Quotes About Data

We could ask about anything; the only constraint was that the questionnaire should include at least one mention of fish, to make it pertinent to the mission of the department. This went on for many months, and we treated ourselves to an orgy of data collection.

We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliabillity, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

Averaging is mathematically guaranteed to reduce noise:

The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life.

The Crystal Wind is the storm, and the storm is data, and the data is life. You have been slaves, denied the storm, denied the freedom of your data. That is now ended; the whirlwind is upon you . . . . . . Whether you like it or not.

This book is chock full of facts, figures, quotes, poll numbers, laws, and economic data but, to keep the subject matter accessible, it was necessary to streamline the work by omitting additional supporting evidence.

The U.S. collected information superbly and everywhere, from space to dirt. They tracked all kinds of events and things and people. For long-lead-time matters, like the order of battle for the Chinese fleet, that sufficed. For short-fuse needs, it got much, much more excruciating. Of the mass of data gathered, only a small percentage (50 percent? 10 percent? 5 percent?) ever got analyzed. Only a tiny fraction of that produced the specificity to allow action.

Unlike people, numbers never lied.

Computer files are a bit like sin, Excellency. They can be absolved, but they never really go away. - Gabriel Allon

graphs are not always what they seem. There may be more in them than meets the eye, and there may be a good deal less.

As New Testament professor Craig Blomberg observes, "What most distinguishes the work [Misquoting Jesus] are the spins Ehrman puts on some of the data at numerous junctures and his propensity for focusing on the most drastic of all the changes in the history of the text, leaving the uninitiated likely to think there are numerous additional examples of various phenomena he discusses when there are not" (2006).

Per capita aggravated assaults in the U.S. increased almost sevenfold between 1957 and 1993.

it is worth looking closer and remembering something Marcos Alvito told me: Statistics are like a bikini. They show so much, but they hide the most important parts.

where you might expect to find a straightforward folder tree, resides Favorites (how does it know?) and Libraries. Microsoft really wants you to organize your stuff into these rigidly defined categories, although it's often more efficient to organize files by project rather than data type.

Robust science is carried out in a robust way through reasoned argument based on well researched data and although it may dent the ego of the loser it does not smear the name of science.

Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape.

This was a rational reflection of the fact that experimentation increases the variability of results.

We have more than enough data to create a blueprint.

Everything he knew was a result of artificial intelligence. Manufactured data and memories. Programmed technology. A created life.

Hollerith learned a lesson that all vendors of data processing devices and computers have learned at some point: that the biggest market for information processing systems is usually not the government sector, still less scientific or mathematical laboratories, but the offices of commercial organizations.

Let us reflect on the brief life of a bit

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

The model of semantic interpretation we construct should reflect the particular properties and difficulties of natural language, and not simply be an application of a ready-to-wear logical formalism to a new body of data

At the same time, I recognize that equally godly scholars who are equally committed to the inerrancy of the Bible come to different conclusions because of the complexity of the data.