Quotes About Data

Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data.

Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games.

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.

All these subprime companies were calling and hollering at him: You're wrong. Your data's wrong. And he just hollered back at them, 'It's YOUR fucking data!

I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.

I was in a state of perpetual disbelief. I would have thought that someone would have recognized what was coming before June 2007. If it really took that June remit data to cause a sudden realization, well, it makes me wonder what a 'Wall Street analyst' really does all day." By

It was an open question as to which was more mysterious to a male NASA engineer: outer space or the American female. They appeared to have better data on outer space.

No one cares about data when everything is going well," said Josh Wills, the former chief data engineer at Slack, who agreed to help. "People only care about data when the shit hits the fan. 'Oh my God, what's going on??? We need data!

No one ever asked Friedberg the question: If my knowledge is no longer useful, who needs me? But it was a good question. "There is stuff the farmer picks up on that we haven't got data on yet," he said. "For example, are there bugs in the field? But over time

that'll go to zero. Everything will be observed. Everything will be predicted.

Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.

In the end, he decided that the Rockets needed to reduce to data, and subject to analysis, a lot of stuff that had never before been seriously analyzed: physical traits. They needed to know not just how high a player jumped but how quickly he left the earth—how fast his muscles took him into the air. They needed to measure not just the speed of the player but the quickness of his first two steps. That is, they needed to be even more geeky than they already were.

improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the one-day-out forecast had been in 2005. In just the last few years, for the first time in history, a meteorologist's forecast of how hot it will be nine days from now is better than just guessing.

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data.

After seeing the diabolically clever data-based approach taken by the North Carolina legislature in writing laws to make it more difficult for African Americans to vote, the comedian John Oliver congratulated the legislators for having "Money-balled racism.

They collected great heaps of data: choices people had actually made. "Always keep one hand firmly on data," Amos liked to say.

began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgment was less reliable than algorithms.

Of the roughly $9 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to NOAA, and the bulk of that money is spent, one way or another, on figuring out the weather. Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

he came to see there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration's attitude toward public data. Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company.

The change in the kind of person who got rich enough to buy a professional sports franchise also had helped. "The owners often made their money from disrupting fields where most of the conventional wisdom is bullshit," said Morey. These people tended to be keenly aware of the value of even slight informational advantages, and open to the idea of using data to gain those advantages.

Statistics wasn't just boring numbers; it contained ideas that allowed you to glimpse deep truths about human life. "Because

The sensors measured everything that Clark could think to measure, including the pressure on the engine. They passed these measurements up to the programmable logic controllers. The

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government.