Quotes About Information

But great talent, even when its existence is not yet recognised, will inevitably provoke certain phenomena of admiration, such as the landlord had managed to detect in the questions asked by more than one English lady visitor, athirst for information as to the life led by Elstir, or in the number of letters that he received from abroad.

People do not just use information that is easy to find; they even use information that they know to be of poor quality and less reliable, so long as it requires little effort to find, rather than using information they know to be of high quality and reliable, though harder to find.

I wish that one of us had been endowed with some mystical gift of prescience that would have warned us off this train wreck. But you make your decision with the best information you have at the time.

We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do. It's based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us.

In a world of rapid change, we each need to garner as much useful information as possible, sort through it in a way that meets our unique circumstances, calibrate it with what we already know, and re-circulate it with others who share our goals.

Science suggests that intuition or whole-body learning is a real form of intelligence, and it works on a far larger scale than most of us have ever realized. It may be difficult to describe and is not always easy to get in touch with, but it can process information on a more sophisticated level.

Humankind now produces in two days the same amount of data it took us from the dawn of civilisation until 2003 to generate.

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn't mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

Data. That's what matters. That's what tells us something. But people want to see pictures. Supernova in vivid color. Even though scientifically it's useless.

Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer?

Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than thirty-four million articles published in academic journals and noted how the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines. These information-filtering tools, he observed, "serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn't."36

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts.

They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.

People, alas, don't document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.

Forever isn't always something one would choose, given all the information.

Sam, you could be descended from a pirate." Rachel sighed dramatically. "And to think that I thought the True Wind would be the more exciting operation. Maybe next time we go ashore, we could find an eye patch for you to wear. I think pirates are so sexy, Sam." "That information could come in handy someday." He nodded. "I'll definitely put one black patch on the shopping list.

Our wisdom grows not by staking out claims and defending them against all comers, but by sharing information freely, so that we may work together for the betterment of all.

Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

Bibliomancy: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.

Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.

So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers.

one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "[...] the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity…There's a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.