Mathematical Modeling Used To Track and Label

Anti-Globalism writes to tell us that in a new book titled The Numerati, author Stephen Baker introduces us to some of the math wizardry that is used to label or track our movements through purchases, phone calls, internet usage and other habits. "One of the most promising laboratories for the Numerati is the workplace, where every keystroke, click, and e-mail can be studied. In a chapter called "The Worker," Baker travels to IBM, where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt: 'Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management.'"

Comments

#6 degrees of separation in the Global Village

[drjzzz]

...turning IBM's workers into numbers.

"I am not a number - I am a free man!"
The Prisoner of work's modern dilemma

Re:Not a chance.

[russotto]

As a non-manager, I can tell you the most important job of management is to deal with the unquantifiable: engineers need to feel unique and usefull

Then why does management so often go out of their way to indicate that they think engineers are interchangable human resources?