Top Highlights

• Just for fun, Garth Sundem, in his book Geek Logik, used a regression to create a formula to predict how long celebrity marriages will last.
• the modern tests are much closer to eHarmony’s questionnaire in trying to evaluate three underlying personality traits of the applicants: their conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extroversion. Data mining shows that these personality traits are better predictors of worker productivity (especially turnover) than more traditional ability testing.
• Now firms sometimes know more about consumers than the consumers know about themselves.
• He created Farecast.com, a travel website that lets you search for the lowest current fare. Farecast goes further than other fare-search sites; it adds an arrow that simply points up or down telling you which way Farecast predicts fares are headed.
• Google’s web accelerator is continually pre-picking web pages from the net. So while you’re reading the first page of an article, it’s already downloading pages two and three. And even before you fire up your browser tomorrow morning, simple data mining helps Google predict what sites you’re going to want to look at