Quotes About Research

glottochronology

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation.

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

Light will be thrown on the origin of men and his history.

Il me serait difficile de rappeler au lecteur qui n'est pas familier avec la géologie les faits au moyen desquels on arrive à se faire une vague et faible idée de l'immensité de la durée des âges écoulés.

I have read heaps of agricultural & horticultural books, & have never ceased collecting facts— At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Lettre To Joseph Dalton Hooker [11 January 1844]

When on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America

The laws governing inheritance are for the most part unknown.

if history is any guide, a long, long road lies ahead before physicists will be able to tame fusion reactions

Today most mathematicians accept the continuum hypothesis as true, though some study non-Cantorian transfinite numbers where the continuum hypothesis is taken to be false.)

scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.

Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—

By dawn on Sunday he had been awake for over thirty hours, tracking a crisis of ever-expanding but indeterminate scope. A large body of operational research demonstrates that human beings suffer disproportionately from fatigue-induced errors of judgment after twelve hours of concentration at work; while Gerald Lockhart had long experience of pushing himself under crisis conditions, he was about to make a fatal mistake.

I'm really sorry, sir, I was working on a final solution to the packing density problem in the sub-subbasement—" she glanced sideways at the dog-eared paperback lying facedown on her desk, copiously annotated: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach—"and I may have become slightly distracted.

Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research.

This distinction between correlation and causation is crucial to the proper interpretation of statistical results.

One fundamental difference between a poll and other forms of sampling is that the sample statistic we care about will be not a mean (e.g., 187 pounds) but rather a percentage or proportion

The finest studies are like the finest of anything else: They cost big bucks.

Longitudinal data sets are the research equivalent of a Ferrari. Not surprisingly, we can't always have the Ferrari. The research equivalent of a Toyota is a cross-sectional data set.

In the case of a randomized, controlled experiment, the control group is the counterfactual

You should see that a bigger sample makes for a shrinking standard error, which is how large national polls can end up with shockingly accurate results.

The whole point of a representative sample is that it looks like the underlying population.

these cases, the goal is to find two groups of subjects who are broadly similar except for the application of whatever "treatment" we care about.

Logic suggests that we should be less confident about generalizing our results to the entire adult population from a sample of 25 than from a sample of 3,000.