Outliers

Outliers: the Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell seemed to me to be an extension of Freakonomics by Steven Leavitt. I admit it would be hard to find a pattern around outliers, but by finding the similarity of successful people such as their birth year, number of hours worked etc. it seems that the work could be a result of the increased use data mining. Or my conclusion may be the result of my reading of the Numerati by Stephen Baker who talks about massive amounts of data and how it wil be used to splice and dice us into our own individualized niche.