Information Retrieval Quotes

The key utility measure is user happiness. Speed of response and the size of the index are factors in user happiness. It seems reasonable to assume that relevance of results is the most important factor: blindingly fast, useless answers do not make a user happy. However, user perceptions do not always coincide with system designers' notions of quality. For example, user happiness commonly depends very strongly on user interface design issues, including the layout, clarity, and responsiveness of the user interface, which are independent of the quality of the results returned. ~ Christopher D. Manning

Thus, an index built for vector space retrieval cannot, in general, be used for phrase queries. Moreover, there is no way of demanding a vector space score for a phrase query - we only know the relative weights of each term in a document. ~ Prabhakar Raghavan

Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it. ~ Geoff Colvin

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage. ~ Carl Bernstein

When the three months is over, so are we. I'll move on and you will too. Because you won't know my name or any identifying information about me, you'll have no way to contact me. Ever. ~ Georgia Cates

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. ~ Tim Berners-Lee

One of the most curious aspects of human psychology is an omnipresent and persistent habit to seek information from the worst possible sources. When seeking relationship advice, humans speak to their single friends instead of happy couples who have been married for decades. When researching a religion, humans ask ex-members instead of faithful members. When seeking financial advice, humans ask scholars instead of successful entrepreneurs. When discussing complex sociopolitical matters, humans solicit the opinions of actors and models. Anteedan Psychologists have dubbed this curious phenomenon the "Oprah Effect," and had planned on determining the cause, however research ceased after a financial scandal involving the team lead stealing money from the grant and eloping with an exotic dancer named Cinnamon. -A Tourists Guide to Earth, 2nd edition, page 184, Valium Press ~ Aaron Lee Yeager

Google's a strange place. When I met Eric Schmidt, he said, "If you are kind to everybody, then you will make good decisions because people will give you good information, and if you are truthful to everybody, they will be truthful to you." That's what's different about Google. They screw up and make mistakes, but they genuinely mean the good stuff about "don't be evil." ~ Larry Brilliant

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts. ~ Barack Obama

There is no coherent knowledge , i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information , obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Just before I left [Cuba], I was about to transfer to the university. I had decided I had had enough experience in work in the manual areas. But then I got word from the United States that I could return ... that my party had gathered enough information about the false charges that were against me for me to return to the United States. ~ Huey Newton

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles.

Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state - as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two typ ~ Hannah Arendt

We have rights in America. In tandem with those rights, we have responsibility. Whatever type of journalist we are, whether it be in the entertainment business, or as professional journalists, we always have the consequences of the way we present fact and information. ~ Mike Pence

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information. ~ Ron Chernow

Information is information, not matter or energy. ~ Norbert Wiener

You paying good money?"

"For what?"

"Information, asshole. You was the one said it."

"Depends on the information. But please, I had asshole legally dropped from my name.

"That was a mistake. ~ Joe R. Lansdale

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art. ~ Joseph Campbell

Now Congress learns that the Veterans Administration failed to provide complete, accurate information on the money it needs for both this year and next year. ~ Doc Hastings

thinker sees in his own actions attempts and questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and failure are answers to him first and foremost. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use. ~ Anne Rice

Lies of omission do not exist. The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it. Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can. And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have. If I do not volunteer information you deem critical to your fate, it possibly means that I am a scoundrel, but it does not mean that I am a liar. And it certainly means you did not ask the right questions.
One can make either true statements or false statements about reality. All of the statements I make are true. ~ Scratch

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit. ~ Anna Politkovskaya

Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process ... When a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information ... And readers love it. ~ Michael Arrington

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
[The Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1995: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the District of Columbia of the Committee on Governmental Affairs (1996)] ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Canceled checks Along with your bank statement, you will most likely receive all the checks you wrote that were cashed during that month. You should keep these in case you ever have to prove to a supplier that you paid an invoice. The bank stamp on the back of the check carries information as to when and where the check was cashed. ~ Angie Mohr

Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective.

This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle. ~ Marilyn French

Didn't I know, he asked, that some people found me a snob? I didn't. Our marriage was formed by the things Christopher knew and the things I did not. This was not simply a question of intellect, although in that respect Christopher again had the advantage, he was without a doubt a clever man. It was a question of things withheld, information that he had, and that I did not. In short, it was a question of infidelities - betrayal always puts one partner in the position of knowing, and leaves the other in the dark. ~ Katie Kitamura

Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information ~ Jeremy Campbell

Since that time I have had continuous contact with the persons who were completely unknown to me, except that I knew they would hand whatever information I gave them to the Russian authorities. ~ Klaus Fuchs

When the archeologists find this place they'll destroy history. Mankind will attempt to bury this information but we will ensure there is a leak. Intel this valuable makes insignificant fame starved humans grand masters of legend.Secrets are best retold to hungry ears. ~ Poppet

But our brains are different from mice. Their cortex is tiny, which means their ability to learn from experience is tiny. They are built to run on innate rather than learned circuits. Our cortex is huge because we are designed to fill it up with acquired knowledge. We are not meant to run on pre-loaded programs. Every creature in nature runs on as few neurons as possible because neurons are metabolically expensive. They consume more oxygen and glucose than an active muscle. It takes so much energy to keep a neuron alive that they actually make it harder to survive. Neurons only promote survival if you really get your money's worth out of them, by wiring them up with survival-relevant information. Natural selection gave humans a gargantuan number of neurons. That means we were meant to use the experience we've stored in our neurons, not to ignore ~ Anonymous

We live in an information and knowledge-based economy. ~ Bobby Scott

Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever. ~ Daniel Goleman

One of the great joys of life is creativity. Information goes in, gets shuffled about, and comes out in new and interesting ways. ~ Peter McWilliams

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might ~ John Maynard Keynes

You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both. ~ Douglas Coupland

Keep a journal, and learn how to see how you as an individuals sees information so you can learn your own sign language. Meditate and practice psychic self defense and surrounding yourself with prayer. ~ John Edward

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication. ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did. ~ Maggie Gyllenhaal