The Numerati
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Narrated by:
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Richard Powers
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By:
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Stephen Baker
About this listen
Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls.
Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the 21st century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to profile us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists, even lovers. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior - what we buy, how we vote - without our even realizing it.
In this tour de force of original reporting and analysis, journalist Stephen Baker provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're all entering and the people controlling that world.
©2008 Stephen Baker (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Steve Baker puts his finger on perhaps the most important cultural trend today: the explosion of data about every aspect of our world and the rise of applied math gurus who know how to use it." (Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief, Wired magazine)
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The Plateau Effect
- Getting From Stuck to Success
- By: Bob Sullivan, Hugh Thompson
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Plateau Effect is a powerful law of nature that affects everyone. Learn to identify plateaus and break through any stagnancy in your life - from diet and exercise, to work, to relationships. The Plateau Effect shows how athletes, scientists, therapists, companies, and musicians around the world are learning to break through their plateau - to turn off the forces that cause people to “get used to” things - and turn on human potential and happiness in ways that seemed impossible.
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Heath
- By Oliver Nielsen on 07-22-13
By: Bob Sullivan, and others
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No Better Time
- The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet
- By: Molly Knight Raskin
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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No Better Time tells of a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet. It's the story of a beautiful friendship between a loud, irreverent student and his soft-spoken MIT professor, of a husband and father who spent years struggling to make ends meet only to become a billionaire almost overnight with the success of Akamai Technologies, the Internet content delivery network he cofounded with his mentor.
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An Overlooked Hero of 9-11
- By Jean on 05-27-16
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The Click Moment
- Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World
- By: Frans Johansson
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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On the one hand we aren’t surprised by the uncertainty of everyday life, but on the other we believe that success can be analyzed and planned for. It is a revealing paradox. The implications are explosive and they obliterate every common-sense notion we have about strategy and planning. The Click Moment is about two very simple but highly provocative ideas.
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Outstanding book!
- By Anilyn Karel on 08-26-24
By: Frans Johansson
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The Formula
- How Algorithms Solve all our Problems…and Create More
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.
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Not about algorithms. Not an original book.
- By Landon Rordam on 12-02-14
By: Luke Dormehl
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The Friendly Orange Glow
- The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
- By: Brian Dear
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 21 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers - some of them only high school students - in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was not only years but light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers.
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Memory lane for the cyberist.
- By Robert C. Hickcox on 08-08-18
By: Brian Dear
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The World Is Flat
- Further Updated and Expanded
- By: Thomas L. Friedman
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will they say was the most crucial development in the first few years of the twenty-first century? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations?
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If you like cliches...
- By Jonathan Shultz on 09-08-07
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Breakpoint
- Why the Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology Is in Your Brain
- By: Jeff Stibel
- Narrated by: Robert David Grant
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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We are living in a world in which cows send texts to farmers when they're in heat, where the most valuable real estate in New York City houses computers, not people, and some of humanity's greatest works are created by crowds, not individuals. We are in the midst of a networking revolution - set to transform the way we access the world's information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: Bigger is rarely better in the long run.
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Meh
- By Customer on 12-07-14
By: Jeff Stibel
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Group Genius
- The Creative Power of Collaboration
- By: Keith Sawyer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Marosz
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.
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Worth reading
- By Glenn on 12-29-10
By: Keith Sawyer
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Trade-Off
- Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't
- By: Kevin Maney
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between fidelity and convenience between the products we love and the products we need.
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No Trade-Offs for Reading Trade-Off
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Kevin Maney
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The Art of Innovation
- Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
- By: Tom Kelley, Jonathan Littman - contributor, Tom Peters - foreword
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.
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This is an old book!
- By EPR review on 01-05-17
By: Tom Kelley, and others
What listeners say about The Numerati
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Phebe
- 08-01-15
Corporations hunt us through the forests of number
An eye-opener, and easy to understand and listen to, which cannot be said about all audiobooks on numbers. The author shows how Big Data is being collected on each and all of us, constantly, implacably, all sliced and diced for commercial purposes. Data is collected ceaselessly on us collectively and (chillingly) as individuals, and sold to many eager commercial customers. Corporations target ads to us; dating sites limit our choices based on our statistics and their proprietary theories; medical care is based on statistics, not us; blogs are all analyzed in every detail by Numerati because they reveal so much about the writer.
