi‑Fi HaLow IP backbone — the comms floor of every TOC box.
05 — Cryptography & secure comms
Keeping a secret
The comms‑security design — one‑time pads, modern crypto, the rolling‑key scheme — rests on the foundations of the field.
Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems — Claude E. Shannon (1949)
What we took: the proof that a correctly used one‑time pad is unbreakable — the basis of our command‑channel crypto.
The Code Book — Simon Singh
What we took: the honest lesson that ciphers rarely fail — the people around them do (Enigma, VENONA). Our whole "20% radios, 80% discipline" stance.
Cryptography Engineering — Ferguson, Schneier & Kohno
What we took: practical crypto done right — AES/ChaCha, key management, forward secrecy — the modern layer above the pad.
The Signal Protocol — Signal / Open Whisper Systems
What we took: X25519 key exchange and the ratchet — the forward‑secrecy model our rolling‑key scheme mirrors.
06 — Hazard science & live data
Whose numbers we trust
The Early Warning layer and the situation‑room map run on authoritative, public science. We aggregate; they measure.
GeoNet — GNS Science, Toka Tū Ake, NEMA (NZ)
What we took: NZ seismic and volcanic alert data — the keyless, authoritative feed behind our earthquake and volcano warnings.
MetService & Open‑Meteo — NZ meteorology · open weather API
What we took: severe‑weather signals for the warning layer. MetService is the official NZ authority; always defer to it.
USGS Earthquake Hazards & NASA GIBS/EOSDIS — US Geological Survey · NASA
What we took: global quakes and daily satellite imagery — the world layers on the situation‑room map.
07 — The open‑source we stand on
Built by others, freely given
A partial list — every one of these is someone's unpaid or generous work.
Leaflet · D3 · TopoJSON · MGRS · OpenStreetMap · OpenSeaMap · Esri public services — mapping & geospatial
What we took: the entire map — tiles, projections, the strategic view, coordinate systems.
Node.js · Express · and the wider npm ecosystem — the runtime & server
What we took: the whole application platform. Thank you.
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