Super Crunchers

Super Crunchers : How Thinking by Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
by Ian Ayres

Ian was on the BBC one night talking about this book. He's a very persuasive speaker. The stories he told convinced me to get this book from the library. It's quite the book.

This is one of the books that I did not finish. There was enough there for me to take home the one piece of information necessary from every book. Life got a little too complicated, then the library wanted the book back and wouldn't let me renew it!

The first thing Ian talks about is how corporations, governments and large institutions use data mining to improve their business. Think Wal Mart supply chain. When you purchase something at Wal Mart, the entire supply chain is notified and the replacement process starts. All the way back to inland China. They derive outstanding efficiency by doing that. This is not news.

The news to me is how the Internet can be used to do instantaneous market research. I should not have been surprised, because it's so simple.

Ever notice the little ads on virtually every page you load from the Internet? (Me, neither.) They are supplied by the likes of Google, Yahoo!, and many others. They can be related to the content of the page, perhaps from cookie crumbs you've left behind, or whatever.

The market research comes through supplying slightly different ads to the thousands of people looking at the page. For example, one might advertise "All inclusive vacations" and the other "Complete vacation packages." Then, by simply watching the click through rates for the two ads, the researchers know exactly which words have the highest impact. And the cost, almost nothing!

Compared to the dollars and days cost of the old focus groups, this is a great tool for research.

This wasn't a bad book, I actually did try to renew it. But I've moved on to

The Day the World Ended at Little Big Horn
a Lakota History
by Joseph Marshall III