This is very cool. I work with information visualization/visual analytics, which provides some very powerful analysis tools to handle situations where you have to make decisions based on heavily multi-dimensional data.<p>This research hasn't been as heavily applied in practice as it could be, but it's obvious that it has huge potential. This article is a textbook example of what sorts of situations these analysis techniques are good for. (Except that there are no textbooks on this yet, but that's a minor detail). The major point is that these techniques will show you trends and correlations, which is usually enough information in real life. People will yell "correlation does not equal causation" all day, but often correlation is enough to be able to conduct a closer investigation in the right place or ask the right follow-up questions.