regression is a statistical procedure that takes raw historical data and estimates how various causal factors influence a single variable of interest.

On the one hand, this is a massive amount of information—it’s roughly equivalent to more than half the information contained in all the books in the Library of Congress.

Yahoo! currently records over twelve terabytes of data daily.

Indeed, because of Super Crunching, firms sometimes may be able to make more accurate predictions about how you’ll behave than you could ever make yourself.

it often becomes impossible to figure out how an individual input is affecting the predicted outcome.

Many times this Super Crunching revolution is a boon to consumers as it helps sellers and governments make better predictions about who needs what. At other times, however, consumers are playing against a statistically stacked deck.

Super Crunching moves us toward a kind of statistical predeterminism.

Autopsy studies show that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time.

In fact, because the algorithm is not public, it is possible that eHarmony puts a normative finger on the scale to favor certain clients.