The Numerati by Stephen Baker

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.