Best Data Quotes & Sayings

Some of the best theorizing comes after collecting data because then you become aware of another reality. — Robert J. Shiller

Humans simply aren't moved to action by 'data dumps,' dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with Once upon a time — Jonathan Gottschall

The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic. — Simon Schama

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data. — V.S. Ramachandran

The weather records of the U.S.A. are the best kept and most accessible in the world, thanks to consistent government/military taxpayer support. There are longer European data sets, but the U.S.A. data is enough to forecast major extreme events. — Piers Corbyn

One of the best things data can enable us to do is to ask questions we didn't know to ask. — Vinod Khosla

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions. — Sean Carroll

[Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along. — David Quammen

Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they're usually up to something. — Jaron Lanier

signs of deceptive behavior. With each admission, remember to avoid a deep dive into any one issue. Your best bet is to aim for little nuggets of information, so it doesn't appear that you're asking for a big data dump and an emotionally draining confession. Then, when you have all those nuggets and it's time for your deep dive, don't go back to the beginning - start with the most recent admission first. That's likely the most serious matter, because it's the one she tried hardest to conceal. Keep in mind as you're collecting those nuggets how essential it is to remain engaged. As we pointed out in Chapter 6, engaging the person you're interrogating is a vital element in coming across as sincere, which will in turn help you in your effort to persuade the person to share the information you're seeking. But we should make it clear that it's equally important to be engaged from the standpoint of ensuring that you don't miss any of those nuggets that are coming at you. — Philip Houston

In School of One, students have daily "playlists" of their learning tasks that are attuned to each student's learning needs, based on that student's readiness and learning style. For example, Julia is way ahead of grade level in math and learns best in small groups, so her playlist might include three or four videos matched to her aptitude level, a thirty-minute one-on-one tutoring session with her teacher, and a small group activity in which she works on a math puzzle with three peers at similar aptitude levels. There are assessments built into each activity so that data can be fed back to the teacher to choose appropriate tasks for the next playlist. — Eric Ries

Listening to the data is important ... but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model? — Steve Lohr

The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly. — Marcus Du Sautoy

Resveratrol is fascinating stuff. One of the best sources of information about it is the Immortality Institute. They have a forum where some people are in the 500 Club, as they call it. They've been taking 500 milligrams for years. It's a really great source of data. — Timothy Ferriss

The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty. — David Deutsch

If competition for Kaggle's top talent becomes fierce enough among banks, insurance companies, hedge funds - we hope the world's best data scientists will earn more than $50 million per year, just like the world's best hedge fund managers. — Anthony Goldbloom

I'm a very good decision maker because I have core set of principles and so I can make decisions. Decisions can be very hard and you have to wrestle with them, but I'm able to get all the data on the table and figure out what would be the best decision because decisions mean ill for some people and mean positives for others. — Michele Bachmann

Get your product into users' hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd's feedback to iterate. Your customers will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone. — Jay Samit

Our collaboration with Datapipe on a managed hybrid cloud solution for AWS removes many of the common barriers to cloud adoption. It offers customers the best of both worlds by providing Equinix's secure data center platform, including private access to AWS, along with Datapipe's expertise in designing and managing an optimal IT architecture for enterprises. — John Landy

With data collection, 'The sooner the better' is always the best answer. — Marissa Mayer

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!" ... — David Byrne

If you're working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I'm not sure you're doing your best work if you're doing it on an iPhone. — Seth Godin

What I have always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he'd done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember. Which is why drivers compulsively record their every move, their every race, with cockpit cameras, in-car video, data mapping; a driver cannot be a witness to his own greatness. This is what Danny says. He says racing is doing. It is being a part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time. The great champion Julian Sabella Rosa has said: When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake. — Garth Stein

It should go without saying - but it usually doesn't, so we'll say it - that data is best understood by those closest to the issue, which is often not management. As a leader, it is best not to get lost in details you don't understand, but rather trust the smart people who work for you to understand them. — Eric Schmidt

Use # as an introducer for comments. It is good to have a way to embed annotations and comments in data files. It's best if they're actually part of the file structure, and so will be preserved by tools that know its format. For comments that are not preserved during parsing, # is the conventional start character. — Eric S. Raymond

Excel suffers from an image problem. Most people assume that spreadsheet programs such as Excel are intended for accountants, analysts, financiers, scientists, mathematicians, and other geeky types. Creating a spreadsheet, sorting data, using functions, and making charts seems daunting, and best left to the nerds. — Ian Lamont

Supported by digital data, new data-driven tools, and payment policies that reward improving the quality and value of care, doctors, hospitals, patients, and entrepreneurs across the nation are demonstrating that smarter, better, more accessible, and more proactive care is the best way to improve quality and control health care costs. — Todd Park

I'm handed a bunch of existing data. My job is to put that in the best narrative form. That is a puzzle I love to solve. — Hilary Liftin

Even the best data security systems can't protect private taxpayer information from entrepreneurial foreign businesses than can make huge profits selling U.S. taxpayer information. — Melissa Bean

But what I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim. And it is important, in this seat, to make sure that you're making your best judgments based on data, intelligence, the information that's coming from your commanders and folks on the ground and you're not being swayed by politics. — Barack Obama

The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about. — James S.A. Corey

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible. — Jonathan Sacks

Given my experience, I believe there are three compelling reasons why the death penalty should be replaced. (1) The criminal justice system makes mistakes and the possibility of executing innocent people is both inherently wrong and morally reprehensible; (2) My personal experience and crime data show the death penalty does not reduce crime; and (3) The death penalty wastes precious resources that could be best used to fight crime and solve thousands of unsolved homicides languishing in filing cabinets in understaffed police departments across the state. — George Gascon

Nelson and Winter had spent more than a decade examining how companies work, trudging through swamps of data before arriving at their central conclusion: "Much of firm behavior," they wrote, is best "understood as a reflection of general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm's past," rather than "the result of a detailed survey of the remote twigs of the decision tree."6.15 — Charles Duhigg

As planned The Three Wise Women meet at 3WW HQ for debriefing. Angelina extracted the small camera from her lapel and downloaded it onto a laptop. She then expertly digitally scanned the Polaroid into her electronic file on James. Ava had just missed Sean who had given his camcorder and photographs of himself and Patrick to Angelina. It had been digitally downloaded and formatted onto Patrick's pc file. A back-up of all data was done on the Company server but it was heavily encrypted and written in Angelina's own program Borrow and used her own software Gotya, so only the very best could break her code and that would take months — Annette J. Dunlea

The key is if the economic data stays soft, maybe we don't have to worry much about interest rates anymore. Then we need to worry about earnings. What gave us a really strong move in stock prices from late May until about two weeks ago was this heightened optimism that maybe interest rates are at that high. That gave you a relief rally. Now reality is setting in - if we've seen the worst on interest rates then we've seen the best on earnings. — Douglas Cliggott

It's important for you to understand that routers, which work at the Network layer, don't care about where a particular host is located. They're only concerned about where networks are located and the best way to reach them - including remote ones. Routers are totally obsessive when it comes to networks. And for once, this obsession is a good thing! The Data Link layer is responsible for the unique identification of each device that resides on a local network. — Todd Lammle

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect. — Brene Brown

Data can generally travel the speed of light unless networks are congested. When there's congestion, usually the cheapest and best thing is simply to add capacity generally, not to prioritize certain sites over others. — Marvin Ammori

Here we are, practitioners of memos: We send e-mail and we receive it, We copy it and forward it and save it and delete it. We write to move the data, and organize the program, and keep people informed - and know and control and manage. We write and receive one-dimensional memos, that are, at best, clear and unambiguous. And then - in breathtaking ways - you summon us to song. — Walter Brueggemann

Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best. — Ben Goldacre

In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth (as best one can judge from official national accounts data) show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, or Sweden. In other words, the reduction of top marginal income tax rates and the rise of top incomes do not seem to have stimulated productivity (contrary to the predictions of supply-side theory) or at any rate did not stimulate productivity enough to be statistically detectable at the macro level. — Thomas Piketty

Perhaps the best way to welcome women into churches is not to saddle them upon entry with an array of "shoulds" to add to their lists of commitments. Instead, women need to find a place of support that recognizes the value of their many hats and empowers them to live well into those roles. And right now, the data suggest women are not finding such a place at church. — Barna Group

The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information, — Eric Schmidt

The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex. — Stephen Baker

We think we have the best matching algorithm, we think we have the best members. So why wouldn't we want to just shine the light onto just how our processes work, what the real data are, and let people come to their own conclusions. — Sam Yagan

For ecommerce data derived from digital experiences, such as the keywords and phrases from search engines to the frequency of purchases of various customer segments, data is most often not normally distributed. Thus, much of the classic and Bayesian statistical methods taught in schools are not immediately applicable to digital ecommerce data. That does not mean that the classic methods you learned in college or business school do not apply to digital data; it means that the best analysts understand this fact. — Judah Phillips

The creative folks intuitively design what's best for the user, while data folks provide great insights. The true unicorns are those who can go end-to-end designing, building, measuring, analyzing, and iterating with a combination of user intuition and deep analytics. — Matthew Humphreys

The mandate for the CTO's office is to unleash the power of technology, data, and innovation on behalf of the nation. The CTO's office is really trying to bring best practices, possibilities, pilots, and policy advising. — Megan Smith

The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress under these "ultimate" conditions should be a laggard's game, but that's not exactly what the data suggests. — Steven Kotler

Target isn't alone in its desire to predict consumers' habits. Almost every major retailer, including Amazon, Best Buy, Kroger supermarkets, 1-800-Flowers, Olive Garden, Anheuser-Busch, the U.S. Postal Service, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Capital One, and hundreds of others, have "predictive analytics" departments devoted to figuring out consumers' preferences. "But Target has always been one of the smartest at this," said Eric Siegel, who runs a conference called Predictive Analytics World. "The data doesn't mean anything on its own. Target's good at figuring out the really clever questions. — Charles Duhigg

We know everything about what you know and how you learn best because we get so much data. And education is the highest-stakes media product in your life. It's infinitely more important than your Facebook friends' status updates or your Google search results because it's your future. — Jose Ferreira

You are forced to have the best data capture, the best information, when you have goods in hundreds of factories around the world, and the question is: 'Where is everything?' And how do you bring it all together? — Philip Green

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best ... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year. — Sam Altman

Our view is that the very best data miners or statisticians can earn as much as the very best golfers or tennis players. — Anthony Goldbloom

The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings. Some of these choices were no doubt made with the best intentions. Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer. — Cathy O'Neil

When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. A — Bertrand Russell

Our knowledge advances not when we have the best theory, or the best data, or the best lab, but when we have really good problems — Jay Rosen

I trust my government. I actually have a trust for my government with my data, and I trust them to protect me. They've protected me - they've made the best efforts to protect me my whole life. — Ashton Kutcher

The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the bible as a whole. — Arno Hintjens

We get more data about people than any other data company gets about people, about anything - and it's not even close. We're looking at what you know, what you don't know, how you learn best. The big difference between us and other big data companies is that we're not ever marketing your data to a third party for any reason. — Jose Ferreira

The best decision-makers are always armed with the best information and data! — George Raveling

If you just talk to who's easy to talk to, you're not really getting the best data. — Emmett Shear

The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics. — Udny Yule

The United States will continue its efforts to improve our understanding of climate change - to seek hard data, accurate models, and new ways to improve the science - and determine how best to meet these tremendous challenges. — George H. W. Bush

we learn the emotional habits that can undermine our best intentions, as well as what we can do to subdue our more destructive or self-defeating emotional impulses. Most important, the neurological data suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children's emotional habits. — Daniel Goleman

Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for "looking" - that is, exploring your options, gathering data - in which you categorically don't choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the "leap" phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase. We — Brian Christian

Abracadabra," Roarke stated, and opened it.
"Now that's more like it." Hunkered down beside him, Eve studied the neat stacks of cash. "This is how he stayed out of a cage so long. No credit, no e-transfers. Cash on the line. And a file box, loaded with discs and vids."
"Best of all." Roarke reached in, took out a PPC. "His personal palm, very likely uninfected and chock-full of interesting data."
"Let's load it up, get it in." She pulled out her memo book.
"What're you doing?"
"Logging the entry. I better not see any of that green stuff or those baubles go into your pockets, Ace."
"Now I'm offended." He straightened, brushed at his shirt. "If I nipped anything, you can bet your ass you wouldn't see me do it. — J.D. Robb