Quotes About Data

We can say, "if you want government money, you have to make this data public - you have to share it."

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.

Information is the most valuable commodity on the surface of the earth.

Computers are no more able to create information than iPods are capable of creating music.

IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected.

…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.

Numbers and more numbers...the future of mankind has come down to decimals. I guess you will figure that out, eventually.

Programmers have a saying: "garbage in, garbage out.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.

Marketing is becoming a battle based on information than on sales power.

Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

thermometer n. digital fever computer

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn't as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy

Do not trust historical data—especially recent data—to estimate the future returns of stocks and bonds. Instead, rely on interest and dividend payouts and their growth/failure rates.

If you want to convince someone, target their System 1 with narrative, not their System 2 with facts and data.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

Tellingly, Ralf has revealed himself as an Internet sceptic. One suspects he thinks the World Wide Web has made things too easy for people, certainly too easy to 'pollute' the world with the meaningless and the inconsequential. 'I am not a fan of the Internet, I think it's overrated. Intelligent information is still intelligent information and an overflow of nonsense does not really help. In Germany it's called Datenmüll: data rubbish.

Statistics can easily fool us if used incorrectly, or if we fail to take in the whole picture of what's going on. The situation is even worse when data are presented in a way that's deliberately misleading – as often happens in advertising and politics. Without resorting to outright lies, there are plenty of ways to distort data to create a false impression.

There's evidence, too, that being good at maths is tied to a more general capacity to spot hidden structures in data. This could explain why it's common to find people who excel at both maths and music, and why training at chess can help improve maths scores – both music and chess have complex data structures at their heart.

We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,* and hence fallible, as all our theories are. Consider