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Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart |  | Author: Ian Ayres
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $5.00
as of 9/8/2010 13:37 EDT details
You Save: $11.00 (69%)
New (36) Used (32) from $4.98
Seller: frederickgl
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 7747
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0553384732
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.5
EAN: 9780553384734
ASIN: 0553384732
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
An international sensation—and still the talk of the relevant blogosphere—this Wall Street Journal and New York Times business bestseller examines the “power” in numbers. Today more than ever, number crunching affects your life in ways you might not even imagine. Intuition and experience are no longer enough to make the grade. In order to succeed—even survive—in our data-based world, you need to become statistically literate.
Cutting-edge organizations are already crunching increasingly larger databases to find the unseen connections among seemingly unconnected things to predict human behavior with staggeringly accurate results. From Internet sites like Google and Amazon that use filters to keep track of your tastes and your purchasing history, to insurance companies and government agencies that every day make decisions affecting your life, the brave new world of the super crunchers is happening right now. No one who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Ian Ayres’s engrossing and enlightening book.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 Read It June 27, 2010
Mitch (Ohio)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you think about social forces or the course of civilization, then read this book.
This is more than just finding out statistics and a handful of factoids.
It's "super" crunching because it's about handling massive (hence, "self-randomizing") amounts of data.
This is new because of massive data storage technologies and modern computing power.
We are able to find significant things about ourselves today, which could not be found before, and being able to ferret out these previously-obscure facts about ourselves is a new and significant part of our civilization.
Remember how it used to be in small towns? Everyone knew everything about everybody.
Well, in the new global village, The Ubiquitous They can figure out most everything about us but we don't know so much about Them.
It's a big deal. Be a good Citizen of the World and learn about this stuff.
Very interesting and enjoyable book! February 18, 2009
MBA Student (TN)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is really interesting because of how it relates to quantitative tools that can be put to use in amazing ways. I read the book in conjunction with a text book for a MBA level statistics class. I highly recommend it for anyone as a way of seeing the numerous ways that numbers are put to use (most ways I have never even thought of).
Required Reading July 12, 2009
T. E. Baker
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Excellent non-technical, persuasive demonstration of the importance of statistical reasoning, and how "super crunching" meshes with judgment. If concepts like regression, normal curves, and standard deviations make your skin crawl, you NEED this book.
Great examples of data mining for fun and profit March 12, 2009
Trevor Burnham (Ann Arbor, MI)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Much of this book is unsurprising, describing the awesome amount of data and processing power available to us. I'm an academic; I'm familiar with statistical analysis. Yet there were anecdotes in here that floored me: Websites playing with different layouts to manipulate their users' behavior; companies using randomized trials to figure out how best to serve (and extract money from) their customers; even the book's title was tested by taking out ads on Google under several different names. "Super Crunchers" wasn't the author's top choice, but it was the apparent of the masses, so that was that.
And we're only at the beginning of this phenomenon. The stories told in Super Crunchers seem fresh now; in a few decades, these powerful methods will be ubiquitous. If you're in business, this book will put you ahead of the curve. And if you're just a customer, this book will help you to be prepared.
Who Is Data-Mining You? June 12, 2009
Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan)
14 out of 17 found this review helpful
When a customer deleted the cookies on his computer which identified him as a regular Amazon customer, he discovered that Amazon's quoted price for DVDs fell significantly. This prompted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to declare: "we've never tested and we will never test prices based on customer demographics."
This excerpt from Super Crunchers introduces two techniques that form the focus of the book: regression analysis and randomized trials. Regressions are a widely used statistical technique that can be used for prediction, inference, hypothesis testing and modeling of causal relationships. The term "regression" was coined in 1877 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, when he estimated a formula to predict the size of sweet pea seeds based on the size of their parent seeds (there was "regression toward the mean": peas didn't grow into balloons). Applied to DVDs and book sales, regression analysis helps predict a consumer's willingness to pay and leads to a pricing policy that maximize the value of sales based on a consumer's characteristics and buying pattern. It also allows websites like Amazon to make buying suggestions based on the observation that "consumers who bought this also bought that".
Randomized trials, used in the testing of pharmaceuticals, takes the analysis one step further. Instead of analyzing historical patterns, they produce their own data in an experimental setting that involves the random allocation of different treatments to subjects. The key word is random: if two groups of subjects with identical characteristics are exposed to a different intervention or condition, with all other things being held equal, then we can be confident that any change in the two group's outcome was caused by their different treatment. Randomized testing can also be used to test how much money can be extracted from a consumer by exposing similar buyers to different bundles of products and prices.
Ian Ayres, a law professor with a taste for numbers, has applied statistical testing to a variety of subjects: taxicab tipping, affirmative action programs, car theft, baseball card selling on eBay, weight reduction programs, etc. He doesn't shy away from sensitive issues. He was the first to expose the higher price markups that women and minorities had to pay at car dealerships. His research shows that the impact of concealed handgun laws on crime is inconclusive and doesn't validate the "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis.
But as he demonstrates in his book, applying statistical techniques to social issues is not the prerogative of academics. These techniques have now moved out of the ivory tower, as business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. Number crunchers "are not just invading and displacing traditional experts; they are changing our lives. They are not just changing the way that decisions are made; they are changing the decisions themselves." From teaching methods to health care, management is now backed by rigorous data analysis. Evidence-Based Medicine or Direct Instruction force doctors and teachers to follow a script, like a flight attendant reading FAA safety warning word for word at the beginning of each flight.
Data-driven decision making sometimes faces strong resistance. In the medical sciences for instance, the idea that doctors should give special emphasis to statistical techniques remains controversial to this day. The author notes that doctors are less likely than pilots to accept the drills of decision support software: "unlike pilots, doctors don't go down with their planes". In 1840, Ignaz Semmelweis was the Viennese physician who recommended doctors and nurses at clinics to wash their hands before surgery, after having observed that mortality rates dropped from 12 percent to 2 percent if they did. He was ridiculed by other physicians who considered hand-washing several times a day a waste of time, and after a nervous breakdown he ended up in a mental hospital, where he died at the age of forty-seven. How ironic: the reference for the diagnosis of mental disorders is now the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, which evolved out of systems for collecting census psychiatric hospital statistics.
Super Crunchers can be read as a sequel to the hugely popular essay Freakonomics (the authors of the two books share the same blog on the New York Times website). Freakonomics focussed on how statistical analysis can reveal unexpected relations of causation, like the link between the abortion rate in 1970 and the crime rate in 1990. It also played the forensic economist trying to expose criminal frauds, like match rigging by Japanese sumo wrestlers or the rewriting of multiple choice questions by teachers in the Chicago school system. The book was "freakish" in a way as it presented unconventional academic results that sometimes had only a faint relation to economics as a science. By contrast, Super Crunchers focusses on real-world decisions and how they are being impacted by data-driven management. It is even further away from the academic discipline of economics. But the techniques and results that it covers are highly relevant for policy makers and business executives.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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