Only in America can a whole generation of bright, young minds be swayed so much by entertainment television when it comes to one of the most important decisions in their burgeoning adulthood: choosing a college major.

The TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” debuted in 2000 and by 2002 was the most watched show. By 2003, forensic science and criminal justice became the hottest majors on college campuses. Suddenly, chemistry was cool. There were waiting lists for forensic science courses and educators were scrambling to developing programs in the science of crime fighting.

In four years, enrollment in Baylor University's forensic science program grew nearly tenfold. Graduate programs were created at the University of California at Davis and Duquesne University. No matter that most states or municipalities didn’t and still don’t have the money to pay these new graduates and provide jobs.

I believe history is about to repeat itself, with one important exception: There will be jobs. Telecom jobs.

This time, students will imagine themselves not in lab coats looking at blood splatter patterns and solving murders, but at the blackboard in jeans, disheveled and unshaven and obsessed with the formulas before them, desperately seeking patterns and fighting not mere criminals, but terrorists. The best and brightest of our algorithmic upstarts will be identifying terror cells and finding weapons caches through the magic of numbers and social network analysis. The other 98 percent will start in the minor leagues — using SNA for marketing purposes with their local phone company perhaps. But hey, it’s a job, which is more than all those CSI wannabes can say.

We have already seen the popularity of television shows like Numb3rs, in which a math whiz fights crime. But all the hype this fall season will be on AMC’s Rubicon (debut on August 1) in which the hero searches for hidden patterns in the ocean of information from newspapers, television and the Internet. If it succeeds, our universities better prepare to get what they’ve been asking for: American students interested in math. Hopelessly paranoid students looking for patterns everywhere, but interested in math nonetheless.

The first sign, or hidden pattern, that this new show will be a success is that the lead actor has three names: James Badge Dale. After all, remember who got the whole vampire craze started years ago with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sarah Michelle Gellar. And two original CSI cast members had three names: Robert David Hall and Lauren Lee Smith.

Spooky.

That we take our career cues from television is disturbing, but on the bright side, it will be good for telecom. It is probably naive to think that telecom is leaps and bounds ahead of the national intelligence community when it comes to SNA. But we have our share of companies with more than passable solutions that can identify a social network of users and find the influencers in it: AperioCI, Cognitive Box, IBM, Idiro, SAS to name a few.

The jury is still out on the technology, but it is too interesting and potentially useful to give up on. Gartner recently tried to categories the players within a social network in order to better understand their propensities, and the companies mentioned above are doing it by applying algorithms to real-time billing and network data.

An article in the July 17 issue of ScienceNews, called “Safety in Numbers,” by Laura Sanders, describes how mathematics is becoming the latest tool to chase evildoers, identify and disrupt their terror organizations, uncover hidden rules that govern their behavior, find weapons caches and potentially predict the future.

Spookier.

All we want to do in telecom is know what people want based on their behavior and give it to them. Terrorists are trying not to be found; consumers don’t even realize anyone is looking for them. So it should be easy. SNA providers have already discovered things that national security folks are just working out, such as what an interstitial member of a social network is and why they’re important. They know how to find the influencer in a group. But both the vendors in our world and the braniacs in the intelligence community have the same problem. They are having a hard time convincing the potential users of the weapons of war and marketing that they work. In other words — nobody’s buying. Or if they are, nobody’s talking.

As thousands of graduates pour out of our universities in four or five years with degrees in mathematics and a passion to be like their TV heroes and do social network analysis, that may all change.

There is one other potential problem with SNA — and it’s inherent. We are a pattern seeking species. It’s part of our nature as humans and one of the foundations of our intelligence, such as it is. The problem is, we’re also a wishful species and we tend to find whatever patterns we’re looking for, whether they are there or not. And when we look for patterns, we tend to miss others that are obvious. It is hard to argue with the math. So identifying patterns with real data is critical to the success of SNA, because left to our imaginations, we can see faces on Mars and religious icons in grilled cheese sandwiches.  
 
So I hope we teach our children well.

A great example of our pattern-seeking problem can be found in this short video by Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer. I think you’ll enjoy it:

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com or click on the comment button below and know that your click and what you order for lunch today using your iPhone are likely going into a huge database where people are looking for patterns about you. What pattern are you?