Book Review Of Ian Ayres's 'Super Crunchers'

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Book review

Today, number crunching affects our lives in ways we may never have imagined. Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers, shows how today 's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightning speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the “Super Crunchers”. From Internet sites like Google and Amazon that knows you better than you do yourself, to a physician 's diagnosis and your child 's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula out predict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, and how super crunching can be used to help, not …show more content…

It will also be important for us to learn how we can restate other people’s super crunching results in terms which make intuitive sense within our organization. To be competent in number crunching, we need to feel comfortable about using two quantitative tools: 2SD Rule and Bayes Theorem.
The 2SD Rule, to use this rule, you start by estimating what the mean or average value is and what the standard deviation is. The 2SD Rule then gives you a way to translate those statistics into numbers people will relate to.
Bayes Theorem, allows you to combine two or more probabilities into a single number. To come up with a combined probability, multiply the initial probability by a single number which represents the “likelihood ratio”. That ratio will either inflate or deflate the original probability estimate. The Bayes Theorem allows you to update your predictions over time as new and ideally better information comes to

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