Quotes About Estimates

Predicting the stock market is really predicting how other investors will change estimates they are now making with all their best efforts. This means that, for a market forecaster to be right, the consensus of all others must be wrong and the forecaster must determine in which direction-up or down-the market will be moved by changes in the consensus of those same active investors.

Near the end of the flood, weather forecasters began tallying up just how much rain had fallen in the Dayton area alone. One estimate making the rounds shortly afterward was that during the four days it rained on Dayton, the amount of water dumping over the city and passing through the streets equaled the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a four-day period.

Almost every cost estimate made by a physicist is wildly wrong, and the better the physicist the worse it is (Herb York).

Few researchers today accept Dobyns's estimates—they seem extreme—but most believe that native numbers were far higher than estimated by previous generations. Most, but not all.

In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world's population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.

Decade by decade: estimates of Pluto's size got smaller and smaller.

Latest estimates, extrapolating from the current catalogs, suggests as many as forty billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. Those are the planets our descendants might want to visit someday, by choice, if not by necessity.

He estimates the number of deaths worldwide as 100 million, a larger number than the conventional estimate of 20 to 40 million. But, he said, 20 million people died in India alone, making it impossible for the 20 to 40 million figure to be correct.

The officers had a ghoul pool, in which they bet on how many bodies eventually would be recovered. The estimates ranged from five to twenty-four. Everyone was low. Taking a cue from a movie just opening in Chicago theaters, they got themselves T-shirts emblazoned with "The Body Snatchers, No. 803640," the six digits referring to the case number, with large numerals "27," signifying the body count, on the other side. (That number also proved low.)

Famines were frequent in colonial India and some estimates indicate that 30 to 40 million died out of starvation in Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Bengal during the later half of the 19th century.

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people's own beliefs, values, and habits to bias their estimates of how widely such views and habits are shared by others.

Goodstein demonstrated that in every case, when compared with the actual costs paid, the estimates were grossly inflated.6 His examples range from asbestos to vinyl, and in all instances but one the estimated cost flowing from regulatory change was at least double the actual cost paid, while in some cases estimates were even more exaggerated.

As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.

In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

The best estimate of experts like James Alan Fox of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University is that, at any given time, there are two to three dozen serial killers at large in the country, responsible for the deaths of between one and two hundred victims.

James T Kirk: Mr.Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four? Montgomery Scott: Certainly, Sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?

I do believe we have to understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates. But you have more public service - certainly many of you - than I have ever had, and you recognize that this is not unusual.

By the early estimates of the rangers, the fire had burned enough wood to provide timber for the whole nation for fifteen years.

The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others

A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves "completely certain" about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time. When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time.

when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others

In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor

First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units.

We have tried to change regimes through a variety of means - over 80 times, by some estimates. Many of these efforts were counterproductive to U.S. interests.