Data Analysis Quotes

Everything that informs us of something useful that we didn't already know is a potential signal. If it matters and deserves a response, its potential is actualized. ~ Stephen Few

Now she sat on a bench alongside Valerie West, the two of them pretending to be on their lunch. Val was a whiz with data analysis, but nervous in the field. Cooper was watching her shred her napkin, and weighing whether it was worth it to say something, when Luisa touched the other woman's knee, said something off-mic. Valerie nodded, shrugged her shoulders back, and tucked the napkin in her pocket. Good. Normally Cooper would have discouraged a romantic relationship between teammates, but the two often seemed better agents because of it. ~ Marcus Sakey

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data. ~ Gus O'Donnell

Serving humanity intelligently is held up as the "gold standard" of AI based systems. But, with the emergence of new technologies and AI systems with bio-metric data storage, surveillance, tracking and big data analysis, humanity and the society is facing a threat today from evilly designed AI systems in the hands of monster governments and irresponsible people. Humanity is on the verge of digital slavery. ~ Amit Ray

The so-called co-efficient of heritability, which I regard as one of those unfortunate short-cuts, which have often emerged in biometry for lack of a more thorough analysis of the data. ~ Ronald Fisher

To find signals in data, we must learn to reduce the noise - not just the noise that resides in the data, but also the noise that resides in us. It is nearly impossible for noisy minds to perceive anything but noise in data. ~ Stephen Few

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality. ~ Amanda Ripley

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith. ~ Peter Watts

Blogging, writing conventional articles, and being science consultant and pocket protector ninja to various web portals and TV programs, quite often trying to promote the penicillin of hard data to people who had no interest in being cured of their ignorance. ~ Stephen L. Burns

The real point of the matter is that what we call a 'wrong datum' is one which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion for right and wrong. ~ Isaac Asimov

The challenge of data analysis is how to bring vast amounts of information into productive contact with human intelligence. ~ Anonymous

The inadequacy of unidimensional plotting along a continuum (in this case the diagonal of a symmetric matrix) inevitably would make "buffer" elements appear non-conformist when in fact they may be part of an interconnected pattern. ~ Jennifer K. McArthur

HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process. ~ Eric Ries

The latest technologies are often sexy, but beware of solutions that vendors dress up like trollops, unless you're looking for a one-night stand. ~ Stephen Few

In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described. ~ Bertrand Russell

This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency - given a constant concupiscence coefficient - of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, omnidirectional consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight" flip-flop circuits, since Trurl held here to the position of Dr. Yentzicus, creator of the famous oculo-oscular feel theory.
There were also all sorts of auxiliary components, like a high-frequency titillizer, an alternating tantalator, plus an entire set of lecherons and debaucheraries; on the outside, in a special glass case, were enormous dials, on which one could carefully follow the course of the whole decaptivation process. Statistical analysis revealed that the femfatalatron gave positive, permanent results in ninety-eight cases of unrequited amatorial superfixation out of a hundred. ~ Stanisław Lem

Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world. ~ Pete Townshend

Collection Methods in Qualitative Studies Where was the setting of the study? What was the rationale for choosing the setting? Who were the participants and what were their roles and characteristics? Why were they chosen? What data collection methods were used? What role did the researcher adopt within the setting? Who collected the data and were they qualified for their roles? How were data collectors trained? Was the training adequate? Was the process of the fieldwork adequately reported? How did the event unfold? Was data collection continued until saturation was achieved? Were the researchers' assumptions or biases acknowledged? ~ Nola A. Schmidt

I felt that the biological clock was some myth to keep me from doing what I wanted to do. And so I rebelled against it in the '90s. I thought it was a backlasher, some sort of faulty data. But it's real. I'm glad I woke up before my body was just like 'uh-uh.' ~ Lili Taylor

The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain. ~ Tony Benn

Oftentimes, those who stop researching lose the ability to conduct deep analyses. ~ Eraldo Banovac

One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it! ~ Steven Johnson

I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I'm capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I've concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me ~ Adam Savage

The ability to identify someone at a moment's notice by snapping a photo of him or her, to trigger an immediate influx of data about the person behind the face, will forever change the world. ~ Jan Chipchase

In the last analysis the great patriots were those who identified personal ambition with the welfare of their country. The traitor, as often as not, was one who, failing to recognize where the true interests of his country lay, identified his personal ambition with the less noble aspirations of his people. ~ Alec Waugh

Aim for simplicity in Data Science. Real creativity won't make things more complex. Instead, it will simplify them. ~ Damian Duffy Mingle

Nevertheless, for the most part the intangible dangers of being observed by unintended audiences are considered secondary to the convenience of instantaneous access to this "virtual campfire" from the comfort of the home. While online social networking sites are often disparaged as poor replacements for human interaction that encourage superficial relationships, my ethnographic analysis reveals how some people, American youth in particular, are incorporating this medium into their everyday practices in more or less meaningful ways. Through elucidating both the dangers and possibilities of this medium, I seek to encourage people to create their own "virtual campfires" as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, their offline lives. Through participation and sharing in meaningful ways- from conversation to creating art- we might begin to see these sites as vehicles for healing the widely-felt loss of community and the pervasive sense of alienation experienced by so many. ~ Jennifer Anne Ryan

