I heard about this book first on the OR/MS magazine that I receive from INFORMS. This magazine had a special interview with the Stephen Baker the writer. There was a whole section on excerpts from the book which was an interesting read specially because the book talks about OR and Stats ppl and was featured at INFORMS. Highly enthusiastically i borrowed this book from NYPL.
The book was basically divided into chapters i.e. Worker, Shoppers, Voters, Blogger, Terrorist, Patient and Lovers. In every section the author discusses how the data is useful to know, how companies collect and organize data. How we as users are unaware about many of the ways we are leaving footprints on the internet, how a lot of data could be used to benefit humans. The book also brings out how extremely complicated it becomes to analyze such data and all the various kinds of people that are involved.
He names the companies that are currently trying to use this data and come up with meaningful information. He has excerpts from interviews with different people. An interesting part is when in the chapter "lovers" the author takes a test at chemistry.com to see if the website recommends his wife as a suitable match for him! While he discusses how chemistry.com uses the data he entered in this profile he is curious to see who are the 'ideal' matches for him.
To give credit to the book i must say the author tries to explain complex applications in simple layman terms. He is successful in this book, however for people like me I think I did not get any additional information nor did I get a great read. Again i must say the article in OR/MS was much more gripping than the book. Each chapter of this book is around 25 pages which could be shorter. Each chapter could be an articles of a magazine. I must say this book is for people who are out of this feild who want to know how things work or how the 'numerati's' do the job but for others... I would say this book can be overlooked.
My Rating: 6.5/10
The book was basically divided into chapters i.e. Worker, Shoppers, Voters, Blogger, Terrorist, Patient and Lovers. In every section the author discusses how the data is useful to know, how companies collect and organize data. How we as users are unaware about many of the ways we are leaving footprints on the internet, how a lot of data could be used to benefit humans. The book also brings out how extremely complicated it becomes to analyze such data and all the various kinds of people that are involved.
He names the companies that are currently trying to use this data and come up with meaningful information. He has excerpts from interviews with different people. An interesting part is when in the chapter "lovers" the author takes a test at chemistry.com to see if the website recommends his wife as a suitable match for him! While he discusses how chemistry.com uses the data he entered in this profile he is curious to see who are the 'ideal' matches for him.
To give credit to the book i must say the author tries to explain complex applications in simple layman terms. He is successful in this book, however for people like me I think I did not get any additional information nor did I get a great read. Again i must say the article in OR/MS was much more gripping than the book. Each chapter of this book is around 25 pages which could be shorter. Each chapter could be an articles of a magazine. I must say this book is for people who are out of this feild who want to know how things work or how the 'numerati's' do the job but for others... I would say this book can be overlooked.
My Rating: 6.5/10
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