Readability Statistics Quotes

I am delighted to be part of this Women's Aid campaign - the statistics are frightening. I've spent time with the victims of these cowardly acts, and it's heartbreaking. Everyday women and children are being abused in their own homes. I am standing up and saying that I am a Real Man, and that violence against women and children has to end. ~ Gethin Jones

The campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short -term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he'd create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an "essential precursor" of the prosperity of the nineties , and that The Market, in its infinite, time -spanning wisdom, would choose / had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence. ~ Greg Egan

When I'm sitting around watching a game with some friends, and we're all excited, and Jordan is driving in, we might say, 'Come on Mike, break me off a little somethin'-somethin'.' I decided to take that and translate it into what I do on 'SportsCenter.' Just add statistics. ~ Stuart Scott

July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so ~ Mark Twain

Statistics or graphs,'" are not optimal to understand the 'experience of suffering.'" (qtd in Sutton 11) ~ Paul Farmer

Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk, which itself is an iffy enterprise, they cannot dictate what level of risk people ought to accept. People might object to a nuclear power plant that has a minuscule risk of a meltdown not because they overestimate the risk, but because they feel that the cost of a catastrophe, no matter how remote, are too dreadful. And of course any of these trade-offs may be unacceptable if people perceive that the benefits would go to the wealthy and powerful while they themselves absorb the risks. Nonetheless, understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed. It can help scientists and journalists explain a new technology in the face of the most common misunderstandings. And it can help all of us understand the technology so that we can accept or reject it on grounds that we can justify to ourselves and to others. ~ Steven Pinker

Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of starvation ... And such a state of things is obviously what we want; apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. ~ Anton Chekhov

The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity. ~ C. G. Jung

So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression garbage in, garbage out. ~ Charles Wheelan

All statements are true, if you are free to redefine their terms. ~ Thomas Sowell

Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it! ~ Edwin Balmer

Statistics are the heart of democracy. ~ Simeon Strunsky

Thanksgiving is a magical time of year when families across the country join together to raise America's obesity statistics. Personally, I love Thanksgiving traditions: watching football, making pumpkin pie, and saying the magic phrase that sends your aunt storming out of the dining room to sit in her car. ~ Stephen Colbert

Well, first of all the Dominion Bureau of Statistics made a survey in the spring of 1970, which showed that on balance the difference in the cost of living between Canadian cities and American cities was 5 % to the advantage, of course, to the Canadian cities. ~ Leonard Woodcock

My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very - actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to - to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it. ~ Vik Muniz

The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction. ~ Michael Faraday

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. " ... The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes. ~ Kathryn Schulz

I really don't care much about baseball, or looking at ball games, major or minor. All my interest in baseball is in its statistics. ~ Ernest Lanigan

The town slowly wakes up around him with its foreign-made cars and its statistics and credit card debt and all its other crap. ~ Fredrik Backman

...If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way. properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.

"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? ~ Mark Twain

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1975, 31 percent of college teachers were female; by 2009, the number had grown to 49.2 percent.7 There are more women teaching in college than ever, and it is quite possible that their presence, coupled with our discovery of the postmodern narrative, has had a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought. Strong winds of compassion blow across campus quads. Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone's underdog status. Many of the female adjuncts I have spoken to seem blessed and cursed by feelings of maternity toward the students. Women think about their actions, and the consequences of their actions, in a deeper way than do men. ~ Professor X.

Statistics in the hands of activists have power. ~ Ela Bhatt

I have no statistics to prove it, but I'm sure the American workplace will be adversely affected on Monday, the day after XXIV. The game will be the focus of conversation, and distractions happy and sad will be the order of the day, not to mention millions of hangovers. I wouldn't buy a toaster or a parachute manufactured the day after Super Bowl XXIV. You cannot engender such torrid anticipation for an event so great that it requires Roman numerals as a suffix, then expect there to be no social repercussions at its end. ~ Robert Klein

One of the comforts of firing a big gun during a siege must be the satisfaction of watching the results at long range. Inside a tank or behind an M107, a smudge of smoke against a building can be marked off against a map coordinate. The blood and shattered bones at the other end of the trajectory have no physical contact with the gun. But Randal and I were driving towards the other end of the trajectory, back to west Beirut, where the casualty statistics marked the other side of the concave mirror through which armies fight their wars. ~ Robert Fisk

