New on My Reading List

Actually, I am already reading this fascinating book. In a recent post on idea capture I noted that ideas themselves were becoming more and more powerful, but cheaper and cheaper to monetize. The Numerati exemplifies this trend. Businesses are not being built on iron and steel, or even silicon chips and copper wire, but on data itself, or at least transformed beyond recognition by data, modeling, and statistics. We see it in Google's advertising model, and even in it's statistically based translation capabilities; in such disparate fields a Major League Baseball and computerized financial trading, the real "action" is taking place deep inside statistical models.

And our own lives can be affected profoundly by the statistics we keep on ourselves. But that is a story for another post.