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The Numerati | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Baker
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 2413
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0618784608
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.483
EAN: 9780618784608
ASIN: 0618784608
Publication Date: August 12, 2008
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Product Description
"Steve Baker puts his finger on perhaps the most important cultural trend today: the explosion of data about every aspect of our world and the rise of applied math gurus who know how to use it." --Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine (Wired Magazine )
An urgent look at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior -- at work, at the mall, and in bed
Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive
through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is
beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior -- what we buy, how we vote -- without our even realizing it.
In this tour de force of original reporting and analysis, journalist Stephen Baker provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're
all entering -- and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers,
shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists -- and lovers. The implications are vast. Our privacy evaporates. Our bosses can monitor and measure our every move (then reward or punish us). Politicians can find the swing voters among us, by plunking us all into new political groupings with names like "Hearth Keepers" and "Crossing Guards." It can sound scary. 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. Surprising, enlightening, and deeply relevant,
The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor -- the mathematical modeling of humanity -- will transform every aspect of our lives.
STEPHEN BAKER has written for BusinessWeek for over twenty years, covering Mexico and Latin America, the Rust Belt, European technology, and a host of other topics, including blogs, math, and nanotechnology. But he's always considered himself a foreign correspondent. This, he says, was especially useful as he met the Numerati. "While I came from the world of words, they inhabited the symbolic realms of math and computer science. This was foreign to me. My reporting became an anthropological mission." Baker has written for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for his portrait of the rising Mexican auto industry. He is the coauthor of blogspotting.net, featured by the New York Times as one of fifty blogs to watch.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Horrible! November 18, 2008
This book was not only boring, I also didn't learn anything at all. I really struggled to get through this book, and thought many times about just giving up. I wish I had just given up and stopped reading it after the first few pages. It is also written in such a pretentious style - whoever uses the work "confrere" these days? Do yourself a favor and buy something else.
 They Have Your Number November 11, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It may be that you have a "shopper's card" at your local grocery; you hand it to the teller as you check out, and the computer registers, besides what the total is and how the store's inventory will need to be restocked, just what the purchases were for you as a specific individual shopper. Maybe it will mail you some coupons on items it can tell you will be interested in, based on what you have already bought. Not too interesting, not too challenging for the computer, not too intrusive. But what will happen when you get a smart cart at the store? That's one that will welcome your insertion of your shopper's card, and then tell you what your shopping list usually looks like so you don't forget anything, where today's bargains are (in other words, what the store manager is trying to offload), and the fastest route through the aisles so you can get everything you need. If this sounds like it could be a useful tool for you, and also sounds a little creepy because of all the information the store (and the cart) knows about you, it's just the beginning. You may well want to see what else those who are mining your personal information are up to by reading _The Numerati_ (Houghton Mifflin) by Stephen Baker. Baker is a business journalist who wants to let us know about a new reach of mathematics into our lives. There are no equations here, just stories of the mathematicians and computer geeks that use them to find and exploit patterns of our day-to-day existence. Baker has cast some light onto many facets of an arcane realm of number crunchers, and has written a book that is entertaining and often disconcerting.
You can decide that you do not want to have a shopper's card. You can also decide that you do not want a cell phone, you never want to purchase anything on a credit card, or you do not wish to use an internet search engine. If you do volunteer for such activities, the Numerati have you. You cannot help but leave a digital trail. Most of Baker's chapters involve his looking into a particular realm of number crunching, interviewing the geeks and mathematicians who are involved, describing what has been done so far, and explaining the prospects for the not-too-distant future. Perhaps the brightest prospects for data mining are medical. Patients will do nothing extra to deliver information; it will just be monitored passively. Imagine a bed equipped with sensors that would tell how many hours we are actually spending in it, or how much tossing or turning we do, or how many times we get up for a bathroom break and how much fluid is lost on each such trip. Maybe there will be magic carpet on the floor of an elderly patient's house; it could register weight gain, or a new peculiarity in gait, or a fall, or even if the patient has stopped moving around the house during the day.
Privacy concerns are valid; it remains to be seen how much each of us will have to re-think what privacy actually means. There could also be moral questions involved; if you could make a mathematical model of a pedophile, and your church or school screens job applicants using such a model, and the screen says a candidate is an 85% fit, what is the right thing to do (and, an entirely separate question, what will be the thing to do to minimize legal liability)? And that percentage fit - it's going to be what any Numerati have to put up with, because any prediction or pattern can only indicate not reality, not truth, but mere probability. Several of the boffins interviewed here say that as complicated as are the mathematical algorithms to turn people into data, the math is the easy part; it's the humans that are hard to figure out. It is surprising, too, how simple tasks are actually monumental; terrorist watch lists of mere names present a nightmare, as any non-terrorist traveler who has a similar name will tell you. Internationalizing such data is a horrendous task; the Chinese alone, for instance, spell Osama Bin Laden eleven different ways. Baker's brightly-written and enthusiastic book presents pleasing pictures of how our numbers will come up in the future, and emphasizes those without neglecting to mention the darker issues of data misuse. He even did his own little experiment that verified something information techs have known since the most primitive of electronic computers. He and his wife filled out questionnaires at a dating site, and were dismayed that the computer did not point them in each other's direction as potential matches. It turns out that Baker had mistakenly excluded women of his wife's age. The verification: garbage in, garbage out.
some very nice examples November 8, 2008
The Numerati contains a wealth of very nice examples of the ways in which fast and ubiquitous computer chips along with improved software and data mining techniques will affect us (mostly for the good).
 Too Simplistic November 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Quantitative profiling of human behavior ranges from the beneficial (recommendation engines for books and movies) to the scary (employer and police monitoring), and everything in between. "Numerati" provides a journalistic introduction to this topic, that is easy to read and understand. I found it way too simplified, though:
1. The author treats this technology as a "black box" which makes it seem almost miraculous to the uninitiated reader. The first requirement in writing about any technology is to explain what it can and can't do; the book does not provide enough information about this.
2. Like all technology it has both good and bad uses (and most uses are good in some ways and bad in other ways), but the book does not provide enough information about the social and policy tradeoffs inherent in its development, use, and regulation.
In summary, the book provides a readers with a very basic introduction to the brave new world of statistical profiling, but doesn't explain enough about the technology or its consequences to be really satisfying.
Numbers and Sense November 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For anyone who works in digital marketing, internet advertising, online marketing, etc., (I fall into all of those categories and have since the mid-90's), this is a delicious read. Baker lets us peer into the minds and business models of what are essentially mathematical probability companies. It's a highly engrossing read, made more so for me personally since I know one of the data wizards referenced in the book. What I also like about the book is that it lets you draw your own conclusions on topics such as privacy without overly burdening the reader with a dogmatic point of view. All in all, I would (and have) recommend this book to a friend or ten in the "business" and really for anyone who has a passing interest in the implicit and explicit categorization of our lives. I can't wait to see what Baker tackles for his next book.
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