Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I read a blurb on this book in the Economist and bought it for that reason. When I read it however, it failed to deliver. It is similar to the Tom Peter's "Search of Excellence" type book with anecdotal stories with little substance. It is overgeneralized and overhypes the models it discusses. The models Ayres discusses are also NOT NEW. I personnally have been creating these types of system for nearly 30 years. What has changed over the years, of course, is greater accessibility of data and a greater capacity to process that data economically. But we still struggle with quality of data issues and appropriateness of model issues -- especially when the models begin to be used by people other than the model creators. The book glosses over this, only providing an example of how Choicepoint used a poor matching algorithm when eliminating felons from Florida's voting roles and even then the author minimizes the problem. There is no discussion of how these models become abused when implemented as tools where the user of the tool has no knowledge of its limitations, when the model provides suboptimal solutions or what "outliers" are and how to deal with them (although you know immediately when you ARE the outlier and are trapped dealing with a company using a model designed for a population you don't belong to). This leads us to becoming a nation of people who read off a screen and do what the computer says to do, while turning off our brain. Any wonder you can get outsourced in that scenario? But it must be right -- we Super Crunched it!