Without in any way belittling or demeaning those that struggle daily with substance abuse issues, I feel that I have to start this post with an Alcoholics Anonymous type confession - I was once a Pedigree Analyst. As a preface, this is a bit more of a personal post, so if you were hoping (expecting) something of a more technical nature, feel free to move on. For those that are happy to indulge, I was one of 'those guys' who believed that the pedigree held the answer, and by a

Popular Science, an online magazine dedicated to new technology and science has a series of articles online regarding the use of data and in particular data mining to make informed decisions. One of the more interesting articles was about the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power, who uses both real data (race form, pedigree, etc) to make informed decisions about how to frame a market for a race, and also crowd sourcing information and betting patterns to make alterations to the market