Super Crunchers

The utilization of data to drive decision making is not a new concept however the far reaching application of this method and the technology available to analyze enormous volumes of data is a relatively new innovation. Never before have individuals and organizations sought to quantify with data; who would be a good mate, what baseball player would be the best acquisition for a team, what vintage is likely to produce the finest wine, how a prisoner will respond to parole or how a patient should be treated in a medical setting. Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres details the journey of how data analysis is changing the world in which we live and identifies strength, weakness and application of this relatively new and greatly expanding field. Certainly data had previously been used in the aforementioned areas but not to the extent that it is today and there was little ability to gather and analyze the huge sets of data that lead to the most valuable and reliable predictions. Historical data and its relationship with other variables is a superior predictor of future outcomes in comparison to intuition, random selection or chance and the pinnacle of predicting what is likely to occur in the future at this time is the regression analysis. A well constructed regression analysis can not only identify likely outcomes but will also show the probability that those outcomes actually occur.

Technology in its present form has made large scale, large vitiate regression analysis possible and even led to the development of the new field of using a "neural network" that functions much like the human brain (i.e. it learns ) only with more precision to predict future outcomes. It would have been previously impossible to manage such large data sets and vast number of variables that impact an outcome but the demand for this information has driven the innovation of technology to overcome these obstacles. It is clear that decision makers in virtually every industry are recognizing the value of data based decision making and prediction of future events. The quality of the prediction is based greatly on the availability of information, the more information available and the more variables that are able to be considered, the more accurate the prediction, it is in this way that the technological explosion has significantly brought this field to the forefront.

The new applications that "super crunching" is being used to influence is immense. It is of special interest that these data analysis techniques are being used on both the supply and demand side of the equation putting more information than ever before in the hands of both producers and consumers. Super crunching does have the potential to produce an information gap between those who have the data, technology and knowledge to use it and those who do not. This information can be used to enhance an experience, interchange or transaction or alternately provide one party a distinct advantage