Quotes About Data

A further subtlety of a histogram which distinguishes it from the bar chart is that the widths of its bars (which correspond to the class intervals) need not all be the same.

Stemplots, sometimes called 'stem-and-leaf' diagrams, can often be used as an alternative to histograms for representing numerical data.

Scattergraphs (sometimes known as scatterplots or scatter diagrams) are useful for representing paired data in such a way that you can more easily investigate a possible relationship between the two things being measured.

Geordi liked to call Data's subdominant hemisphere—the part of his brain that was organic, the part of his personality that let him be subjective.

Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, reckons that free search via Google is worth $150 billion a year to users; of course he would say that, but his calculations seem reasonable. The economist Michael Mandel has estimated that "data" or information needs to be added as a third category to the traditional distinction between goods and services.

Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does.

If every time new data comes along we have to add complexity to our model in order to accommodate it, this should be a hint that the model is fundamentally a failure. It becomes a blob of 'silly putty' that is malleable enough to fit any new data. This sort of model is not a proper basis for a hypothesis; it is merely a blank check to claim we understand something when we really do not.

companies often create complex prioritization algorithms that produce precise priorities based on very imprecise input data.

a system of postulates, mathematical relationships, data, and inferences that form a basis for describing a scientific process or sequence of events. These models need to be tested against new observations to see how well they hold up. That's a big part of the scientific method.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Everybody hunches at workstations now. On the other hand, anybody with engineering chops is guaranteed promotion down below. Plus, such damned souls as we get now have to do data entry.

Statistics cannot substitute for the human being before you; statistics embody averages, not individuals.

It's worth noting that IBM's program, named Watson, had access to 200 million pages of content consuming four terabytes of memory.

In situations where there are no real feasible solutions to a problem, the gathering and publication of performance data serves as a form of virtue signaling. There is no real progress to show, but the effort demonstrated in gathering and publicizing the data satisfies a sense of moral earnestness. In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success.

Metric fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data.

Nor, according to the Dutch experts, did the publication of metrics affect patient behavior in choosing a provider or hospital. Their conclusion: "The small body of evidence available provides no consistent evidence that the public release of performance data changes consumer behavior or improves care.

The phenomenon of risk-aversion means that some patients whose lives might be saved by a risky operation are simply never operated upon. But there is also the reverse problem, that of overly aggressive care to meet metric targets. Patients whose operations are not successful may be kept alive for the requisite thirty days to improve their hospital's mortality data, a prolongation that is both costly and inhumane.

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits.

metric fixation has elements of a cult. Studies that demonstrate its lack of effectiveness are either ignored, or met with the assertion that what is needed is more data and better measurement.

We took 350 billion snaps in 2011 and an astonishing 1.5 trillion in 2013—more than all the photos ever taken before in all of history.

What consumers have to understand is that "free" services on the Internet are never really free. As Reputation.com's CEO Michael Fortik told me, the business models of supposedly free social networks like Facebook is the sale of our information to their advertisers. We, the producers of data on the free network, are its product rather than its friend or partner.

Bayesian statistics?

We found a way to compare the pollution in earwax from different cities.