Baker enlivens his books with his travel tales as he collects the information about the Big Data revolution in American commerce, and with details from his life, which is charming and does make the numbers go down with a spoonful of sugar. I found myself listening for hours at a time, and I don't usually do that with nonfiction. I recommend this book as fascinating and entertaining ----- and it's just as well we know what is going on as we all become numbers to manipulate by big business.
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Overall
- Michael
- 03-02-10
Interesting Overview of the Topic
While I wasn't riveted to the content, I certainly wasn't board and learned a thing or two along the way. If you want to get into this genre, its a good place to start.
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- Joshua Kim
- 06-10-12
Numerous Reasons to Read
Highly recommended. Baker's The Numerati reports on how the growth of large-scale databases and sophisticated analytical techniques are remaking politics, business, health care and government. An excellent companion piece to Ian Ayres book " Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart. Ayers is a member of the Numerati (and come to think of it - sort of surprising that he is not profiled in Baker's book) where Baker is a journalist. The books taken together help round out the picture on rapid growth of data and evidence based decision making.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Michael T. Gibson
- 04-24-10
Eye Opening!
Understanding how we live on the internet opens doors to infinate possibilities for marketing. The studies outlined in this books will continue to revolutionize how and why we purchase products, vote, love and basically live. The author does a great job in explaining complex ideals and formulas, helping the reader (listener) visualize these concepts and understand how thier daily activities inpact the global society.
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- Michael
- 09-07-13
Big Data for Humans
The Numerati examines the bright side, the dark side, and most importantly the human side, of big data.
Having read Big Data, Super Crunchers, The Signal the Noise, Naked Statistics and The Numerati somewhat recently I liked The Numerati the best by a significant margin.
The author is not a supercruncher, which I think was a good thing. Baker keeps humanity always in scope while investigating the details of big data. Even though Baker is not a supercruncher, I found this the most technically interesting of the books, delving into multivariate vector spaces without getting bogged down in equations or just telling stories. Each time a bit of technical information was presented, how that technology would impact people was also thoughtfully considered. I also felt I learned more about the subject from The Numerati than all the other books combined.
Baker uses examples that are more realistic and representative than several of the other books on the subject. The narration is clear and good, adding emphases or emotion quite nicely, but for some reason the frequency range of the reader’s voice grated on me at first and took some getting used to but after a few hours it was fine.
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15 people found this helpful
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- R. Kinning
- 10-27-20
A good Start
This is old data now but if you have never been exposed to this information its a good intro. It is now 2020 and it is interesting that the models to predict elections are still as flawed as they were in 2008.
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- Stephen
- 02-02-09
Good but not the best of the genre
This is a book about the existence and contemporary use of data in todays world. The amount of data being gathered each moment is staggering. What is purchased, what people are searching for on google, where people are going, what they are reading etc. This has spawned the practice of using such data to make predictions of what is to happen - what we will be interested in, what we will but, where we will go etc. The people who do this analysis are called the numerati.
It is a very interesting read but there are two other books, Supercrunchers and the Drunkard's Walk that address this same phenomena in different and better ways. All three books demonstrate how this data is used and how one could take advantage of it.
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15 people found this helpful
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- A.R. Bredenberg
- 06-21-10
The Numerati want to model you
"The Numerati" is an exploration of the ways math and data are influencing the world, and what that might mean for business and for our privacy.
I thought one of the most interesting takeaways is that number-crunchers are working toward a world in which each real human can be modeled electronically, representing a multitude of characteristics. This model will be used to predict how the person will behave in various contexts -- economic, social, political, medical."
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- Laurie
- 01-07-09
Fascinating way to look at detail
Author takes a challenging topic and makes it understandable to every one. Reader is excellent and is a good match to the material.
At this time of turbulent change, it is very thought provoking on how business and management could evolve.
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- William Milz
- 10-09-08
Balanced Warning and Possibilities
Great book with comfortable narrator. The story that Baker provides is one of growing science of data analysis in various sections of our lives. The description of the complexity of drawing meaningful linkages in premptive terrorist identification leaves a curious mix of encouragement and frightening anxiety over predicting a repeat of September 11th. Later chapter on medical research in variety of illnesses that inflict our own aging process is also encouraging, while incorporating a brief discussion of efforts to identify "dark cutter" steers before investing the continuing costs to raise a low profit calf, all with the use of similar electronic data gathering as those which will help warn of oncoming development of Parkinsons in a family member.
A good collection about the pace of development and variety of future applications of the "numerati" professionals who are sifting and gleaning among our everyday activities which we hardly notice. Maybe all of HAL's brethren were not disconnected in 2001 ?
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43 people found this helpful