It is only in statistics that people die by the millions. Each person dies individually, in his own predicament. ~ Liv Ullmann

There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability. ~ Marian Engel

Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more. ~ David Eagleman

Of course, if 40% of women need oxytocin to progress normally, then something is wrong with the definition of normal. ~ Henci Goer

I will listen to any hypothesis but on one condition-that you show me a method by which it can be tested. ~ August Wilhelm Von Hofmann

Essentially, the frequentist approach toward statistics seeks to wash its hands of the reason that predictions most often go wrong: human error. ~ Nate Silver

The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors. ~ David Hockney

XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files ~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum

No one can tell time except approximately, time never stands still to be named. ~ Fredric Brown

I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not. ~ James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian tangles with slave traders who, with statistics and graphs, try to justify their operations as 'economic development.' Caspian wants the trade ended:
'But that would be putting the clock back,' gasped the governor. 'Have you no idea of progress, of development?'
'I have seen both in an egg,' said Caspian. 'We call it "Going Bad" in Narnia. This trade must stop. ~ Joseph Loconte

If you're the kind of person who likes numbers and statistics, I'm the long shot - the Lotto Powerball winner. I'm the mutation in the DNA that makes evolution a reality. I am the new black. ~ Tracy Morgan

And what is the Republican solution to these outrageous [racial] inequalities? There isn't one. And that's the point. Denying racism is the new racism. To not acknowledge those statistics, to think of that as a 'black problem' and not an American problem. To believe, as a majority of FOX viewers do, that reverse-racism is a bigger problem than racism, that's racist, ~ Bill Maher

The English word Atonement comes from the ancient Hebrew word kaphar, which means to cover. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and discovered their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, God sent Jesus to make coats of skins to cover them. Coats of skins don't grow on trees. They had to be made from an animal, which meant an animal had to be killed. Perhaps that was the very first animal sacrifice. Because of that sacrifice, Adam and Eve were covered physically. In the same way, through Jesus' sacrifice we are also covered emotionally and spiritually. When Adam and Eve left the garden, the only things they could take to remind them of Eden were the coats of skins. The one physical thing we take with us out of the temple to remind us of that heavenly place is a similar covering. The garment reminds us of our covenants, protects us, and even promotes modesty. However, it is also a powerful and personal symbol of the Atonement - a continuous reminder both night and day that because of Jesus' sacrifice, we are covered. (I am indebted to Guinevere Woolstenhulme, a religion teacher at BYU, for insights about kaphar.)

Jesus covers us (see Alma 7) when we feel worthless and inadequate. Christ referred to himself as "Alpha and Omega" (3 Nephi 9:18). Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Christ is surely the beginning and the end. Those who study statistics learn that the letter alpha is used to represent the level of significance in a research ~ Brad Wilcox

When the CERN teams reported a 'five-sigma' result for the Higgs boson, corresponding to a P-value of around 1 in 3.5 million, the BBC reported the conclusion correctly, saying this meant 'about a one-on-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.' But nearly every other outlet got the meaning of this P-value wrong. For example, Forbes Magazine reported, 'The chances are less than 1 in a million that it is not the Higgs boson,' a clear example of the prosecutor's fallacy. The Independent was typical in claiming that 'there is less than a one in a million chance that their results are a statistical fluke.' This may not be blatantly mistaken as Forbes, but it is still assigning the small probability to 'their results are a statistical fluke', which is logically the same as saying this is the probability of the null hypothesis being tested. ~ David Spiegelhalter

Averages don't always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet. ~ Robert Reich

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged. ~ Rudolf Virchow

Ida was clearly exasperated by the fact that despite the motives that accompanied the lynching statistics published year after year - which Ida included in nearly every article - "law-abiding and fair-minded people should so persistently shut their eyes to the facts." Ida continued, "This record, easily within the reach of every one who wants it," made it "inexcusable" for anyone not to debunk the presumption from the beginning. ~ Paula J. Giddings

Her statistics were more than a study ... For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed - and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief - that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator - to say nothing of the politician - too often failed for want of this knowledge. ~ Karl Pearson

The solid wealth of insurance companies and the success of those who organsie gambling are some indication of the profits to be derived from the efficient use of chance. ~ Edward De Bono

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. ~ Eric Temple Bell