The Hindu Business Line : Analytical competition will be something of an arms race

When the usual business edges go blunt move up to the high end of business intelligence with Competing on Analytics. But `guard against intellectual nonsense masquerading as science,' as Oracles of Science cautions. And get to massaging atoms in Programming the Universe. Varied dimensions of science, through three fascinating books.

Harrah's Entertainment: Founded more than 60 years ago, and now "the world's largest provider of branded casino entertainment," with revenues close to $10 billion, informs www.harrahs.com. Its customers use loyalty cards that capture data on their behaviour.

"The data is used in near real-time by both marketing and operations to optimise yield, set prices for slots and hotel rooms, and design the optimal traffic flow through the casinos."

To know how the system works, let us go up to a slot machine where a customer is losing `too much money too fast'. Harrah's computers are watching the tragedy, so the system immediately sends a message to the customer, saying, for example: "Looks like you're having a tough day at the slots. It might be a good time to visit the buffet. Here's a $20 coupon you can use in the next hour." If someone were winning, he might get an SMS on his cell phone offering seats for a concert that night `at half the price'!

This is one of the many situations described in Competing on Analytics, by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris (www.landmarkonthenet.com). The Harvard Business School Press publication is on `the new science of winning', because the usual business edges have gone blunt and `the traditional bases of competitive advantage have largely evaporated'.

Enter, therefore, the world of `analytics': A word that refers to `the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions'.

Analytics are a subset of `business intelligence, a set of technologies and processes that use data to understand and analyse business performance,' say the authors. At the low end of `intelligence' is `access and reporting', which answers questions such as: `What happened; how many, how often, where; where exactly is the problem; and what actions are needed'. Analytics are at the high end, with a promise of greater competitive advantage, and the questions tackled at this level are: `Why is this happening; what if these trends continue; what will happen next; what's the best that can happen'.

Analytics are not for the timid, please note. You need to stay on the leading edge. "Analytical competition will be something of an arms race, requiring continual development of new measures, new algorithms, and new decision-making approaches."

In baseball, `perhaps the most analytical professional sport', they have been trying out new measures of player performance — "eschewing the traditional `runs batted in' or RBIs, and focussing on `on-base percentage' and `on-base plus slugging percentage'." Lessons for our ailing cricket?

The authors explain how Google augments its offerings with analytics, be it for search, or advertising. Google Analytics, a free service, educates Web publishers and advertisers `whether their efforts are working'.

Catalina Marketing is another player in the analytics services space. "The firm retrieves about 250 million transactions per week from more than 21,000 grocery stores. On behalf of these stores, Catalina manages one of the largest databases in the world, containing the purchase histories of over 100 million households."

A book that prepares you for the new `war', where the battle will be one between insights drawn from rapid computers crunching terabytes of data!

Unforced connections

Modern science is an enormously wonderful and powerful achievement of our species. Thus say Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas in Oracles of Science. The book speaks about six influential scientists — biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg.

Key ideas of each Oracle are presented in their own words, where you'd find nuggets of wisdom on matters other than science too. For instance, in `Time to stand up,' written as an immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, Dawkins says: "The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals."

Gould speaks of his `one lucky strength' — that of finding `legitimate and unforced connections among the disparate details'. He calls himself `an essay machine', and says: "A detail, by itself, is blind; a concept without a concrete illustration is empty."

Hawking recalls his meeting with the Pope in A Brief History of Time, and writes: "I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I felt a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!"

Sagan believes that discovering alien intelligence would be good news for our nuclear age. And that extraterrestrial path led to a deeper understanding of who we are.

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers... Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars."

Weinberg is famous for his declaring that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. He concedes, however, that the effort to understand the universe is `one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy'.

Wilson, a world authority on ants, proclaims that if religion, including the dogmatic secular ideologies, could be systematically analysed and explained as a product of the brain's evolution, its power as an external source of morality would be gone forever.

The final insight the book wraps with is that science is compatible with a broad cross-section of very different views on the deepest human problems.

"Modern science can be embraced by any religion, any culture, any tribe, and brought to bear on whatever problems are considered most urgent, whether it be tracing their origins, curing their diseases, or cleaning up their water."

Never fashion science into `a weapon for the promotion of an ideological agenda', advise the authors. "We must be on guard against intellectual nonsense masquerading as science."

Valuable collection.

Atoms are easy to talk to

"Think of me as a kind of atomic masseur," suggests Seth Lloyd in Programming the Universe. "As a professor of quantum-mechanical engineering at MIT, my job is to massage electrons, photons, atoms, and molecules into those special states in which they become quantum computers and quantum communication systems," he writes.

Atoms are tiny but strong, resilient but sensitive, entices Lloyd. "They are easy to talk to (just hit the table and you've talked to billions upon billions of them) but hard to listen to (I bet you can't tell me what the table had to say beyond `thump'). They don't care about you, and they go about their business doing what they have always done. But if you massage them in just the right way, you can charm them. They will compute for you... "

Fascinating scientific reads for the week.

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