Data Files Quotes

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans. ~ Ralph Nader

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others. ~ Robert Reich

Throughout this book we have repeatedly asked what makes humans superior to other animals. Dataism has a new and simple answer. In themselves, human experiences are not superior at all to the experiences of wolves or elephants. One bit of data is as good as another. However, a human can write a poem about his experience and post it online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system. That makes his bits count. A wolf cannot do this. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213) ~ Julia Angwin

the form of deception being produced is a BFL, the truthful information one possesses is contextually unproblematic, the truthful information is easily accessible within memory (i.e., involves data that recently were uploaded to working memory), and any false information that might be used to construct the BFL must be retrieved from long-term memory. ~ Anonymous

Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful. ~ Frederick Seitz

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion - we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. ~ Daniel Kahneman

The Europeans have lots of data on the use of adjuvanted flu vaccine in the elderly, but I don't think anybody has really good data on adjuvants in children. ~ Anthony Fauci

these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to - and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral. If we back away from them and treat mathematical models as a neutral and inevitable force, like the weather or the tides, we abdicate our responsibility. And the result, as we've seen, is WMDs that treat us like machine parts in the workplace, that blackball employees and feast on inequities. We must come together to police these WMDs, to tame and disarm them. My hope is that they'll be remembered, like the deadly coal mines of a century ago, as relics of the early days of this new revolution, before we learned how to bring fairness and accountability to the age of data. Math deserves much better than WMDs, and democracy does too. ~ Cathy O'Neil

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled "Operation Freakout." It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or "truth serum," and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled "Operation Freakout." The goal of the operation was to get Cooper "incarcerated in a mental institution or jail. ~ Lawrence Wright

I think the actions taken by the (rate-setting) Federal Open Market Committee have been the appropriate actions. And I assume we will continue to take the appropriate actions, depending on what is happening with the data and the dynamics of the economy ~ Bill Vaughan

Data Scientists should refuse to be defined by someone else's vision of what's possible. ~ Damian Mingle

The launch of Google+ apps sends a powerful signal - the personalized web has begun. What this means is that the way information is structured and accessed will turn on the individual, or rather their personal profile which is a composite of all the data collected on the basis of what they have searched for and shared. ~ Simon Mainwaring

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. ~ Charles Fort

The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it. ~ Michael Behe

I hate when people ask me to: "Massage the data". ~ Ronald Coase

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day. ~ Emily Oster

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole. ~ John Dewey

File sharing is our radio; that's the way people hear our stuff. ~ Guy Picciotto

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse. ~ Don DeLillo

Can we talk real for a minute then? Do you "really" think that your problem is that you just need to gather more information and data before you start to "do" better with your commitment to yourself? Or isn't the real truth more like -> you are already educated with enough information - beyond your level of behavioral obedience to what you already know! You don't need to "know more" to get going- you simply need to buckle down and get real about "doing better" with what you already know. ~ Scott Abel

Listen, Google,' I will say, 'both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it's so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?'
And Google will answer: 'Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades' worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.
Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don't like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say "Paul". Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorith ~ Yuval Noah Harari

A software architecture is defined by a configuration of architectural elements
components, connectors, and data
constrained in their relationships in order to achieve a desired set of architectural properties. ~ Anonymous

The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent. Detective. ~ James S.A. Corey

But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data - everything you say, you've said before." For ~ Adam Johnson

We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report. ~ Julian Barnes

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother! ~ Tess Gerritsen

Todd was neuter, it seemed, except for the near-orgasmic pleasure he took from his formulas. Cono guessed that only a person who didn't really care for people could find personalities in equations, and friends in matrices. Todd spoke of data sets as if they were current or future lovers. Cono admired him for his ability to find joy beyond the secretory impulses that controlled most humans. ~ Victor Robert Lee

The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements - all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics - to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

Nick Dawson, a leader of the Society of Participatory Medicine, uses Evernote as his electronic medical record, pulling in data from sensors and sharing with providers or family members.64 ~ Eric Topol

The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data. ~ Rick Smolan

If you succeed not, cast not away the quills yet, nor scratch the wainscot, beat not the poor desk, but bring all to the forge and file again; turn it new. ~ Ben Jonson

Humankind's struggle against a hostile environment causes people throughout the ages to deploy their full armory of logic, training, strategy, imagination, inventiveness, and creativity. We are born with the natural ability to strategize. The most influential tool in humankind's intellectual tool kit is the ability to regenerate a sense of unruffled alertness, to establish a poised stance that leads to intuitive discoveries generated by the conscious and unconscious mind constantly filtering a plethora of data, selecting critical facts, and producing elegant solutions to seemingly insoluble dilemmas. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We don't have enough data about how lifestyle decisions impact our health. ~ Anne Wojcicki

Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

As the amount of inputs go up, as the number of people and ideas that clamor for attention continue to increase, we do what people always do: we rely on the familiar, the trusted and the personal. The incredible surplus of digital data means that human actions, generosity and sacrifice are more important than they ever were before. ~ Seth Godin

Well, all across the country, this is kind of sad, unemployment offices are swamped with people waiting to file for unemployment insurance. It's gotten so bad that the offices are overwhelmed and can't function. I got an idea. Why don't you hire more people? They're right there in line. Speed this whole thing up! ~ Jay Leno

Making progress in science often hinges on asking the right kind of question.

Without a well-posed question, discussions become little more than people talking (or yelling) past each other.

And without a well-posed question, there's no clear path toward gathering data that will yield answers.

Finding a good question is like throwing open the shades in a dark room.

It's the first step in finding a new way to tell is important. It tells us where we should be looking, where we should be going, and how to begin organizing our efforts to get there. ~ Adam Frank