Things I Learned From Super Crunchers

Posted from Royal Oak, Michigan--

I've never excelled at math, but that's why number intrigue me.  Super Crunchers--Why Thinking By Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart is written by Ian Ayres. 

Here are some of the things I learned from his book:

• "The Wisdom of Crowds," named by James Surowiecki, states that most random groups of people will be smarter than any individual person on a particular issue

• Corporations use large data bases to predict consumer behavior

• Harrah's casino can predict when you will be unhappy with your losses, so they dispatch a "luck ambassador" to treat you to dinner if you walk away from the game immediately

• Use www.Farecast.com to tell when airfare is going to go up or down

• The data mining of cell phone records was used to capture the two men who killed Michael Jordan's father

• Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis of Vienna General Hospital discovered germ theory of disease in the 1840s.  He was ridiculed when he suggested that doctors were causing their own patients' deaths by not washing their hands.  Semmelweis was fired, had a nervous breakdown and died in a mental hospital at the age of forty-seven.

• Ronald Fisher was the father of randomized testing in 1925

• Kryder's Law, named after Seagate CTO Mark Kryder, states that the storage capacity of hard drives is doubling every two years.