I am just finishing up a great book on data mining and business intelligence by Stephen Baker called The Numerati. The book is a fascinating read on how math and computer gurus are mining unimaginable amounts of electronic data to categorize and predict human behavior.

The book discusses how the data mining of personal information is being used by business and government to model and predict things like worker behavior; consumer behavior; voter preferences; blogger attitudes; terrorist characteristics; patient behavior and romantic interests.

Below is an interesting inverview with Stephen Baker on his book The Numerati, where he discusses the good and bad of data mining as well as other issues regarding the collection and use of personal information by computers for business intelligence, government intelligence and predictive modeling of human behavior.