{"id":339,"date":"2008-08-19T14:51:26","date_gmt":"2008-08-19T18:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=339"},"modified":"2008-08-19T14:51:26","modified_gmt":"2008-08-19T18:51:26","slug":"the-numerati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/08\/19\/the-numerati\/","title":{"rendered":"The Numerati"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek<\/em> has just published a book entitled The Numerati<\/em><\/a>, and has a blog related to the book<\/a>.\u00a0 The purpose of the book is to look how mathematicians are using data to to profile people in their shopping, voting, and even dating habits.<\/p>\n

I am not exactly an unbiased reader of the book.\u00a0 I talked with Stephen during the writing of the book, and he asked me to review the two pages he wrote about “operations research” (I made a couple suggestions which didn’t make it into the final version:\u00a0 I guess this is my “cutting room floor” experience).\u00a0 He was kind enough to send me a review copy of the book, which I received a few weeks ago.\u00a0 He also accepted my invitation to speak here at CMU to the Tepper School Faculty and doctoral students.<\/p>\n

The book is divided into chapters corresponding to the different uses of data:\u00a0 “Worker”, “Shopper”, “Voter”, “Terrorist”, “Patient” and “Lover”.\u00a0 For instance, in the “Voter” section, the emphasis is on predicting voter behavior.\u00a0 In the past (perhaps), geography and economics were very good predictors of voting behavior.\u00a0 Now, people seem much more in flux as to their behavior.\u00a0 Perhaps there are better predictors.\u00a0 Or perhaps there are useful clusterings of like-minded people that would respond to a particular pitch.\u00a0 If Barack Obama were to identify a cluster of “people who blog about obscure\u00a0 but important mathematical modeling methods”\u00a0 and would send a mailer (or email more likely) showing his deep understanding of operations research and a promise to use that phrase in his acceptance speech, then perhaps he would gain a crucial set of voters.\u00a0 Barack, are you listening?<\/p>\n

I greatly enjoyed reading the book, and did so in one sitting.\u00a0 For someone like me who perhaps could be seen as one of the Numerati, there is not much technical depth to the book, but there are a number of good examples that could be used in the classroom or in conversation.\u00a0 There is a bit too much “The Numerati know much about you and can use it for good or EEEVVVIILLLL” for my taste, but\u00a0 perhaps I take comfort in understanding how poorly data mining and similar methods work in predicting individual behavior.\u00a0 The book is very much about modeling people, so essentially ignores the way operations research is used to automate business decisions and processes.\u00a0 This is a book primarily about what I would call data mining and clustering, so there are wide swathes of the “numerati” field that are not covered.\u00a0 But for a popular look on how our mathematics is used to characterize and predict human behavior, The Numerati<\/em> is an extremely interesting book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek has just published a book entitled The Numerati, and has a blog related to the book.\u00a0 The purpose of the book is to look how mathematicians are using data to to profile people in their shopping, voting, and even dating habits. I am not exactly an unbiased reader of the book.\u00a0 … Continue reading “The Numerati”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-data-mining"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}