Quotes About Analysis

With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: 'What do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?'

The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

There's a lot of new subject matter to learn. You start slowly peeling the onion and start figuring out how the policy and the politics intersect.

State of the Culture' is more mature content. We want to go as deep as we can on whatever the subject matter is, we're not there to joke.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that's really important.

My favourite subjects at school were algebra and logic: making a big problem into something small.

The danger of the blogosphere is reading only those you agree with. While there are right-wing blogs that are entertaining freak shows, it's hard to find substantial journalism there.

Republicans and Democrats have used accounting gimmicks and competing government analyses to deceive the public into believing that 2 + 2 = 6. If our leaders cannot agree on the numbers, if 'facts' are fictional, how can they possibly have a substantive debate on solutions?

There is no substitute for face-to-face reporting and research.

Constantly referring to past wrongdoings can become a substitute for developing a deeper analysis of today's foreign-policy challenges, of understanding what is new and different.

My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

I always say, 'Let your experiment speak to you.' What I mean by that is I - actually, we, or, at least, I'm not smart enough, actually, to guess how nature is working, but by looking and doing the right experiments and paying close attention to the subtleties of it, you start to catch on.

By relying on the statistical information rather than a gut feeling, you allow the data to lead you to be in the right place at the right time. To remain as emotionally free from the hurly burley of the here and now is one of the only ways to succeed.

In a different direction, the necessity to model the analysis of noisy incomplete sensory data not by logic but by Bayesian inference first came to the forefront in the robotics community with their use of Kalman filters.

Piaget also did not provide a detailed analysis of how communicative interaction leads to symbolic representation.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Often sound advice turns out to be totally wrong. Sometimes things turn out in such a way that only a fool would predict. Which is why fools, too, have their place in analysis and debate.

True and genuine inward certainty does not in the least fear outward analysis, nor does truth resent honest criticism. You should never forget that intolerance is the mask covering

science should be question driven, not methodology driven.