Quotes About Data

The mathematical analyses pinned down the quantity of information a given black hole contains, without providing insight into the information itself.

The working Planetologist has access to many resources, data, and projections. However, his most important tools are human beings. Only by cultivating ecological literacy among the people themselves can he save an entire planet.

In a society where hard data is uncertain at best, one must be careful to manipulate the truth. Appearance becomes reality. Perception becomes fact. Use this to your advantage. Empress Herade, A Primer on the Finer Points of Culture in the Imperium

The working Planetologist has access to many resources, data, and projections. However, his most important tools are human beings. Only by cultivating ecological literacy among the people themselves can he save an entire planet. Pardot Kynes, The Case for Bela Tegeuse

If you don't have data, then all you have is an opinion.

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.

Nearly everyone in ancient Egypt exhorted the gods to let the Pharaoh live 'forever. These collective prayers failed. Their failure constitutes data.

Since much of the ocean floor remains unexplored (except perhaps for still-classified data acquired by the U.S. and Soviet navies), we may know more about the surface topography of Venus than about any other planet, Earth included.

In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking).

In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, 'facts'. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts.

Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge.

Venus, it turns out, is broiling hot. There are no swamps, no oil fields, no seltzer oceans. With insufficient data, it is easy to go wrong.

Imagine a society in which every speech in the Congressional Record, every television commercial, every sermon had an accompanying error bar or its equivalent.

If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold - namely, in the area of religion?

Cada vez que un estudio científico presenta algunos datos, va acompañado de un margen de error: un recordatorio discreto pero insistente de que ningún conocimiento es completo o perfecto.

I've got tons of irreplaceable information inside the soul of this computer.

Mulally pointed to ten BPR rules he had posted on the wall of the room3: • People first • Everyone is included • Compelling vision • Clear performance goals • One plan • Facts and data • Propose a plan, "find-a-way" attitude • Respect, listen, help, and appreciate each other • Emotional resilience … trust the process • Have fun … enjoy the journey and each other

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.

I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.

As many will remember, a respected Army Corps economist filed a whistleblower complaint about the Corps' use of faulty data to justify lock and dam expansion.

The mind when it has an old experience will add that data into its current experience, and it keeps coming up with wrong answers.

We are not big believers in making decisions solely on the basis of the numbers. But we do think that ignoring what the numbers tell you is pretty silly.

Remember, accounting is the art of using limited data to come as close as possible to an accurate description of how well a company is performing.

The art of accounting and finance is the art of using limited data to come as close as possible to an accurate description of how well a company is performing.