Original Photo from: House of Sims
The Numerati is author Stephen Baker’s term for the “new math intelligentsia”: experts who create mathematical models designed to profile us and predict our behaviour. To run those models, they’re relying on the streams of data we create every day: our purchasing habits, our web-surfing, our cell phone calls.
In The Numerati, Stephen tracks the implications of all this data-crunching for our lives as voters, shoppers, bloggers, workers, and suspected terrorists. A shorter version of this interview will air on the Sept 24th and 27th edition of Spark. I hope you enjoy it.
You can hear the interview by clicking below, or you can download the mp3 here.
Play audio:
Great interview Nora! Very timely.
Thanks, Dawn! I find it so interesting that so many years after we first started worrying about data collection (remember the concern about debit cards and loyalty cards?) the statistical modeling is now actually in practice.
The link between Hummous and Terrorism is brilliant!
It reminds me of the un-natural act perpetuated by marketers because of conditioning, and the story goes like this–a cash register strips stories or conversations that occur between a sales person and buyer. Then one year later corporations pay marketers billions to find stories and paste them to historical transaction to predict future behaviour.
It is much easier to keep the stories or understand Persona behaviour patterns and allow customers to declare interest.
The Numerati is a brilliant series of observations but the people labelled as Numerati aren’t as smart or effective as one might fear.
Cheers,
Nick