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Stephen Baker investigates how our computer footprints are being used to predict our behavior

Sunday, September 21, 2008, JOHN STRAWN, The Oregonian

In the era of ubiquitous computers, according to Stephen Baker, we've become inadvertent electronic Hansels and Gretels, dribbling virtual breadcrumbs along the digital highway as we go about our daily tasks. Scientists and mathematicians who ponder this digital debris looking for patterns that will help identify our true desires and needs as consumers, voters or patients are members of what Baker, a Business Week reporter, calls the Numerati.

"The Numerati" is a kind of travelogue, a report from the shadowy regions where data mining, the search for new algorithms and the divination for the hidden meanings disclosed by our choices animates a type of research that was impossible to imagine before the computer, and its ceaseless compilation of data, came to rule not just commerce but the ordinary exchanges of our daily life.

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