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Super Crunchers
Ian Ayres
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I saw Super Crunchers at the library, and I decided to pick it up because I'm kind of on a sociology/statistics kick lately.
Super Crunchers is about how you can use data to come up with interesting conclusions, like there's a part in the book where they talk about how doctors, for example, have a difficult time knowing about every disease that could possibly happen in the world, but if they can plug the data of the symptoms a person is having into a database, then the computer could super crunch that information and say, "Well, if you've got this and this and this and this symptom, it's likely you could have one of these 20 diseases," and the doctor then makes the choice between which of these diseases is most likely.
The most interesting thing about this book was that he really had practical applications for this stuff in almost every field, and one of the things that author said that I thought was kind of interesting was that everybody would be kind of unhappy to hear about how it's going to work in their field because everybody thinks that they have their own intuition about what's best, and I thought, "Yeah, maybe, I don't know." But then when he started talking about my field, teaching, I really was just as, "Humph! No, that doesn't sound right!"
I found the information to be accessible, and I don't have a real mathy background. You know, the nonfiction genre can get kind of snoozy after awhile. It's a good thing to read if you're really awake and can pay attention; if you're tired and falling asleep at night, it might not be the book of choice.
I would recommend this book to almost anyone, anyone that has an interest in sociology or social patterns.
I would give this book four and a half stars out of five.
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