To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42. ~ Alain De Botton

Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena. ~ Maurice Kendall

As an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information. ~ Paul Krugman

Perfectionism kills art. I find that if I criticise myself, it spoils the fun. You can get paralysed by analysis - it takes all the playfulness away. ~ Geri Halliwell

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look: ~ Christian Rudder

I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I'd do if I were in power again? I'd say, okay then, we'll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we'll have queues to flights on which we've done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone's precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture - nothing. On the right, we'll have queues to the flights where we've done everything possible to make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn't that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world would really choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down? ~ Robert Harris

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. ~ Michael J. Behe

To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, "I will is more important than IQ." It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it's been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to success and happiness. Discipline, hard work, perserverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important. ~ Rafe Esquith

I expected so much from life and if I had not seen it so close, I would to this day be expecting something. What treasures I discovered in my own soul - where are they all? I have exchanged them for the world's coin, given my frankness, my first passion - and for what? For bitter disillusionment, for the knowledge that all is deception, all is brittle, that one can place trust neither in oneself nor in others - and I have come to fear both others and myself. I have not been able, along with this analysis, to accept the trifles of life and be content with them, as many others do. ~ Ivan Goncharov

In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive ... The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see. ~ Peter Medawar

The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by the analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it. ~ Carl Jung

Experts may help assemble data, specialists may organize it, professionals may offer theories to explain it. But none of these can substitute for each person's own leap into the dark, jumping in to draw his or her own conclusions. ~ Charles R. Wolfe

We just kind of relied on written scouting reports through the eighties and even the early nineties. I've really been amazed by some of the data that's out there, especially with regards to tendencies of hitters, and certainly tendencies of pitchers as well. I would have loved to have gotten that data when I played. ~ David Cone

Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. ~ Judith Curry

Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines. ~ Alex Berenson

War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. ~ Nikola Tesla

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive. ~ Ryan Holmes

Redemption doesn't mean scrapping what's there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved. And because of the analysis of evil not as materiality but as rebellion, the slavery of humans and of the world does not consist in embodiment, redemption from which would mean the death of the body and the consequent release of the soul or spirit. The slavery consists, rather, in sin, redemption from which must ultimately involve not just goodness of soul or spirit but a newly embodied life. This ~ N. T. Wright

So I see that Christianity in believing in a Creator pulls together more facts, data, inner experience and ability than any mechanistic view could hold for me. ~ Kenneth L. Pike

The innards of Ping's G5 were supposedly computer-engineered with a process called "finite-element analysis," a term that for all I know was stolen from an old Star Trek episode. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forgetting. ~ Michael Pollan

Those fields which most depend upon authoritative opinion for their data least contain known natural law. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Although the method is simple, it shows how, mathematically, random brute force can overcome precise logic. It's a numerical approach that uses quantity to derive quality. ~ Liu Cixin

A lot of development has always been informally subsidized. When a system administrator writes a network analysis tool to help him do his job, then posts it online and gets bug fixes and feature contributions from other system administrators, what's happened is that an unofficial consortium has been formed. ~ Karl Franz Fogel

White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be - and still is - teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

Although, as you well know, dictionary sales to laymen have been waning for a long time. As books have gone out of print and we've moved from reading to "consuming data streams," "texting" rather than writing - as Memes have become king - the average consumer has had much less need for real meanings. And Synchronic ~ Alena Graedon

Desrochers and Shimizu (Chapter 5) identify several shortcomings in Carson's Silent Spring that stem from major omissions. These include her silence on the benefits of chemical pesticides, such as higher agricultural production - which reduced hunger in a world of chronic starvation and limited the loss of wildlife habitat. Another flaw is her reliance on anecdotes rather than systematic analysis of available information. But perhaps the book's biggest failing is its discussion of cancer. ~ Roger E. Meiners

Artists will come into my office and say, "I just came from another label and they said you're research guys, you're data guys." I don't know what that means. Everybody who says that is being naive. ~ Monte Lipman

I think that we are trying to put data communications, telecommunications and media communications together and be the No. 1 player there. ~ Hans Vestberg

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. ~ Evgeny Morozov

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I cite too the ordinary fears of mortality the inspection of a fast-growing mole on the side of the nose blood in the stool a painful injury or the mournful witness of the slow death of a parent all this is given to all men as well as the starting awake in the nether hours of the night from such glutinous nightmare that on'e self name relationships nationality place in life all data of specificity wipe out amnesiatically asiatically you don't even know the idea human it is such a low hour of the night and he shares it with all of us. ~ E.L. Doctorow

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are - and I say this with big pride - the progeny of slaves. If there's any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we've traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby's, and much of black America's, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates