Algorithmic Quotes & Sayings

The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the "secret sauce" that drives each company's profitability. The problem with this invisible "black box" algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable. — Marc Goodman

The authors, academics from Northeastern University, Harvard University, and the University of Houston, concluded that Google Flu Trends had wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States for more than two years. The article, "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis," concluded that the errors were, at least in part, due to the decisions made by GFT engineers about what to include in their models - mistakes the academics dubbed "algorithmic dynamics" and "big data hubris. — Clayton M Christensen

In real life, according to McNamara, the leader first must discover the problem. He or she must figure out what problem needs to be solved before beginning to make decisions. McNamara explained that identifying the true problem facing an organization often proved to be the most difficult challenge that leaders face. In many instances leaders do not spot a threat until far too late. At times, leaders set out to solve the wrong problem. — Michael A. Roberto

I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory. — James Gleick

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines. — Douglas Rushkoff

Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension. — Verity Stob

More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Google's — Eli Pariser

These algorithms, which I'll call public relevance algorithms, are-by the very same mathematical procedures-producing and certifying knowledge. The algorithmic assessment of information, then, represents a particular knowledge logic, one built on specific presumptions about what knowledge is and how one should identify its most relevant components. That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God. — Tarleton Gillespie

Here the query A320 returns algorithmic search results about the Airbus aircraft, together with advertisements for various non-aircraft goods numbered A320 that advertisers seek to market to those querying on this query. The lack of advertisements for the aircraft reflects the fact that few marketers attempt to sell A320 aircraft on the web. — Hinrich Schutze

The brightest moments of human discovery are those unplanned and random instants when you thumb through a strange book in a foreign library or talk auto maintenance with a neuroanatomist. We need our searches to include cross-wiring and dumb accidents, too, not just algorithmic surety. — Michael Harris

The next question is how? How does news find us?
What you need is a certain critical literacy about the fact that you are almost always subject to an algorithm. The most powerful thing in your world now is an algorithm about which you know nothing about. — Kelly McBride

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. — Eli Pariser

The bouillon cubes of discrete human-like intellects thus melt into an algorithmic soup. — Nick Bostrom

You must be very secure in your masculinity to parade around in those budgie smugglers."
"Oh, I'm very secure." He see-sawed the towel over his back. "And I'm happy to show you the rear view of my budgie smugglers - oh wait - you already saw it when you were checking out my ass. — Tracey Alvarez

We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution's friends and foes alike, and it is parallel to the confusion of the coin-toss tournament winner who basks in the misconsidered glory of the idea that since the tournament had to have a winner, and since he is the winner, the tournament had to produce him as the winner. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. — Daniel C. Dennett

To reprise language from the previous chapter, the solution isn't algorithmic (following a set path) but heuristic (breaking from the path to discover a novel strategy). — Daniel H. Pink

He said it was the kind of book you made your own. — Stephen Chbosky

Never be discontent with the life you've been dealt, be discontent with the way you're living it. — Mike Donehey

Moralistic, therapeutic deism is fine with sin hiding in a foxhole. The gospel wants to nuke the hole. — Matt Chandler

So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed - and Darwin provided - was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn't count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process. — Daniel C. Dennett

In fact, the private sector is improving their algorithmic ability to search through big data month after month after month. And, of course, a big government bureaucracy isn't keeping up. — Carly Fiorina

Our vocabulary may become a real time algorithmic word bank.
Could you imagine having a conversation like that?
Where the meaning of words constantly adapts? — Natasha Tsakos

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs can make is trying to do everything themselves. They usually blow up when they try. I did an inventory of every deal I've ever done and it turned out that every single deal I made money on was a partnership, and every colossal failure, where I lost millions, was something I tried to do by myself. — Kevin O'Leary

Nick: How? Are you a vampire or something? What made you immortal?
Acheron: Real good DNA. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Life is algorithmic. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague. Maybe it's everywhere in the population already and we never noticed. Maybe this is end-stage. Terminal without symptoms, like poor Kip."
Kanya glances at the ladyboy. Kip gives a gentle return smile. Nothing shows on her skin. Nothing shows on her body. It is not the doctor's disease she dies of. And yet ... Kanya steps away, involuntarily.
The doctor grins. "Don't look so worried. You have the same sickness. Life is, after all, inevitably fatal. — Paolo Bacigalupi

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless — Daniel Dennett

This does not mean that I fail to recognise that Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension. It just means that I have no idea how, or indeed if, Lisp handles exceptions. — Verity Stob

Matching the right kidney to the right patient is one example of an algorithmic artificial intelligence. — Hari Sreenivasan

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things. — Aleksandar Hemon

It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth. — Philippe Aries

Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments - both carrots and sticks - can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. — Daniel H. Pink

And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we've done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them. — Louisa Hall

She's all broken inside but no one will ever notice. - Unknown — Monica Murphy

No one in my circle calls me 'Travis.' Even my family, at a young age started calling me 'Travie.' So I want people to feel comfortable calling me 'Travie.' It's almost like inviting people in. — Travie McCoy

A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic - as the scholars call it - abilities. — Daniel H. Pink