Another of the most amazing books that I have ever read. The best attribute of this book is the way that it demystifies and makes accessible very complex and intimidating mathematical concepts. Before reading this book, I knew that data mining was going on and that it was cool and interesting. Alternately, I had all of these wacky ideas about how to analyze the world and break down employee populations (I'm in HR), that everyone told me were a) insane; b) evil; or c) pointless. This book reassured me that I am neither a crazed malefactor nor an idiot, I'm just spiritually a numerati without the comp science skills.I had no idea how far data mining had come or how many applications it has. The sections on terrorism and on politics was predictable, but I was surprised to learn that health data mining was so advanced and that I am not the first person to want to try to build a gigantic employee characteristic database and then match the employee with the job with the team with the company - apparently IBM has been doing it for years!
Instead of feeling intimidated by how out of my league the numerati are, I feel inspired to come up with better ways to utilize their talents and to maybe take a class or two on algorithms. I have to admit that I had a fairly fuzzy idea as to what an algorithm is prior to reading this book. Now, I want to try to write a few of my own! Excellent excellent book and really more of a long magazine article than a full book. It's not a huge time commitment or enormously demanding, just all around wonderful.
