Quotes About Data

But what feels like progress can prove to be poison if it leads managers to mistake the model of reality that active data offers for the real world.5 Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made.

As they exited the conference room, Summer tugged at Dirk's elbow. "So what did the data from Perlmutter cost you?" she chided, knowing the gourmet historian's penchant for culinary blackmail. "Nothing much. Just a jar of pickled sea urchins and an eighty-year-old bottle of sake." "You found those in Washington, D.C.?" Dirk gave his sister a pleading look of helplessness. "Well," she laughed, "we do have six more hours in port.

Numbers can't be racist, right? But the data can be dumb or wrong, though, and if you feed shit into the computer, it gives you shit right back.

There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

Never tell a computer to forget it.

Packets don't lie.

Sociologists have studied these questions as well. It turns out that there is a fundamental flaw in the data used to support the claim that we suffer from time poverty and overwork: we lie.

I have a computer screen near my seat where I monitor the overall health of the vehicle and pick up any problems that might be occurring early on or once we see any kind of a malfunction or anything unusual that's happening, we can look at the data and figure out what that is.

As a physician, I understand how important it is to collect data on people so we can understand what's happening with them. I will be in the position to help enable that knowledge.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.

Wherever you go online, the Big Computer knows what you want before you want it. It's ready for you and waits patiently, humming. It knows where you will be tomorrow and what you will be doing, and it carefully calibrates the shame you carry with you in hopes that you will buy something to restore your peace of mind.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

Only dead things can be reduced to a set of data. A civilization that sees the world as alive will learn to bring other kinds of information into its choices.

Another thing that cigarette smoking causes is statistics.

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

We proved these people were wrongly removed. this was a Jim Crow operation. Except instead of white sheets they used spreadsheets.

Roman history is like astronomy in that respect. New experiments cannot be carried out. But a vast mass of distant and ancient phenomena can be observed through tiny packets of residual data, and the forces and cataclysmic events that formed the observable universe can be reconstructed.

ALPR is?" she asked. "Automated license-plate recognition," Evan said, relieved to be back on familiar turf. "Police cruisers have sensors embedded in the light bars that scan the plates of all surrounding vehicles. They can swallow numbers eight lanes across on cars going in either direction up to eighty miles per hour.

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.

It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material.

The right half of the table shows you data from 2001 on spiral CT screening on more than five thousand volunteers, some of whom smoked, some of whom did not.13 This study measured the rate of lung cancer diagnosis in smokers and nonsmokers. What it shows you is that with the advent of spiral CT, nonsmokers have about the same risk of lung cancer as smokers. It sure looks like the use of spiral CT has made cigarette smoking much better for you.