Quotes About Data

contar historias que se basan en datos acumulados y no en anécdotas personales, anomalías llamativas, opiniones personales, estallidos emocionales o tendencias morales.

How can this type of data be made to tell a reliable story? By subjecting it to the economist's favorite trick: regression analysis. No, regression analysis is not some forgotten form of psychiatric treatment. It is a powerful—if limited—tool that uses statistical techniques to identify otherwise elusive correlations.

A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.

rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

Storytellers need their stories to resonate with their listeners. So when you envision a goal and describe the action needed to reach that goal, you transform your vision into a portrayal that depicts what's truly possible to move people to action. While you need enough material (data and reasoned analysis) to flesh out the tale, you don't want to bombard people with charts and tables.

The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, "Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!

Conventionally, a developer will create a piece of software, and once it's finished, expose a small part of its functionality to outside developers via the API. The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

You can't scrub everything," says Lorenzo. "Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.

Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)

Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.

Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time.

aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.

Though editors have told me that readers hate math and will never put up with numbers spoiling their stories and pictures, their own media belie this condescension. People avidly consume data in the weather, business, and sports pages, so why not the news?

I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

Historical data are scarce, not least because suicide, also called "self-murder," used to be a crime in many countries, including England until 1961.

I love that the world is data intensive … unfortunately, it's called 'Big Data.'

In the Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but on how much you believed it to begin with.

If you've ever run an experiment, you know scientific truth doesn't pop out of the clouds blowing a flaming trumpet at you. Data is messy, and inference is hard.

Nowadays, the Abrahamic argument—just look at everything, how could it all be so awesome if there weren't a designer behind it?—has been judged wanting, at least in most scientific circles. But then again, now we have microscopes and telescopes and computers. We are not restricted to gaping at the moon from our cribs. We have data, lots of data, and we have the tools to mess with it.