"In 'The Numerati,' (Stephen) Baker offers a highly readable and fascinating account of the numbers-driven world we now live in," writes John Derbyshire, in the Wall Street Journal (9/15/08). That word is, as we know, inhabited by a motley mix of "marketers, politicians, employers, doctors, matchmakers or national-security analysts." And baseball managers. Political types mine "databases that track consumer and 'lifestyle' preferences, and sort us into tribes by behavioral proxy." Own a cat, do you? Hm, a likely liberal. Doctors can monitor their patients' vitals by following "data streams from sensors on clothing or even from sensor-laden 'magic carpets' laid around the house."

Marketers, when they're not talking, can listen to their shoppers by following bloggers. "What makes the blog world especially valuable to marketers," Stephen writes, is "its unfiltered immediacy." When they'd rather do the talking themselves, there's Google's data-driven Adsense service, which "will automatically place context-related ads on a blog page. The Numerati is, however, still trying to figure out how to deal with splogs -- which are fake blogs, filled with nothing but gibberish, but that nonetheless attract visitors and then entice them with ads. In the book, Stephen "gives a helpful sketch of the math involved, each blog reduced to a vector in a space of several dozen dimensions."

Using data patterns to break the backs of terrorists is, however, both more pressing and more daunting. Compounding this challenge is that "terrorists themselves are data-savvy and skillful exploiters of the internet ... Jihadists may want to take us back to the seventh century, but they are willing to detour through the 21st to get there," notes John Derbyshire, adding: "It doesn't help that our National Security Agency ... is restricted to hiring U.S. citizens and paying civil-service salaries while their competitors in recruitment -- Yahoo, Google, IBM Research -- can cast their net worldwide and engage in bidding wars for top talent." Then there's the matter of privacy, although Stephen Baker argues that while we are indeed the targets of the Numerati, we also benefit from their work. ~ Tim Manners, editor

Starwood is combining its "culture of creativity" with the discipline of Six Sigma, fostering innovations that last year "delivered more than $100 million in profits to its bottom line," reports Spencer E. Ante in BusinessWeek (10/8/07). "We have been driving our margin growth faster than our competitors ... When people ask why, I point to Six Sigma," says Geoffrey A. Ballotti, president of Starwood N.A. Starwood initiated the approach back in 2001, and has involved training "150 employees as 'black belts' and more than 2,700 'green belts' in the arts of Six Sigma." The "black belts" supervise projects, and "green belts" sweat the details.

However, the ideas for the projects themselves "come from in-house staff." For example, "after a study found that 34 percent of frequent travelers feel lonely away from home," Starwood's Westin Chicago River North hotel initiated a project called "Unwind." Its purpose was "to think up a set of nightly activities that would draw guests out of their rooms and into the lobby where they could mingle, develop a greater loyalty to the hotel group, and maybe spend a little more money." During a brainstorming session with Starwood's black- and green-belts, the hotel's fitness director came up with the idea of offering massages.

The Six Sigma team liked the idea and figured out how to make it work as efficiently as possible. Starwood knew the idea was working because it uses "a proprietary web-based system ... to monitor a slew of performance metrics to gauge the success or failure of a new project." The system "currently contains 3,000 to 4,000 items -- the "Unwind" program itself has spawned 120 ideas -- "one for each of Starwood's hotels, including traditional fire dancing in Fiji and Chinese watercolor painting in Beijing." Geoffrey Ballotti is very pleased with the team effort: "I probably will make 50 percent fewer mistakes than if I had rolled out a project myself, " he says. ~ Tim Manners, editor

To make sense of the "mind-numbing flow of data on the purchases" of its 13 million loyalty-card holders "across 55,000 product lines," Tesco's Dunnhumby "cooked up an algorithm called the rolling ball," reports The Economist (9/15/07). "It works by assigning attributes to each of the products on Tesco's shelves," ranging "from easy-to cook to value-for-money, from adventurous to fresh." The algorithm "starts at the extremes: ostrich-burgers, say, would count as very adventurous." The idea is to see which other products the "adventurous" ostrich-burger shopper buys and then draw associations between product attributes and shopping behavior.

The technique is called "the rolling ball" because "as the associations between products become progressively weaker on one dimension, they start to get stronger on another," and the "ball" rolls "from one attribute to another." Once every product is "categorized and graded across every attribute, Dunnhumby is able to segment and cluster Tesco's customers based on what they buy." The data are then used to make decisions such as which products to put in which stores, and "which products should sit next to each other on the shelves." It is also used to help Tesco "respond to each customer in a personalized way ... by using its analysis to tailor direct-marketing offers to each Clubcard member."

In addition to "segmenting its customers on how they live, the data also enable the supermarket rapidly to spot shifts in their consumption patterns ... Tesco's response rates to such targeted marketing stands at 10-20 percent, against an industry average of only around one percent." Despite the power of such numbers crunching, "human judgment still has a role," of course. In addition to its algorithms, Dunnhumby "is trying to overlay attitudinal research on top of purchasing data to understand why people buy things as well as what they buy." However, as one observer notes, given the crush of data, al gore rhythms "are bound to take over the world." ~ Tim Manners, editor

Rock 'n' roll isn't dead after all -- at least in Philadelphia where Arbitron's newfangled People Meter reveals that rock is actually more popular than hip-hop, reports Sarah McBride in The Wall Street Journal (9/6/07). The People Meter replaces paper diaries with "a pager-sized device that automatically registers what radio station survey participants are listening to" and is believed to be more accurate for various reasons. For one thing, its sample size is much larger, recording the habits of some 1,530 listeners versus just 380 for the old paper diaries. For another, the People Meter captures what people actually do rather than what they say they do.

It seems people flip through stations more than they think they do. It also appears that working people listen to more radio than the unemployed, thanks to all of that commuting time. That helps explain why rock stations do better in Philadelphia (and Houston, for that matter). It's because most of the work force in those cities are men. However, People Meter may be under-reporting younger listeners, "who often forget" to bring the device with them. There's also some concern that the People Meters may not be as good at capturing listening patterns among African-Americans.

Despite such issues, most stations are happy with the People Meter because they believe it will endear them to more advertisers and enable them to charge higher rates. "Radio is now on the same level playing field as top TV stations and the Philadelphia Inquirer," says John Fullam, whose classic rock station, WMGK, became the city's No. 2 radio station among 18-54 year-olds, up from No. 9. Also benefitting are Philadelphia Phillies baseball games, which the People Meter says attract weekly audiences of 744,500, compared to 412,300 as reported by paper diaries. Arbitron says its People Meters will arrive in "New York in October, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago early next year" and will cover "the top 10 markets" by the end of 2008. ~ Tim Manners, editor