Quotes About Measurement

See, every hotel in Las Vegas has a gimmick, and the biggest gimmick of all is the Stratosphere Tower, which claims to have 113 floors, although I think they're measuring floors in Las-Vegas-inches, which stretch and contract to fit whatever lie you're trying to sell.

Scythe Anastasia took a deep breath of precisely 3,644 milliliters, and slowly released it.

The glass isn't half-empty or half-full. What you're looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods. ... Is there an engineering one? ... Yes! It's quite simple: That's half a pint, all that's wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer.

we have another statistic that also signals the "middle" of a distribution, albeit differently: the median.

The standard deviation is the descriptive statistic that allows us to assign a single number to this dispersion around the mean.

The standard error is what tells us how much dispersion we can expect in our results from sample to sample, which in this case means poll to poll.

The purpose of any program evaluation is to provide some kind of counterfactual against which a treatment or intervention can be measured.

Although the field of statistics is rooted in mathematics, and mathematics is exact, the use of statistics to describe complex phenomena is not exact.

we have now introduced two different measures of dispersion: the standard deviation and the standard error.

The standard deviation measures dispersion in the underlying population

The standard error measures the dispersion of the sample means.

Google is in a sense serving as a time machine, and we're just now being able to measure the effect this has on publishing, advertising, and attention.

Time means a great deal to every runner. It means everything to me, because most days miles don't count; only minutes do.

It's kind of debatable whether or not the advertisement model is effective. Like whether Nielsen works.

A bank needs models to measure risk. The problem, however, is that any one bank can measure its risk, but it also has to know what the risk taken by other banks in the system happens to be at any particular moment.

There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy. And by measuring the motion of stars, and in particular, their orbits, we can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.")

asking about sampling errors and margins of error, debating if the number is rising or falling, believing, doubting, analyzing, dissecting—without taking the time to understand the first and most obvious fact: What is being measured, or counted? What definition is being used? Yet while this pitfall is common, it doesn't seem to have acquired a name. My suggestion is "premature enumeration.

Net wealth is a great way to measure riches, but not such a good way to measure poverty. Lots of people have zero, or less than zero. Some of them are destitute; others, like the junior doctor, are going to be fine.

Census taking is among the oldest ways of collecting statistics. Much newer, but with similar aspirations to reach everyone, is "big data." Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Oxford's Internet Institute, and coauthor of the book Big Data, told me that his favored definition of a big dataset is one where "N = All"—where we no longer have to sample, because we have the entire background population.[18

I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living

You'd have to crush a dozen Alexanders in an olive-press before you could extract enough humanity to make up an ordinary person. As a human being, he was tiny.

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.