Quotes About Data

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.

If we continue to assume that we are parts of the physical world and that the evolutionary process that brought us into existence is part of its history, then something must be added to the physical conception of the natural order that allows us to explain how it can give rise to organisms that are more than physical. The resources of physical science are not adequate for this purpose, because those resources were developed to account for data of a completely different kind.

Stated simply, an Excel spreadsheet, or more likely a proliferation of these spreadsheets, is ill-suited for the longer-term data management and analysis required by Six Sigma teams.

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

There's no question: the finance market is moving into the cloud.

We are moving closer to a future where quantified lives will become the norm.

A lot of the data we collect is stuff that has to be analyzed on the ground. For instance, we can't see, you know, bone loss. Our cells, you know, that's something that we'll have to notice with imaging technology when I get back.

My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.

I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.

I think my numbers speak for themselves.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

I don't think anyone would object to Facebook selling ads or having ads directed at me, as long as people didn't think those ads were manipulated by personal data.

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

The aim of these gatherings is to acquaint you with the factology of facts. One has to know whether one is dealing with the essential or the circumferential fact. Historical data, after all, tend to be not particularly factual and subject to revision by later researchers. You must look to start, therefore, with the fact that cannot be smashed into sub-particles of fact.

Compassion is what you're good at. I'm better at complex searches through organized data structures.

We don't use the word 'intelligence' with software. We regard that as a naive idea. We say that it's 'complex.' Which means that we don't always understand what it's doing.

You guessed it! And you say you aren't creative! We did not guess anythiung. We deduced it from the plethora of data you provided us, both consciously and unconsciously. And yet you couldn't detect the irony in my enthusiasm. We detected it. As information, however, it was worthless.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we're putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now.

The plural of anecdote isn't fact.

by the time the datapocalypse is obvious even to people whose paychecks depended on denying it, it would be too