The Numerati |  | Author: Stephen Baker
Publisher: Mariner Books
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 29379
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0547247931
Dewey Decimal Number: 303
EAN: 9780547247939
ASIN: 0547247931
Publication Date: September 9, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Companies like Yahoo! and Google are harvesting an average of 2,500 details about each of us every month. Who is looking at this data and what are they doing with it? Journalist Stephen Baker explores these questions and provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're entering—and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists—and lovers. The implications are vast. Privacy evaporates. Our bosses can monitor our every move. Retailers can better tempt us to make impulse buys. But the Numerati can also work on our behalf, diagnosing an illness before we're aware of the symptoms, or even helping us find our soul mate. Entertaining and enlightening, The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor—the mathematical modeling of humanity—will transform every aspect of our lives.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
 Eye Opener towards Emerging Technologies and what they can probably do with our Data October 12, 2009
Raul Colon (Coamo, Puerto Rico)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It was such an interesting book I had to read it more than once. I use it as a reference and also have given it as a gift to several of my clients. I follow Mr. Baker and read his blog [...] and periodic Business Week Articles, I believe his approach at simplifying very complex terms and technologies for the understanding of many readers without losing the essence of what is happening is an admirable talent you can clearly see in this book.
I was originally attracted to the book after reading an Article on How consultants where being gauged for performance and overall business value by creating software that would include many factors of each individual consultant and giving them a specific ranking or value. Being a consultant myself and having worked for Big Four Consulting Firm in its Planning Management Office assisting in the placement of resources on multiples projects this was a subject very appealing to me.
I was captivated by all the new emerging technologies that are being created to improve our lifestyle and to enhance existing technologies. I think it is a great gift for any client who wants to stay up to date on what technologies are appearing regardless of industry.
 Two trophies from Homonym Hell (where spell-checkers can't help) June 27, 2009
W. Wilt (Boston, MA USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Page 175:
"How do analysts correlate irregular footsteps [on a tread-reading floor pad] and typos [in batches of email] with dementia? The research starts in the laboratory, with the sensors nowhere in SITE."
Should be "nowhere in SIGHT. (Although, if the author were talking only about email, it might have read "with the censors nowhere in sight.")
Page 207:
"But when Josh Gotbaum's political program POURS through the consumer data and ..."
Should be "pores through"
bw
a BusinessWeek article turned into 200 pages of mush-oh wow-gee June 21, 2009
Sundar Narasimhan (Boxford, MA USA)
If you pick up this book after reading Chris Anderson's "If you wish to understand life and business in the Google Age" comment on the cover, you will be disappointed. The book is more a summary of how companies have emerged to track numerous pieces of data about who we are, what we do and less about *how* they actually do it, whether this is good or bad or what we may seek to do about it.
In several chapters -- ranging from Worker (companies are modeling the skills and attributes of their workforce), Shopper (they are tracking what you buy in order to segment, predict, guide and influence your future purchases), Voter (companies are using microtargeting to help politicians), Blogger (they are analyzing your posts to understand both you and what you are saying about products you use), Terrorist (they are analyzing data and relationships between people and actions), Patient (with smart devices, they can track us even more) -- the author writes a lot about what he discovered in conversations with key individuals and companies; But he does not synthesize these somewhat disparate topics beyond "math is being used to do all these things". Topics such as multiple discriminate analysis or support vector machines are mentioned in passing, but collaborative filtering or segmentation and clustering analyses are not even mentioned. Text understanding also has a long history -- and is barely covered here. Most of the topics are also surfaced with a "oh gee, all this is happening" tone, which IMHO is more suited to an article in Business Week! This is not what I'd characterize as either a scholarly and knowledgeable compilation of techniques, or a thoughtful analysis of what all this implies, or an insightful prognostication of where this sort of data collection and inference techniques might lead, or why we should or should not be worried. Lawrence Lessig, for example, has written interestingly about how we might seek to define the boundaries between creators and consumers, and IMO, analyses about the data we produce or generate and how such data is used for commercial, security or other purposes is somewhat overdue. Hackers and geeks I suspect will find Toby Seagaran more enlightening (beware -- you'll need to know Python!).
OTOH, if you want to get broadly informed about how companies are collecting and using data about you and your behavior -- this book might usefully and quickly clue you in. Weekly publication writers write well, and the author is no exception. The pages fly by, and a couple hours later you may be able to say, (like I did after reading this book), Tastes Great but Less Filling!
 Neither fish nor fowl: won't appeal to statisticians; may bore creatives to tears April 24, 2009
Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX)
I listened to the unabridged audio CD version of Stephen Baker's book. I liked it well enough, but it had the unenviable task of following up (in my listening queue) the enthralling read that Malcolm Gladwell gives of his masterpiece, Outliers: The Story of Success. Baker's book contains some good research and is well-written, but it faces the problem of being neither fish nor fowl: there's only a hint of the math and computer science involved so it won't appeal to the mathematically-inclined; and it runs the risk of boring creatives to tears. Moreover, it lumps all sorts of IT-centric professionals under the rubric of 'The Numerati.' In practice, some of the activities and initiatives discussed don't seem to be mathematical in nature - Baker's health care sections come to mind.
Still, the book is a nice walk through IT's advances in various disciplines and industries. If anything, it proves that literacy in math and computer science will be an increasingly frequent touchstone of future success. Google built a company on that reality.
Projections fall short April 17, 2009
Anon.
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a Data Miner I enjoyed reading this book. It was fun for me to identify the actual techniques being discussed before he named them. Then again Baker didn't name many of the techniques and kept all the math out to appeal to the audience.
However, I think he seriously overestimates our ability to predict mass and individual behavior, now and in the future. I've built models with two thousand observations and some with over 20 million. I used 8 to 10 variables to starting with a couple thousand.
The fact is, statistical modeling will never have the level of precision Baker suggests is comming. By its very nature a statistical model requires an error term.
Short of taking courses in multivariate analytics, you can get an idea of why more data won't increase our predictive power in laymen's terms by reading this blog post.
http://www.broadcastthoughts.net/2009/04/predictiveness-versus-parsimony.html
Even with that critique I think Baker did provide a good view to the many areas data mining can help inform intelligent decisions.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
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