Quotes About Data

Google is famous for making the tiniest changes to pixel locations based on the data it accrues through its tests. Google will always choose a spartan webpage that converts over a beautiful page that doesn't have the data to back it up.

No one thinks of the lab-testing experience as positive. It should be! One way to create that is to help people engage with the data once their physicians release it. You can't do that if you don't really understand why you're getting certain tests done and when you don't know what the results mean when you get them back.

Big data has been used by human beings for a long time - just in bricks-and-mortar applications. Insurance and standardized tests are both examples of big data from before the Internet.

Watson augments human decision-making because it isn't governed by human boundaries. It draws together all this information and forms hypotheses, millions of them, and then tests them with all the data it can find. It learns over time what data is reliable, and that's part of its learning process.

A wiretap allows government agents to collect, listen to, read, rifle through and store emails, snail mail, phone calls, text messages, photographs, bank records - you name it.

Most of my life's information is public. I got a text one day from a hacker who texted me all of my credit card information.

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers - and not to tell you about it.

If I see something that seems out of sync with what's already known, the first thing I do is try to find out what's wrong with the data. Once you've done that, and it still seems wrong, that's when things get interesting. It means you've found something new to understand.

No entity in the history of the world has collected more information about you than Google. My office wants to know what exactly Google does with all of the information it's gathering.

If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA.

The problem with Google is you have 360 degrees of omnidirectional information on a linear basis, but the algorithms for irony and ambiguity are not there. And those are the algorithms of wisdom.

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

Banks and credit agencies learn continuously about the purchases we make. This is convenient and diminishes the risk of theft. It also means that banks can know more about our lifestyle than our close relatives.

We all have legitimate concerns over the way our personal data is used and stored and it is right that there are protections to stop the theft and manipulation of our private information.

If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly.

my favorite urban flower, the baseball box score

The 2012 Ibbotson® Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation® Classic Yearbook, published by Morningstar, Inc., is one of the best sources of up-to-date information regarding the performance of various U.S. capital market investment alternatives. The data cover the period from 1926 to the present.

The right data delivered at the right time represents a valuable source of feedback, the kind that doesn't lie!

And when they found our shadows Grouped around the TV sets They ran down every lead They repeated every test They checked out all the data on their lists And then the alien anthropologists Admitted they were still perplexed But on eliminating every other reason For our sad demise They logged the only explanation left This species has amused itself to death

No doubt about it: numbers are the future. The world's been learning to count since the days of chivalry ended and it's only going to get worse. We're about to witness the end of everything that isn't quantifiable—honor, for example.

We also hear of internet corporations cooperating readily in mass surveillance and receiving payments for turning over information to the government.

Police departments no longer have to pay overtime or divert resources from other projects to find out where an individual goes - all they have to do is place a tracking device on someone's car or ask a cell phone company for that individual's location history and the technology does the work for them.

Maandag stierf hij, 102 jaar oud: Ronald Coase, de man die zijn afkeer van de wiskundige modellen in de economie aldus formuleerde: 'Als je de gegevens maar lang genoeg martelt, zullen ze toegeven'.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.