Quotes About Data

if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything

Table 2.1. Percentage saying "Most people can be trusted" Cultural Zone % N Protestant Europe 61 (20,530) Confucian 46 (7,736) English-speaking 42 (10,533) Baltic 31 (4,147) Catholic Europe 28 (22,284) South Asia 25 (10,646) Orthodox 19 (21,321) Islamic 18 (28,990) Sub-Saharan Africa 15 (16,865) Latin America 11 (17,177) Total (160,229) Source: Latest available survey for each country in the Values Surveys. Weber predicted

Why wait passively for the next terrorist attack--or a nuclear missile launched by a rogue state, or a cyberattack emanating from China or from a group of disaffected Estonian teens-- when we could be eliminating the root causes of conflict by fostering economic development and good governance, building relationships, creating networks of agents and allies, collecting data, promoting "new narratives," or striking potential future enemies before they can develop the ability to harm us?

the great de-Kindling, which started when people realized their e-readers were collecting data on their reading habits, like what page they stopped on. Jackie thinks people miss turning real pages. Gruen says it's note taking, marking up the books, that people miss.

Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being -- their simple promise -- catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we're well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

are many studies that say they can't find a statistically significant effect of some policy change," Hoxby says. "That doesn't mean that there wasn't an effect. It just means that they couldn't find it in the data. In this study, I

If you get too caught up in the product of information, you drown in the data. [...] The big giant is tied down by those little rules and regulations and procedures. And the little guy? He just runs around and does what he wants.

presenting long rows of data arrayed in complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they themselves were talking instead about the mysterious and

The unobservables create noise, not signal.

The information age has created a stickiness problem.

no argument in the book has resonated more with readers than this one. We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we're well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences where their peers were presenting long rows of data arrayed in

Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make difference.

What apps used by your line function are mission-critical? Which way should the balance between security and user convenience tilt for each of them? ? What data is the most sensitive? What would be the consequence if it were (a) stolen or (b) destroyed? ? How long will your firm avoid permanent damage if your entire IT portfolio became unavailable? This justifies the ongoing costs of the type—cold, warm, or hot—of backup site.

The reasons for the failure of the Leninist economic model have been studied thoroughly and in the case of North Korea they were essentially the same as elsewhere: distorted price information, lack of incentives for innovation and quality improvement, and an ingrained inability to handle data efficiently.

All programs transform data, converting an input into an output. And yet when we think about design, we rarely think about creating transformations. Instead we worry about classes and modules, data structures and algorithms, languages and frameworks.

EVERY PIECE OF KNOWLEDGE MUST HAVE A SINGLE, UNAMBIGUOUS, AUTHORITATIVE REPRESENTATION WITHIN A SYSTEM.

If you use plain text to create synthetic data to drive system tests, then it is a simple matter to add, update, or modify the test data without having to create any special tools to do so. Similarly, plain text output from regression tests can be trivially analyzed (with diff, for instance) or subjected to more thorough scrutiny with Perl, Python, or some other scripting tool.

The actual history of interracial rape - according to FBI statistics - is that, since the 70's, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by black men. (The Department of Justice uses 0 to denote fewer than ten victims.

These data are unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance.

I believe Uncle's intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.

If you mine the data hard enough, you can also find messages from God. [Dogbert]

Other than when dealing with exception-unsafe legacy code (which we'll discuss later in this Item), offering no exception safety guarantee should be an option only if your crack team of requirements analysts has identified a need for your application to leak resources and run with corrupt data structures. As