Funny how old associations come up. About two weeks ago, I was up near Tysons Corner for an appointment. I was early so I dropped by the Borders across the street. As I was waiting for the cashier with my CD of bluesman John Lee Hooker, I noticed one of those stand-up photo advertisements. The face looked awfully familiar.
It was. It was Steve Baker, a BusinessWeek senior writer with whom I have worked off and on for 20 years. He was in Mexico City when I was in Moscow and later he was in Pittsburgh while I was in Cleveland. The latter association brought on occasional barroom discussions of rust belt economics and the many sins of our New York editors.
Steve’s done very well. The ad was for an excellent book he’s just published about “The Numerati,” a class of math experts who quietly orchestrate the massaging of the zillions of bits of data about us. We generate the stuff every time we use our cell phones or search Google, use a grocery loyalty card or whisk through a toll booth using a Smarttag.
Steve, who has specialized in technology reporting for more than a decade, draws intriguing portraits of the numbers class, many of whom are non-Americans from Syria, Pakistan, or France. How they use the tremendous cache of data about us will make a huge difference in our future lives.
Even in Virginia. In his section on politics, Steve zeroes in on how pollsters and campaign officials used and massaged data in the state gubernatorial race in 2005 to get money or reach out to undecided and critically important voters. How such data will be gathered and analyzed will be extremely important in the tight presidential race this year between Barack Obama and John McCain, especially in the Old Dominion, which is a swing state. Data management will probably be less important in the Mark Warner versus Jim Gilmore senatorial contest, as an outcome favorable to the Democrat seems preordained.
For more, please check out https://www.baconsrebellion.com/Issues08/09-08/Galuszka.php
Peter Galuszka