Quotes About Data

One study of twenty years of data in the United States concluded that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."4

United States Weather Bureau concluded that over 8,000 square miles,* 9 trillion gallons of water fell, weighing 33 billion tons.

As soon as the numbers get up in a chart - or better yet, a graph - as soon as they thus become blessed with some specious authenticity, they become the drivers in high-risk, low-data situations because these people are so anxious to have data. That's when you hear them saying things like "It will be a billion-dollar market in 2016. If we only get five percent of that market..." When you hear that sort of stuff, exit gracefully, holding on to your wallet.

but you had better realize you are adding apples and oranges (that is, doctor sales + engineer sales) to get your final totals, and in so doing, you are leaving yourself open to misinterpreting the data badly. Most important, market, when it is defined in this sense, ceases to be a single, isolable object of action—it no longer refers to any single entity that can be acted on—and cannot, therefore, be the focus of marketing.

The lesson is clear: neither science nor data are democratic. Science is meritocratic and not all data are equal.

Data for data's sake, or the mindless gathering of big data, without any conceptual framework for organizing and understanding it, may actually be bad or even dangerous.

We want Google to be the third half of your brain," says Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

All this data leads us to a direct examination of the reasons the unchurched avoid Christian churches. The biggest issue is a perceived lack of value.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths.

Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.

Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground.

THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

The real point of the matter is that what we call a 'wrong datum' is one which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion for right and wrong.

Can entropy ever be reversed? We both know entropy can't be reversed. You can't turn smoke and ash back into a tree. Do you have trees on your world? The sound of the Galactic AC startled them into silence. Its voice came thin and beautiful out of the small AC-contact on the desk. It said: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Intuition! What's that? Define it!" "Easily. Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done?

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked

This is all disillusioning, Beenay. I thought it was only us psychologists who made the data fit the theories and called the result 'science.' Seems more like something the Apostles of Flame might do!

You already have zero privacy - get over it.

I think we are, certainly in the Department of Justice, a fan of some of the data-mining techniques that will allow us to more effectively zero in on fraud.

The technology, called near-field communication, involves a microchip that can send and receive data across very short distances, about four inches. Instead of swiping a credit card, you hold your phone near a reader and let the data zip between the two devices.