Now is the hour of the geeks and nerds

OPINION: ASKED when he first discovered that he was a nerd, Ben Nugent, a self-proclaimed dork and author of a book about geeks and nerds, says: "I think when people started throwing stones at me and shouting, 'Hey, nerd,' when I was around age 7 or 8."

We've all seen geeks and nerds in American movie and TV comedies - spotty youths in thick glasses, Fair Isle jerseys, too-short, too-tight pants, awkward objects of scorn. Since Dr Seuss coined the word "nerd" in a children's poem in 1952, language mavens and psychologists have struggled with the concept of nerdism.

Nugent writes that nerds favour the practical over stylish, and they're not very good at reading between the lines. "You're talking about a love of rules and systems, someone who likes to think logically more than they like to think intuitively. Nerds tend to speak in full sentences and very explicitly. They read manuals for equipment they don't even own." He says geeks are at least self-aware. Nerds are not.

Nerdism is one end of a spectrum that merges into Asperger's syndrome and ultimately into autism. Exploiting this, Danish entrepreneur Thorkil Sonne employs autistic people to perform nerdish work. He finds some jobs need workers with a preternatural capacity for concentration and near- total recall. He says autistic people "have excellent memory and strong attention to detail. They are persistent and good at following structures and routines. In other words, they're born software engineers".

Since 2004, Sonne has run an IT consultancy that hires out mainly people with autism-like disorders. After a five-month training course, its 60-odd nerds get jobs with the likes of Microsoft or Cisco, ferreting out software errors or keeping track of fibre-optic networks. Sonne says that, once on the job, his nerds stay focused beyond the point when most minds go numb. As a result, they make far fewer mistakes.

Similar agencies exist in Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium, and more are planned for Iceland and Scotland. New Zealand next?

American psychologist David Anderegg, author of Nerd: Who They Are and Why We Need More reports that quite a few of his clinic clients are nerdy victims of schoolyard taunts. He thinks it is scandalous that Americans should ridicule swots on whom the country depends yet glorify gormless sporting heroes.

Time was when nerds were pathetic, hapless creatures on the sidelines of society. These days, says Nugent, they're everywhere. They're mainstream and "normalised". We couldn't get along without them.

The internet, Xboxes, BlackBerrys and iPods have united the nerds and geeks into a far-flung cyber culture. They enjoy their own language, dating and dancing clubs, movies and Valentine cards. At more stratospheric levels, they are among the most successful, powerful and richest people on Earth. Nerds and geeks Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell are among the eight wealthiest men in the United States, and Apple's Steve Jobs is not far behind.