Stephen Baker’s Take on Life and Technology.

I recently came across Stephen Baker’s book via the Wall Street Review. This note on splogs got me interested:

A splog, though unreadable, is seeded with words that will attract Google ads. A computer-user may be annoyed at finding himself staring at a screen full of gibberish but click on an ad anyway, allowing the robot blogger to harvest revenue. This sleight of hand has the Numerati hard at work getting their software to distinguish between a blog and a splog. Mr. Baker gives a helpful sketch of the math involved, each blog reduced to a vector in a space of several dozen dimensions.

The problem of splogs, is one case study, through which Baker shares the positive side of the "Numeratis". So what/who is a Numerati anyway? According to Baker:

They’re members of a global elite, and are busy analyzing our every move. They’re rummaging through mountains of data, looking for patterns of our behavior so that they can predict what we might want to buy, who we’re likely to vote for, what job we’d do better than our colleagues. Some are even matching us with potential lovers…

Baker, through his book, uncovers the "numerati cult", who they are, the positives, negatives, and the unknown. Overall, his attempt is to share what these Numeratis mean to, well, a non-Numerati. Yahoo!, Google, and IBM appear to feature prominently, so do many Numeratis.

Elsewhere, both positives and negatives highlighted:

The Corner Office:

The "Numerati" are an evolving class of quant-humping, algorithm experts who will be playing an enormous role in shaping our society, our economy and our lives. They are the types who founded Google and Yahoo but they are going beyond simple searching to manipulating and massaging the tremendous mass of data that we generate from Web clicks and cell phones.

Sentimine:

I have already ordered my copy…How could I resist when we’re mining the blogoisphere for sentiment and about to test our own home-grown splog detector?

Bacon Rebellion:

…“The Numerati,” a class of math experts who quietly orchestrate the massaging of the zillions of bits of data about us. We generate the stuff every time we use our cell phones or search Google, use a grocery loyalty card or whisk through a toll booth using a Smarttag.

ThinkOR:

I think it is great that operations research is getting some publicity with The Numerati. However, there can be such a thing as a bad publicity. Is it just me or does it seem to everybody (OR folks) that this book is casting us in a rather negative light?

Michael Trick:

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.  But for a popular look on how our mathematics is used to characterize and predict human behavior, The Numerati is an extremely interesting book.

I hope to see this book influence, and promote the positives. The target audience are the non-Numerati’s. But still, this has piqued my curiosity, ordered.