Quotes About Data

ChoicePoint is a private intelligence agency. Several years

ThinThread, a pilot program developed by the NSA in the late 1990s, would have enabled the NSA to collect, analyze, and secure massive quantities of communications data while protecting personal privacy in the process. ThinThread combined four advanced

License plate readers—which collect upwards of 1,800 images per hour—can identify the owner of any car that comes within its sights. (Illustration by Molly Zisk, courtesy of The Register)

Unknown to most Americans, nearly one-third of all vehicles on the road today (and 64 percent of the 2005 models) contain small chips and sensors known as event-data recorders (EDRs) that can retain up to 20 seconds of data prior to an accident. This information includes speed, braking, acceleration, and seat belt usage in cars.31

By mindfully considering data not as stable commodities but as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant.

Most personal computers use two types of disk drives as their secondary storage devices-hard drives and optical drives. Hard disks are attached to their disk drives and are coated with a magnetic material. Each data bit is a magnetized spot on the disk, and the spots are arranged in concentric circles called tracks. The disk drive read/write head accesses data by moving across the spinning disk to the correct track and then sensing the spots as they move by.

You are all pulling light, which is data and information, onto the planet, and as you do this you create new pathways for consciousness to explore without even saying a word.

In the twenty-first century, people threw off data like dead skin cells.

lawmakers reacted to the report by cutting off the funds to continue the testing of students so nobody would know if there was any improvement. This even turns free marketism on its head: Create an expensive government program with taxpayer money, and when the data suggests the program isn't working, hide the data and make sure consumers

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

It would be ideal if we could have an uncontrolled flow of information. But we realized you can't do that.

It's a physical thing that can grab a hold of data and literally rearrange our lives by changing the direction you take your car in. This continuum is going to keep building on itself as we move forward into the future.

It is entirely reasonable to want to know how many citizens and non-citizens there are in the United States.

And never - not in a single case - was the explanation, 'I was pressured to do this.' The explanation was very often, 'The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it.'

An Internet service provider reasonably needs to know your name and address. But it's hard to imagine why a provider would need to collect your Internet browsing habits other than to sell your data.

In recent years, the government has lost more than five million fingerprints from government employees. They have lost hundreds of millions of credit numbers from financial institutions. This problem is happening more and more and more. And the only way we can protect ourselves is to make phones more and more secure.

I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions.

The Facebook way is that you sit at the table and you state your opinion, back it up with data, and make a recommendation.

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.

The government is keeping detailed records on how many Americans have carports. How many Americans have mold in their bathroom.

But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.

We're all drowning in data. We all need moments of recovery. For me, that includes not going right to my phone when I wake up in the morning.

In general, certain conclusions are possible from these data. They fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.

Catalyzed by the Recovery Act, adoption of electronic health records is increasing dramatically.