Quotes About Data

Do you trust storytellers, or do you trust data; the ingenuity of artists or the wisdom of the crowd?

Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in each group. That feature, called Similarities, immediately yielded a noticeable uptick in sales and allowed Amazon to point customers toward books that they might not otherwise have found.

He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how "data overrules hierarchy" and there are "multiple paths to yes"—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.

They often quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's beloved Sherlock Holmes: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." "Myron?

Most people understand on some level that there are a lot of surveillance cameras out there, but very few people really get it. There are forty million surveillance cameras in the United States alone and the number keeps growing. You never go through a day without being recorded.

Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points. Everywhere, people rely on their cell phones, e-mail, and digital assistants in the race to gather and transmit data, plans, and ideas faster and faster. One could argue that the chief value of the modern era is speed, which the novelist Milan Kundera described as "the form of ecstasy that technology has bestowed upon modern man.

Chevron, for example, has a decision-analysis group whose members facilitate decision-framing workshops; coordinate data gathering for analysis; build and refine economic and analytical models; help project managers and decision makers interpret analyses; point out when additional information and analysis would improve a decision; conduct an assessment of decision quality; and coach decision makers.

Whenever I see a forecast written out to two decimal places, I cannot help but wonder if there is a misunderstanding of the limitations of the data, and an illusion of precision.

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.

Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them.

Unlike the on-air talents in the NFL where they have producers figuratively joined at their hip, providing them with info and tidbits of data, we WWE announcers are responsible for getting ourselves ready for every broadcast.

People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible.

Cyber security is a dynamic space. The user faces different challenges every year because there are always new applications and data.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

The work of Cambridge Analytica is not equivalent to traditional marketing. Cambridge Analytica specialized in disinformation, spreading rumors, kompromat, and propaganda.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

CloudShield did not see itself as a cloak-and-dagger company. It made its name for high-end hardware that could peer deeply into Internet traffic and pull out and analyze 'packets' of data as they flew by.

If I'm sitting around exulting over traffic data, I'm an idiot.

In 2011, mobile data traffic in the United States was eight times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. That's traffic.

You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are - the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.

Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people.

One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails.