This is an interesting exploration of numbers, data, and how the morass of information now available is being used in all walks of life to learn about each of us. The author has talked with a number of people who are in the business of using that information for various purposes. Ranging from shopping to voting to terrorism to love, he has done a good job of finding the various applications that exist.

I just have two issues. Fist, the book suffers from a fault that seems to exist with many books written by reporters – the need to provide capsule descriptions of the people being interviewed; descriptions that are as clichéd as they are brief. As a reader I don’t really care about these snapshots; I just care about the research and work that is being done. But I guess you have to do what you have to do in order to hit a couple of hundred pages.

The second issue is not so much about the book as the results that are coming from the research. In the Conclusion I found my own concerns echoed. With so much information, are people proving something important, or just proving what they already believe to be true.

Be that as it may, it is evident that, just like the researchers, this book only scratches the surface of what is out there. And the one thing it does well is start the reader thinking about what else could be or is already being done. It is a thought-provoking book that provides the perfect introduction to a newly emerging concept. ( )

Math is everywhere and anything can be counted, including us and our behaviors. In fact, whether we realize it or not, our actions and behaviors are being counted right now at this minute by mostly unknown and unseen Numerati. The Numerati are the math geniuses of today, creating algorithms and writing computer code that can place each one of us into buckets of data. These buckets are inhabited by people that are grouped together for one reason or another - who we communicate with, grocery purchases, voting patterns, and the list goes on and on.

Being counted is nothing new, but the scale on which are now being counted is phenomenal. So much data is collected on each of us constantly; in order to make sense of this data, mathematical formulas and computer algorithms are needed to siphon out which parts go together and which ones don't. Of course, most attempts at predicting and altering human behavior have shortcomings and miscalculations, but not enough to stop hundreds of companies from researching and tweaking us as numbers.

I found the blogger chapter the most intriguing. Baker discusses techniques that companies are using to find out who we, as bloggers, are. In order to do this, real live people must read blog upon blog to analyze words used, sentence structure, and topics discussed to determine our age, gender, and affiliations. Then, they input all of these semantic clues into a computer program and test it to see if the computer's diagnosis corresponds to the human's. They then re-figure, re-write, and re-test until the program gets it right or close enough. Inevitably, it takes numerous trials before they have a working product. So why do companies want to find out who these bloggers are? The simple answer: marketing and consumer insights. It may not be the most precise method, but analyzing blogs provides one of the most immediate techniques to find out what people are saying about a product or service.

This book was fascinating from start to finish. While Baker's main point is in the myriad ways that a new class of math geniuses is using technology to figure us out, he writes from a business perspective. Who are these companies that count us and why are they counting? If the numbers are so imprecise many times, why bother? With all of this number crunching becoming evermore prevalent and important to marketers, political candidates, national security, doctors, and even match-makers, what will I, as a non-Numerati, do in the world to come? I take solace in Baker's final thoughts:

"Spending all this time among the Numerati, I've found myself wondering what jobs the rest of the world will handle in an economy dominated by calculations. Now it occurs to me: it's up to us to help them find the keys. The mathematicians and computer scientists create magic but only if their formulas contain real, meaningful information from the physical world we inhabit. That's the way it's always been, and even as they mine truckloads of data, it's a team effort."

Let's hope he's right, and let's also hope we are prepared to educate America to be the next generation of Numerati because we're going to need them.

An enjoyable, light nonfiction book. Nothing in it was "news" to me, but then, I live and work with this stuff every day and probably see a lot more of it than most people (MIT's media scholars are featured prominently in it). It wasn't a fear-mongering kind of book, which I really appreciated, and it introduced me to a couple new technologies that I didn't realize were in the works (especially ones for health monitoring: I've considered buying a Body Bugg, and I'm excited to someday be able to monitor my health more closely, so it was neat to read about 'magic carpets' and so on.) ( )

An enjoyable, light nonfiction book. Nothing in it was "news" to me, but then, I live and work with this stuff every day and probably see a lot more of it than most people (MIT's media scholars are featured prominently in it). It wasn't a fear-mongering kind of book, which I really appreciated, and it introduced me to a couple new technologies that I didn't realize were in the works (especially ones for health monitoring: I've considered buying a Body Bugg, and I'm excited to someday be able to monitor my health more closely, so it was neat to read about 'magic carpets' and so on.) ( )

Interesting and well written book on many of the potential uses of the data that we are feeding daily into our computerized resources. I hadn't really thought about the fact that, beyond just computer use, this now includes cell phones, cars, credit and shoppers cards. Beyond the potential for abuse (identity theft, lack of privacy) scientists use the datastreams to study our behavior in new ways - if they can sort out the critical pieces! ( )