Quotes About Data

Más que la tierra o el dinero, más que la cuna. Información. Eso es lo que importa.

The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it's easier said than done. Far easier.

It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.

psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means.

This is called data mining." She said the last words in English. "Which of us is the canary?

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought.

Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they're collecting the data, and they don't realize they're cooking the books.

The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits.

The three main observactions - (1) the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize; (2) it's now within reach economically; (3) all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market - seemed indisputable, especially baked up with heretofore unseen data.

Multiplexing is the process of sending multiple data streams simultaneously over a single channel. The data is then "demultiplexed" once it's crossed the channel.

A distinctive property of functional data structures is that they are always persistent—updating a functional data structure does not destroy the existing version, but rather creates a new version that coexists with the old one. Persistence is achieved by copying the affected nodes of a data structure and making all changes in the copy rather than in the original.

genealogy companies have quietly and steadily expanded to become some of the biggest data organizations of the twenty-first century.

Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format.

Today's temperatures are about the same as in the 1930s and cooler than a thousand years ago.

[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.

Science is facts.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Statistics are no substitue for judgement.

their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Kurt Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game Civilization III into

The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future.

while hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that builds wisdom.

sample size. Sample sizes can be calculated not only for randomized trials but

stratification is developed and used throughout the book. This strategy has three elements: First, as often as possible, I place data in a historical and cross-national context. This information leads to important questions. For example, if the rate of poverty has fallen

You're cramming a few chance data points into a story that has nothing to do with reality. You need to take a giant step back. Take a deep breath. You're way off the reservation." Nobody